Jens’ after tournament report part 4 (last part)

This is it, Folks! The last part of Jens’ series. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have. I thank him for this series and hope he doesn’t stop there.

We finish off with the Jaguar battlegroup and Jens’ closing thoughts.

In this last part of the series, I will review the final part of my Shaltari army list I used at the Dropzone Commander tournament at Wexio 2014. The article discusses the initial thought process followed by an evaluation and a final judgement on a battle group per battle group basis.

Warfist battle group

Heavy: Jaguar

Heavy: Jaguar

Thought process:

Look at the Jaguar and as a Shaltari player you know you want to bring these towering tripod walkers with both anti-tank and anti-air capabilities. If you aren’t convinced, come on LOOK at the Jaguar, let it entrance you and awake an inner image of them walking through a city in ruins with burning metal carcasses at its feat, imagine silvery fast moving aircraft moving in to take the Jaguar out realising its payload just in time before being engulfed by ion cannon fire tearing it apart mid-air, when the payload close in on the Jaguar a firestorm is sprung from explosive munitions when smashing into the energy shields surrounding the great walker leaving the majestic Jaguar unscathed slowly moving forward. If you still do not catch my attraction to the Jaguar, I do not know what to say. I wanted to include two placing them in separate squads to increase their versatility.

Evaluation:

The Jaguars’ performance was solid. The ability to both act as anti-air and anti-tank with a good amount of damage points and supported by a Dreamsnare upheld their reputation of being the most imposing unit of the Shaltari war machine. Not much to say they withstand a lot of punishment but are not as good when delivering force making the Jaguar a great punching bag but not much of a giver. The Gauss cannon with E10 felt weak when firing at UCM or PHR vehicles or walkers. But even weak punches can do damage if you fire off enough of them.

Final judgement

Even though the main cannons are a bit weak the Jaguar itself is a solid unit which does not really have to fear much from other mean machines, in my opinion it is the apex predator in the Dropzone Commander universe at the moment. I will continue to field the jaguar and probably try to shoehorn in a third one.

 

Strengths and weaknesses

My conclusion is that this army list had a bit too much flavour and not enough frontline units. Shaltari units like the Ocelot, the Firedrake and the Dreamsnare adds a good bit of support but using all of them I believe undermined the ability to hold ground and left a lot of the army’s success to luck. Both the Firedrake and the Ocelot is what I would call hit-or-miss units, very potent but useless if they miss, there are no second chances.

The amount of Braves complemented with Firstborns made the list good infantry-wise. Too bad I lacked the aggression to use the infantry in a better way than I did, being too passive resulting in late arrivals and lost objectives. In future games I will try to bring more aggression to the game table.

I also learned army composition is just one part of Dropzone Commander, another being the experience and skill of the player. Since I lacked both I did not manage to execute my initial thoughts and got stuck in reactive mode, where my opponent would have the ability to dictate what I needed to do, leaving me only reacting instead of commanding. This is also a result of lacking aggressiveness, since even when I won the initiative I only responded to earlier moves instead of trying to bring my opponent into a reactive state.

I still found the list fun to play and consists a good mix of units to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the Shaltari. The strengths in my opinions is really good infantry and the use of gates as transports, some great units as the Dreamsnare, the Jaguar and a good frontline command vehicle, the Coyote. The weaknesses being an overall squishiness even though passive saves mitigate the weak armour, especially with a Dreamsnare present. Another weakness would be the lack of E10+ weapons when trying to trade blows with A10 vehicles.

Shaltari the forever eternal and unconquered!

 

Final comments

I hope you as a reader have enjoyed this army list review series, in the future I might try to analyse other player’s army lists, and meanwhile I had fun writing and sharing my thoughts on my own army list.

 

That was it! If you have missed the previous posts be sure to check them out!