Battle Report: Warzone Resurrection

I had planned that my next message would be once again about my Necromancer-trip to Lyon, but it was supposed to feature some miniatures i still hope to finish to paint before end of the month.

So instead a battle report about a quite modern game (well, still with the taste of the unlife in it considering the universe..) today, and my mostly unpainted army: Warzone Resurrection!

I've been playing WZR (yeah, that means Warzone Resurrection) since quite some time with a good friend of mine and accomplice in most of my gaming adventures. We both like very much the universe, the new miniatures and rules from Prodos games (and some of the old ones), and so we try to have a game every week since last spring. Today was one of those days of gaming.

WZR is a young game, having been kickstarted about 2 years ago. It lacks some little things you find in more developped games, but also includes some very innovative and unique mechanics which make us like it.

Unfortunately, in its early stages (i.e. when you only had the rulebook to play), the scenarios were mostly poorly written. A shame since the main idea was good: depending on the size of battle, you have a Priority Mission, a Secondary Mission, and a Corporate Agenda. When players are experienced they can of course choose to combine the three types of objectives in their games, disregarding the size of battle.

While Secondary Missions, and Corporate Agendas and quite simple, fun, and are really immersive (you can be asked to put in deliberate danger someone in your army because the entreprise you work for want to get rid of him - remember that in this universe you don't fight for nations but for Corporations), they don't combine well with some Priority Missions, and those are sometimes strange.

However, the good thing is that Prodos has released some time ago a document called "Diesel-punk tournaments", a very very good guide to organise WZR tournaments, which includes new scenarios. We've played them all, and it was good. Today we tried again one of the old scenarios, and the bad idea came with bad luck...

Priority Mission: Free for all

Each player choose secretly one of the three Objectives (red dices on the picture below) to be its extraction point, and then reveals it to the opponent. You win if in the end of turn 3 (or later) all your surviving miniatures are at 12" of the objective and no ennemy model is at 10". Why not ? Well here is why:

1. Armies are deployed in "Escalation" mode, which means your units arrive randomly on a randomly chosen board edge. So, basically, when your units are deployed far from the obective, having them killed help you win.

2. If both players have chosen the same extraction point, it ends in a stupid melee, which will be won by the luckiest player who will have more units deployed on the right side.

Anyway, we still whose to try this out.

My secondary mission was: retrieve vital intelligence hidden in one of the three objectives (a dice roll).

My opponent's (we'll call him Pulm) secondary mission was: secretly choose an ennemy squad commander and defeat him in close combat to capture him.

Pretty nice ones. A shame the priority mission is not up to it. Anyway, this is how it looked at the beginning after we rolled to know which units were there to fight on turn 1:

My army list (1000 pts): Dark Legion

1 Custom Nepharite Warlord with improved RS skill and Nazgaroth HMG

6 Necromutants (played with undead legionnaires today) with Plaguedealer

6 Necromutants (played with old metal Necromutants) with Plaguedealer

2 separate Razides with Nazgaroth HMG

2 Necrobeasts Riders

2 Praetorian Stalkers

Pulm's list: The Brotherhood

1 Custom Sacred Warrior Warlord

5 Troopers lead by an Inquisitor

5 Troopers lead by an Inquisitor

5 Sacred Warriors

7 Mortificators

3 Inquisitors

2 Guardia Oblati (first outing)

Turn 1:

I had the initiative so i activated the first Necromutants squad on the right and started to shoot at the Inquisitors right away. Even with a lot of bullets and flames, i had to ask the Razide to finish the job to only kill one Inquisitors. His battle brothers then killed several Necromutants as retaliation.

In the meanwhile, the Nepharite put himself on high ground to identify the objective markers as his Secondary Objectives (lucky roll) and shoot down the Mortificators squad commander.

That was nice, but after that (hm) heroic action, a squad of troopers were able to shoot at him, and he was nearly killed. I was counting a bit two much in my armor, but i just can't resist the temptation of having my warlord on the highest ground, defying everyone...

Turn 2: (well, other stuff happened, but i don't remember so it surely was not that important)

Sooo at the beginning of turn 2, my Nepharite run for cover, trying to hide between rocks and newly arrived Necrobeasts riders, which basically saved its life, even if the second squad of troopers lead by an Inquisitor appeared on the same board edge, and tried to murder him with its "Lasergun Ruby Light of whatever" spell. Sorry, no pictures of that epic Hide & Seek moment.

The Inquisitor Squad on the right casted a spell Called Fortitude of the Penitent which made them harder to kill (and they already are pretty hard, believe me). So my Necromutants started to run towards the main objective and tried to shoot them, with almost no effect. On the other hand, the Mortificator squad threw at them a lot of holy grenade (of Antioch ?), which nearly resulted in the annihilation of the squad. Why having such big swords when you have such powerful grenades ? Cowards...

Fortunately, the Praetorian Stalkers appeared in the back of the ennemy warlord and bodyguards, the dreaded Guardia Oblati. No random here, they came with a special teleport skill. Combined with a great Tactical card reducing the armor of the Guardia, they killed one, wounded the other and hurt badly the Warlord. Not bad.

The turn ended with the Necrobeasts storming over the troopers squad who tried to kill my Nepharite. The Inquisitor leader was quickly killed along with two of his friends.

Turn 3:

The Sacred Warriors, last squad missing, arrived just in time to charge the Necrobeats. They destroyed one, and then we decided to stop.

We were quite disappointed by the almost impossible to fulfill objective of the scenario. None of us had any idea about how to play to try to reach the objective, other than simple annihilation based on pure luck on the deployment.

Maybe we missed something. I'll definitely look into it.

Still, always fun to play WZR, even if a bit frustating today.Yet, we deserved it quite a bit. When we rolled for this scenario, we should have changed for something else immediately, as we were both feeling there was something fishy with it.

Next time we'll go back to the "modern" scenarios which are very good, and maybe a small campaign based on the event only limited edition miniature of Icarus Jetfighter pilot, which came with its own scenarios. They can even be combined easily with Secondary and Coporate Missions for more scenaristic action.