A small game of WFB 3rd edition

Inspired by this post on Snickit's Tail I played a muck around game of Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd edition with my son using the painted minis I had on hand. Now the idea snicket has come up with is to encourage people to paint up a 1000 point force from scratch, not to use figures one has on hand. But I thought I might see how such a game goes before jumping in and painting up a new force. It was good fun even if I had trouble flicking through the rulebook at times. If anyone in the Melbourne area is up for the snicket challenge (I cannot see myself getting to BOYL '17) that would convince me to paint up the Slann figures I have which would allow me to field a 1000 point army fairly easily (I can be contacted at firthy11@yahoo.com). I do have 4 finished trogodytes already so I'm off to some sort of a start...

I won't provide a blow by blow account of how things went or the forces that I used. A couple of points of note though are:

1. I used a 5 foot by 3 foot table - to account for the smaller width I reduced the area allowed for initial deployment

2. The undead army I used was led by a level 5 vampire who was able to summon extra skellies, undead riders and 2 champions before the battle using the necromantic spells that it had (I used the full magic rules BTW). Needless to say with 40 magic points the vampire was well worth it. One cannot do this if you use the rules in warhammer armies which only allow casting of one spell before the battle which I find to be pretty daft. The core rules don't have this limitation and for good reason - illusionist spells are largely useless with the restriction in warhammer armies.

3. I gave two of the mounted units a chance to rally at the edge of the board when both were routed as a result being pushed back at the start of the third turn even though technically both units should have simply routed off the board. One passed the test whilst the other didn't.  

4. I didn't give the cannon crew a chance to rally; the carrion that routed each crew also flew straight off the board as they didn't have sufficient room to turn to stay on the field of battle


Anyway here are the pics:

The boy at setup

After the scouting turn - the Bretonnians decided not to send out a scouting force

Bretonnian left flank

Bretonnian right flank

Undead right flank - note the vampire leading the ghouls

Undead left flank

Undead first turn

Bretonnian first turn just before the cannons made a mess of the ghouls and zombies

Undead second turn - carrion rout both cannon crew and one units of knights

Second routed cannon

Skellies rout the second unit of knights who manage to rally before they exit the field of battle

The knights rout the zombies who cannot rally

The ghouls rout the archers - well what was left of them

And the ghouls then pursue the archers off the table when they fail their leadership roll! The vampire reformed though

The combined attack on the spear armed retainers finally forces them to rout

All that was left when I called it

So what did I learn? First the combat resolution modifiers for large units are deadly - even when fairly crappy units are charged by small, expensive mounted units. And units that cause fear are extremely dangerous as all they have to do is to manage one push back and their opponents rout. Which happened a bit. Finally undead are pretty crappy if they don't manage to rout their opponents quickly - the unit of 10 summoned riders were getting beaten by the retainers until other units were able to pitch in.