I've been thinking a bit about bricks lately. My Cetrati are on the road to being fully painted and assembled, meaning that I'll be running a lot more Cetrati bricks in the near future. Therefore, I've been thinking about how to use Bricks well. I've also been thinking about how I'd take out my own Cetrati bricks and similar blocks of really high-quality troops. In this post, I'll be talking about the latter.
Here are some tactics which work against bricks. They're not always effective answers on their own, but they can be used in conjunction with support from the rest of the army to take bricking lists apart.
1) Jamming. A lot of bricks are vulnerable to delay tactics, but this is especially true of Cetrati, who have medium bases and only one attack each. To jam a brick well, throw in a unit it will have some trouble removing, and keep advancing bases into B2B with the bricked up unit so that it can't advance. Don't mash all your soldiers into the brick in the hope of taking the Cetrati out unless your troops are high P+S weapon masters with a lot of attacks and/or high Mat, e.g. Bane Knights/Thralls and Great Bears. Regular troops simply cannot do significant damage to Arm: 20, 8 hit-box models. The more troops you commit to the brick, the more can be taken out by the brick player's clearance tactics.
Just for example, my Xerxis brick was once jammed by Primed Nyss Hunters, who are Weapon Masters with Def 15 (in this battle it was 16 thanks to Rhupert's Dirge of Mists). My opponent didn't charge them all in at once. Instead, they came at the brick in wave of approximately 3, each wave charging in. They could reliably do 3-5 damage per hit on the charge, and taking them out meant risking more damage. By the end of the game, they had ended up accounting for two or three Cetrati, and the survivors had gotten the last hit in on Xerxis after Durgan and some other stuff had softened him up. Their main accomplishment, however, was to keep my 11-point brick from advancing significantly after turn 3.
Few troops will be as good at jamming bricks as the Nyss Hunters (Kayazy Assassins and Satyxis Raiders are the ones which spring to my mind), but any unit with 6-10 bodies can at least hold them up while other parts of the army get into position or eliminate the brick's support.
In Skorne, I'd use either Nihilators or Swordsmen with some sort of defensive buff if I could manage it. I don't know Trollbloods as well, but it Kriel Warriors, Fennblades and Pyg Burrowers are the units I think of first for jamming Cetrati, though if you could get 2-3 Troll Whelps into them, that would work too. For the Dygmies, there would also be the threat of popping up behind the Cetrati on the next turn to take out their warlock or support.
2) Forced Movement. There is nothing that annoys me more when I'm playing a Brick than dealing with an army that can shove me around and break up my Shield Wall. Spellcasting units with Force Bolt are always bad. Druids of Orboros are the main offenders I'm familiar with, but Battle Mages also have Force Bolt. Spellcasting solos like Janissa Stonetide can pull similar tricks, though often at a much shorter range.
Most armies with access to forced movement get it through their Warlocks/Warcasters. Forced movement spells include Telekinesis, Gallows, the ever-wretched Hellmouth, and the like. Usually, the army needs some way to arc spells to take full advantage of shenanigans like these. There are also a few Feats out there like eKruger's and Gorten's which push a whole CTRL worth of enemy models around. Both Feats can be used to break up Shield Walls and Defensive Lines.
In terms of Skorne models, I'd use anything capable of Throws, because that's what we have. There is Train Wreck, the Bronzeback's animus, but as a push effect, Beat Back is less useful for actually pushing models out of Shield Wall than it is for giving the target beast an extra advance while beating them to death, Shield Wall be damned. Slams suffer a similar drawback. They can knock a bunch of models down, but whether they're really better than taking all of a beast's initial attacks largely depends on whether the opponent positioned them so they could be slammed out of Shield Wall.
EDIT: So I completely forgot about Cataphract Arcuarii, which are a really excellent unit for busting up Shield Wall and Defensive Line because they have Drag on their Harpoons. They can make a CRA likely to damage their target, then follow up with a Weapon Master melee attack to finish it off. There are a lot of warlocks I'd use them with, and because they can do all this at range, it's a very easy tactic to combine with jamming units to block the Arcuarii from retaliation.
3) If you must take out a big Brick unit like Cetrati, don't try to take them all out at once if you can focus on one at a time. It will take several attacks (usually) to take one out, but then it's done. That model's offensive potential is gone from the unit. Throwing moderate damage onto several models isn't going to reduce the unit's offensive power, and many casters have ways to move wounded heavy infantry to the back of a unit to reduce damage to them.
This works best if you can combine it with some way of preventing retaliation by the rest of the unit. Ranged attacks work well if you can focus your fire on a model who's been pulled out of formation. Any model with an ability to hit and run. even a little, can be followed up by a jamming unit running into the gap it left to protect the model that did your killing.
4) Slow them down and go around. If you can slow a big brick unit down enough, you can sometimes pick apart the rest of the army. This is especially true in scenario games where the army will have to try to control or contest whether the brick can keep up or not. A lot of effects can slow units down, and units which depend on a Full Advance to keep their Shield Wall bonus are nearly crippled by spells and feats which reduce their speed. If opponents can slow down to keep pace with the brick, they'll be vulnerable to ranged and magic attacks.
Those are my thoughts on the matter for now. I'll be running a little more Xerxis, pMakeda and Mordikaar than usual in the coming weeks, and I'll post again with additional thoughts.
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