Round 1

The Eldarim in the Empyrean army use their Dragon Handlers racial ability to recruit a single health dragonkin unit to any one terrain where an Eldarim unit is present. The dragonkin unit recruited must, however, match one of the colours present at the terrain.

A Fire Dragonfoal joins the army at the Wasteland Empyrea home terrain.

The biggest perceived threat to the Empyrean army is the large missile force at the Selumari home, which is showing missile distance, and they are therefore capable of doing a lot of damage to the largely unprotected magicians currently located at the frontier.

With the frontier terrain in a magic-friendly state, the first march for the Empyrea will be to establish the fire element at this terrain, to allow them to use their Flaming Shields ability and to improve their chance of a bigger save result.

A wasteland wood minor terrain can be placed at a coastland terrain as both contain the air (blue) element. Also, the wood has a 25% chance of granting the army the possibility of doubling ID rolls for saves.

The ID of the minor terrain is rolled, which gives them a choice of using melee, missile or magic from the terrain in addition to the action currently showing on the major terrain.

The choice makes no difference in this case, as there are only magic units at the terrain and they already have that action showing. Magic is chosen at the wood. The fire element is introduced.

The Empyrean magicians produce 9 red and 9 blue magic results.

The purpose of the magic was to reduce the threat from the archers and the best way to do this is to use a Mirage spell to ship them out of the way for a while. This will cost 5 of the blue magic results, leaving 4 red results to be used for a Fiery Weapon on the horde army.

The Coastal Dodge ability of the Coral Elves means that the two Bowmen are not affected by the spell. The remaining three Eldarim, however, are dispatched to their reserves.

The Fiery Weapon will add two melee or missile results to the Empyrean attack.

The Empyrean second march sees the horde army try to manoeuvre.

11 results against 0 means that the terrain can be moved to either face 5 (missile) or face 3 (missile). The coastland plays to the strengths of the Selumari and the attackers know that this will be where they concentrate their efforts. In order to make this as slow and as difficult as possible, the die turns down to 3 and away from the tower on the 8th face.

The Coral Elf contingent have a Defensive Volley ability which means that, when attacked at a terrain containing the air element, such as this coastland, the are able to counter fire. This means that missile engagement here will be risky, but possibly worth trying.

The SAI ‘Flame‘ does nothing in a missile attack, so the roll only produces 3 missile results from the IDs, and 2 more from the Fiery Weapon, totalling 5 missile results in all.

The Ferry SAI generated by the Gryphon, normally very useful in these situations to remove units away without taking damage, does not really help. The ID plus the Coastal Dodge generated save give a total of 4, meaning that only a single hit is taken.

A solitary Bowman goes to the DUA.

Note – Error in plot #1

At this point the Selumari should have used their Defensive Volley ability and returned fire on the horde army, but I made a mistake and overlooked this in this instance. Let us assume that the Coral Elves produced a few missile results and were easily parried by the shield bearing Eldarim in the horde army.

The Empyrean horde have now done their mischief, and are redeployed using their Air Flight ability.

The Eldarim units are withdrawn to the reserves.

The Cavalry go to the home terrain.

The infantry and the Gorgon go to give support to the campaign army.