• Confrontation
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• Ram

Strategy: Azaël? What am I supposed to do with her?

Design: What were they thinking when they coded her?

We are seated facing each other, each at our desk. So it’s easy to talk about things: everyone is ok to say that the Ram essentially relies on magic, with an Energy bonus. Ideas get thrown around: A magician was the obvious choice for the generic character. Problem: magicians are expensive and fragile. We can make them tougher but the cost will go up, it’s unavoidable. We settled for proper armor and eventually managed a much more descent cost than foreseen, making Azaël an affordable all-round magician, for only 50 AP more than her mortal enemy Agonn. That’s not much, merely a fifth or a sixth of an infantry unit. Lacking a shield her Defense is lower. This means she would rarely come out on top against Agonn in hand to hand combat. We check it out, running a few exchanges between the two enemies. Dice are rolled, success pile up. Unless you’re really lucky, Azaël quickly gets cut to pieces each time. However she does cause Fear and gets to cast rituals. The match ought to be a fairer challenge then…Unfortunately the travel journal had yet to be written, so we could only assume. Yet, we were pretty satisfied at this point. Azaël’s main handicap was clearly her low rank: she will need the support of one or two Incarnates with “Horns of Damnation” (ideally Melmoth) allowing her to have more rituals under control. For the moment though, only the Almighty Skull is available to fill in, which is not all that bad.

How to use Azaël? We needed to try her out. We had enough minis lying around to build ourselves two small armies, Lion against Ram. The first test went almost too well. Azaël summoned a unit of Thralls, which she sent to get slaughtered against the ballista, taking the servants with them. Azaël summoned a new unit, which she used to screen herself, intercepting a unit about to charge her. By the time the Thralls were dispensed with, the unit that was intercepted was no longer a threat and Azaël moved in to finish off whatever was left. At this point in the test, we stopped the game: there was no way the Lion was going to win.

Test number two: this time Azaël used “In Pulverum Revertis”. The Lion was aware of the threat this magician represented and showered her with bolts from the ballista, which got shattered by the ritual in return. This time round, Azaël was rapidly toast. The third game she returned to summoning Thralls, and the game ended in the same way. In the end we agreed we had one dangerous magician…However being only a rank 1 Incarnate, she is still easy to eliminate.

As a conclusion to these satisfying tests: Azaël is an excellent rank 1 Incarnate, close to the upper limit when considering the balance of the game.
Obviously, one or two extra Thrall units do represent quite a gain in power. On the whole, we are a bit scared of Azaël. Once on the table she becomes THE target to eliminate, even more than the Almighty Skull, when it comes to putting an end to the tidal wave of the dead. However this power comes with two conditions:
First: Investing in a Thrall unit that might not play as they are kept aside to be summoned. The financial investment though limited, still exists.
Second: Consider Azaël as a dispensable light weight. Once the danger she represents is apparent, she is going to be neutralized very rapidly. She is a glass cannon. Neutralizing her is also pretty straight forward: avoid finishing off the last fighter of the unit she summoned. This will present her from summoning another unit before this fighter is eliminated.