35) Cheeseboard Theory: 41 Slices of Processed Yellow Squares or 1 Quality Block of Swiss?

My Ratkin miniatures collection has gotten insanely large and I could easily field over 7500 points all at once if I wanted to. Considering that the tournament standard is only 2300 points, I essentially have three armies worth of rats. So what if I took nothing but a ton of cheap trash infantry? What if I didn't have the big hammer titan units like Scud and friends? Well, as it turns out that makes for an insanely huge army.

Most Kings of War armies have about 12-13 units, with a scoring Unit Strength of 22-25.

If I fielded nothing but cheap line infantry and rat swarms, I could get up to 20 units and a scoring Unit Strength of 41.

This is problematic. The question is, though, is it more problematic for me than it is for my opponent?

I played this army for four months. It is incredibly difficult to use. The army is massive. It is difficult to even fit all those units into the alloted deployment zone on some tables. It is also squeaky and squishy and all of the rats have very short attention spans and cannot be left unsupervised for even one turn or some manner of terrible mischief will befall them. The army, lacking any hard-hitting units at all, cannot fight its way out of a cardboard box. Strangely, though, that's kinda ok.

My previous army had to focus on scenario to win, because I had very few hard-hitting hammer units. This army was just an even more extreme version of that because it had zero hammer units. A lot of the scenarios in Kings of War are based on controlling certain sections of the map by putting more Unit Strength into that area than your opponent. What I found with this list was that even if my opponent killed half my army by the end of the game, they still often hadn't killed enough rats to win the scenario. There were some games where I lost most of my army, didn't kill anything from my opponent's army, but I still won. If there was an elite scary unit approaching my lines, I just fed a small cheap unit to it each turn to keep it busy, and by the time it fought its way through those multiple units of chaff the game was over.

Another problem that this army created for my opponents was deployment. In Kings of War, each player takes turns placing their units on the table before the game. If you have twice as many drops as your opponent, you start the game with a big advantage for scenario play because you still have units left to deploy after their whole army is already lined up on the table.

One of the best things about this army, though, was that it absolutely stopped elite alpha strike lists dead in their tracks. Alpha strike armies are designed to hit first and to hit fast. The idea is that they use cavalry or flying units to hit flanks or get behind your lines. This Rat army completely foiled that strategy. Almost all of my units were spear phalanxes, which are very strong defending against cavalry and flyers. Not only that, but my army was so massive and so dense that there was often simply nowhere for a flyer to actually land without putting itself in immediate danger of being swarmed and enveloped by much cheaper units.

That said, this list definitely didn't have a winning record. It had a W/L/D record of something like 4-8-2. There were certain scenarios that it was amazingly good at, and certain opponents that it was amazingly good against, but the rest of the time it was like trying to play a video game on the hardest difficulty setting. Piloting that many units, trying not to get into traffic jams, rolling hundreds of dice just to do negligible damage... it was rough. The more I played it, though, the better I got. I learned a lot about movement, positioning, and deployment from playing this list. I learned that sometimes delaying an enemy unit is just as effective as killing them. I learned how to shuffle chaff units around to prevent my big scoring infantry blocks from getting double charged.

One of my favorite things about this army was watching my opponents try to solve the crazy puzzle that I had presented them with. This army gave my opponents PROBLEMS. Even though I lost most of my games, they were never blowouts. They were always close, and my opponents were always really sweating at the end. And the funny part was that when I won, my opponent had always killed so many damn rats that they still felt good about it.

Going forward, I have committed to playing the two-day grand tournaments at Hoosier Storm and Adepticon this Spring, so it is time for a new list! A while back I toyed with the idea of a shooty rat list that had a ton of ranged attacks. After playing exactly two games with that list I realized that I hated it. I won both of those games but I didn't feel good about it. I didn't feel that I deserved those wins. I don't think my opponents had fun, either.

That's the problem with full gunline armies. They take a gun to a swordfight.

Kings of War is a strategy game. It is a game of maneuver. The whole point of the game is to outsmart your opponent in a contest of wits.

Full gunline armies win by standing still and just rolling buckets of dice until they win. I came here to fight a duel. Not to stand in front of a firing squad with a cigarette in my mouth, or shoot fish in buckets.

That said, my rats do need to have SOME shooting because if you don't have any shooting at all but your opponent does, you will never be able to control that game. I've had two different Masters level players tell me that after they beat me. They were able to seize control of the game right from the beginning, because they had ranged threat and I didn't. They used that to pressure me into moving where they wanted me to move, because if I didn't close with them quickly, it would just be a shooting gallery.

To provide some moderate shooting to my army I have decided to include three weapons teams and two troops of Clawshot Snipers. Clawshots are tricky to use because you have to be careful not to screen them with your own lines. I tried to use them when I first got into Kings of War a couple years ago, but it was frustrating trying to keep their lines of sight unobstructed by my own army. They are best suited for shooting things that are really tall, like giants or dragons.

The weapons teams are mobile short range war machines. They can't shoot very far, so they often put themselves in danger by getting close enough to an enemy to shoot it. The reason I am running three of them together is because each one is its own separate unit. This means that an enemy can only fight one of them at a time. If I position them cleverly, they can really slow down an enemy assault for a couple of turns. If I am lucky, two out of the three teams will get to shoot more than just one turn.

So far I have played one game with the new combined arms list. It was a casual game at a store in Batavia Illinois. It was an incredibly close game, absolutely down to the wire on turn 7, and my Rats just barely managed to squeak out a victory against Tim Aker's Northern Alliance.

I know that this combined arms approach is the way to go, but I have concerns about running out of time at my upcoming tournaments. I'm not a fast player, and I never had to worry about a shooting phase before. Now I do. I have basically added a whole new phase to my game and there are only sixty minutes on that chess clock. Time will tell!