Thommy H:
No Chaos Dwarfs sadly - just my Warriors of Chaos against Emma’s erstwhile Wood Elves.
Interesting battle. We got a few things wrong, only because we approached the new edition with a totally open mind and treated nothing as gospel. This meant we made a few mistakes by actually not going with out 7th Edition instincts (for example, I missed that units which are Immune to Psychology couldn’t Flee! as a charge reaction, and totally glossed over some stuff about arc of sight for chargers because I thought this edition had simplified it) - but I don’t think this affected the result too much, which was a bloody draw.
It was 2,000 points, with Emma’s army consisting of a Spellweaver leading an army composed of heaps of Core (two 10-man Glade Guard, two 8-man Dryad units, two units of 6 Scouts, 8 Glade Riders, all backed up by a Treeman and a handful of Wardancers, and a Scout Kindred Noble and a Branchwraith to round out the characters) and my WoC bringing my mounted Lord with his Chaos Knights, my new 20-man unit of Warriors, my Marauders led by an Exalted Hero, a Warshrine and the Trolls led by “Throgg”. You can see the relevant thread in my sig for details. Obviously, everything that could be given the Mark of Khorne was.
I pretty much played like any Khornate Lord, engineering every charge I could. My Trolls leapt right into combat with the Wardancers and completely stomped them, only to then be caught in a charge between the Treeman and the Glade Riders which was enough to send them packing and they were swiftly run down. My Knights (led by Xavier) hurtled their way towards some Glade Guard cowering behind a wall on the other side of the battlefield, completely annihilated them but then got caught reforming in all that dangerous terrain and lost two knights! Meanwhile, as my Warriors and Warshrine trundled towards the bloody smear that had once been the Trolls, my Marauders got caught fighting some Scouts led by the Noble.
The Exalted Hero (Ulf Ragnarson) kept having to challenge, of course, so he couldn’t affect the combat. The Elf Noble held him off thanks to his Annoyance of Nettlings (which means you need 6s to hit in challenges…) and his ASF sword and, while the Marauders kept winning and forcing the Elves to flee, they couldn’t catch the pesky Scouts until the last turn of the game - by which time the Noble had finally managed to cut Ulf down!
I ran down the Dryads (they fled from charges, which they’re not actually allowed to do, but when we realised we ruled that they would have been killed anyway so no harm done) but the Warriors were goaded into the same trap as the Trolls and ended up getting hit by the Treeman and flanked by some Glade Guard (though, amusingly, the Spellweaver had managed to nuke herself with a miscast the turn before) which resulted in an ignominious defeat. The remaining Knights got circles run around them by the other Scouts and the Glade Riders, but survived the hail of arrows, only to end up woefully out of position anyway. The Marauders were also stuck on the edge of the table in the last turn as everything Emma had charged in on the (now quite battered) Warshrine and the Treeman finally smashed it in half with one of his branches.
I won on victory points (having killed all her characters), but only by 100. So, a draw.
What was 8th Edition like? Well, it was interesting. Emma elected to keep her multiple small units, despite 8th being the edition of steadfast and infantry blocks, simply because her army still benefited from being so fiddly. She would be able to shoot with more Glade Guard as separate units and if they got into combat against any of my guys they’d have died anyway, so there was no advantage to optimising them for static combat resolution. Similarly, as skirmishers, the Dryads gained nothing from being a single unit. What I found most surprising was how characterful both armies played - from reading the description, you’d assume my army kept failing attempt to restrain its Frenzy, but in fact the charge baiting was totally organic: whenever I lined up a good charge, she’d just run away, relying on the dice to keep her out of reach, then smash me in the flanks with that bloody Treeman! Because of the random charges, that tactic worked much better - it was never a foregone conclusion that I’d be able to catch those slippery Wood Elves. Everything moved a lot faster too, with combats kicking off in the second turn. Furthermore, the fact that WoC have to challenge all the time was a pretty big disadvantage against an army not optimised for combat. Champions lose nothing by refusing, and the Noble was tough enough to stand toe-to-toe with Ulf, keeping him from hacking apart the Scouts. My only Eye of the Gods roll came from Mutant Regeneration and the Warshrine - with an attempt to use Giver of Glory late in the battle on my Knights giving a predictable “The Eye is Closed” result anyway. Unsurprising, given Khorne’s alleged finest’s complete inability to pin the puny Elves down and collect their skulls!
It was a fun battle though. Quite a different feel to 7th Edition, with a lot more dashing around the table. The impression I had from talk elsewhere was that manoeuvring was no longer that important, but I found the exact opposite: it was so much easier to find units totally out of position, and the advantage belonged squarely to the agile Wood Elves.
