It's been a while....

The sun is out, the sky is blue and the tides will wash the Nauticans back too !

With the summer on it's way and the promise of evenings in the garden with my notepad, beers and imaginary fish tank I think we can safely say that the Nauticans are in for a re-write :)

Anyway, it's been a long time so I thought I'd better give any poor soul still following this blog an update....

1) I have some new miniatures to show you which I will post pics of sometime this week.

2) I think I've grown big enough balls to start painting and ruining my miniatures.

3) Battle play-testing, read on....

There have been a few battles over the past 6 months and the Nauticans are frankly getting a right royal kicking. The draft 5.0 army just about managed to work out how to handle the Skaven and then along came Warriors of Chaos and once again the Nauticans are getting a real pasting. Since draft 5 was released it looks like I've had 8 battles with no wins (although I think I might have missed 1 win off the list, I'm sure I've won once since draft 5.0 ?!)

Now, these demoralizing losses might all be down to my incredibly bad general-ship but I'm hoping not. If the losses are down to me being p'ss poor with my troops then I'm going to steal what remains in the fish tank war chest and go and live somewhere very inland where the fishy-men will never find me :)

Anyway, I though I'd better have a think about what's going wrong. Here's my analysis...

In both recent games against WoC I felt that the Nauticans were well and truly out-gunned in close combat. One battle was a massacre, the other a major defeat that was about to become a massacre and a fine fish barbecue at the Chaos shrine :(

A lot of the problem, I guess, comes down to fighting an obviously very broken Warriors of Chaos army :) Only kidding ! So, assuming that I'm an ok general (a big assumption !), the WoC army is not broken (a reasonable assumption), then there is something amiss with the Nauticans.

So where do we start ? Well, looking at my enemy's 2,000pt army in this afternoon's battle...

There were a lot of frenzied Khorne Warriors with 2 hand weapons in 2 ranks [supporting attacks] (ie 40 attacks in total) which are not easy to tame ! On top of the Khorne warriors we had two units of Tzeentch Warriors with hand weapon and shield to "hold the line" (or rather kick my ass !) with a 5+ ward save, on top of the toughness of 4 and armour save of 3+.

The weakest troops were Chaos Marauders and, frankly, at 4pts per model (or a bit more with shields) they were only there to make up the numbers, tie up my units and smile for the photographs :(

Now, looking at my army...

In reply I had fairly solid selection of fighty-units including 2 units of trident guard (with the bullshark banner [frenzy] and the venomous spine banner [poisonous attacks]), 2 units of 2 Weresharks and a large 38 model horde unit of Wavebreakers (incl. General, BSB and Siren) with scalemail [-1 to hit], shields and spears.

I had some crabs (I understand they're not usually easy to get rid, although the Warriors didn't seem to find it too difficult) and some coral hunters (i.e. 18" spearguns)

The above collection of Nauticans represents quite an offensive combat oriented force and I was hoping I would be able to stand toe-to-toe with the Warrior of Chaos core units providing I managed to get those all important Wereshark flank attacks in.

Well... I got the all important flank attacks in, I tied up a Warriors of Chaos and Marauder unit with Sandgangers will a bit of help from the two Giant Crabs and... I got well and truly trounced by the rest of the chaos army ! The primary offending (never again to be invited to the under-ocean party) units consisted of 40 Chaos Warriors [20 Khorne and 20 Tzeentch] including a Sorcerer who didn't do much but scare me a lot and a unit of 30+ Marauders and 5 Marauder Horsemen (who I actually managed to dispatch to their gods - who can't have been pleased !).

It's all very depressing, the Warriors of Chaos took a very "Vanilla" (ie plain and common-sense army), I took a very "Vanilla" Nautican army and it was quite clear early on that the Nauticans were soon going to be served skewered with Khorne sauce !

Anyway, I don't want to finish this on a negative point. After all, I'm the only person I know of in the whole world who's collecting a Nautican army so, providing I can get someone to play against me, I can do what I want with them.

So, here we go...

I had a chat with my good buddy "J" who tests and regularly (actually almost always !) beats me.

Here are the initial thoughts and conclusions:-

1) Cresters are currently useless so need an upgrade
2) Coral hunters should have a scout option upgrade
3) Interceptors should be tweaked and brought into core units

We thought the above were reasonable to bridge the gap between Nauticans with a really hard "fighty" army to at least give them a couple more options.

Also, I am going to remove 4 or 5 characters from the list, the ones that just don't fit well anyone, eg. Coastal Hermit, Zheala. I will also remove quite a few special rules (because everyone keeps moaning about them) and add another Lord level special character - called "Kill All Atom Bomb" (only kidding!) There will be some more characters though.

Anyway, that's it for now. Thanks for following the blog,
Sigmar

Miniature pic used with Reapermini.com permission.