Reflections on HotT ..

My fame and fortune in the local HotT tournament scene has been earned with my Spider army (Nick G has posted an excellent AAR of our game in last Sunday's tournament here). As Nick comments, it was the only game I lost out of 5, and it was a pretty thorough thrashing I have to say.

The army composition I used was:

1 x Behemoth general
1 x Hero
1 x God
2 x lurkers
10 x Hordes

I have always considered Horde armies to be weaker than most, but now I'm not so sure. The basic approach has been to surround my strongest elements (the Behemoth and Hero) with plenty of Hordes, hoping that the opposing army becomes bogged down in the horde of Hordes, while the two biggies do the business. I generally don't count on the God; if he turns up that's a bonus, but I try to plan the battle in my head on the assumption that he doesn't.

I had traditionally considered Hordes to be weaker elements, but I guess that with a CF of 2, they are strong enough to hold out, and deployed 2 deep, near the baseline, they do indeed tend to wear the opponent down. The opposition's 'mental fatigue' isn't helped by the constant redeployment of lost Hordes as well. This redeployment means that I try to keep my 'battle line' close to my own base line, so that those Hordes brought back onto the table at least have a running (or scuttling, in this case) chance of getting back into the battle.

So, having mentally gone into two tournaments now with the view that the spiders were the tournament 'easy beats', I have had to change my mind. Maybe Hordes aren't too bad a bet after all.

As I think Joseph Stalin once said (correct me if I'm wrong) "Quantity has a quality of its own."

After all, the rules are titled 'HORDES of the things'!!!