Today I played BoC again in the campaign we are running. It was indubitably my worst defeat ever. At the end of the battle every single unit was destroyed or about to be so. Rather then go through all the details I thought I would discuss some of my tactical and strategic failures.
First let me start off by saying that the army I brought today was almost exactly the same as the last army I brought against the BoC, which was extremely victorious. I have been trying to tweak it and make it better; this tweak will definitely be redone!
Because I am playing BoC and most of the units are skirmishers or tougher creatures like minotaurs I decided archery was out. I did not bring one single shooting unit, not even bolt throwers (though these are some of my favorite units, it doesn't get much better then 6 BS4 S4 -1 armor!).
Instead I brought 4 mages to the battle. I brought an Archmage, and three lvl 2 mages (it was a 2000 pt game, forgot to mention that). With magic items I had 13 + D3 power dice each turn and 7 dispel dice. Total I had about 850 pts invested in magic.
The first game I took 3 fire mages and one death. I then decided to tweak that list into two possibilities. The first was one where all the mages were fire; my death mage just wasn't doing enough damage, and of course fire is the most straight forward lore with every spell being a damage doing one.
The second one I made was the list I brought today. I was thinking I wanted to try and use magic a little less directly and more as a supportive role, so I took two high magic, one heavens, and one life. Clearly this was a mistake. If you are going to invest almost half your army in magic, then magic can not play a supportive role. It must be doing tons of damage every turn ( I should have brought the first list!). In addition I am starting to think that mixing lores is not as useful as it seems.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are lots of times it is nice to have different lores in the same battle (I hate slanns!) but in general each lore is better at different things. If you have decided what role your magic will play and picked the lore that will be best at that, why not maximize its potential by taking multiple wizzards with the same lore. In the future if I want magic to play this role I will bring two lvl 2 mages with high magic.
Since this is turning into a wall of text I will wrap it up with a posting of my list.
1 lvl 4 archmage - high magic
1 lvl2 mage - high magic
1 lvl2 mage - heavens
1 lvl2 mage - life
20 Spearmen
20 Spearmen
15 swordmasters
10 Silver helms
1 lion chariot
