"Warhammer Battle, Empire vs Chaos" Topic

Just a quick battle to get back into Warhammer after 2-3 years. No offense, but none of that AOS nonsense for a curmudgeon like me.

You dang kids and your newfangled fancy pants rules.

Here is a battle we did last night. 1000 points, 8th Edition, Empire vs Chaos.

Initial set up

Chaos Battle Line

These bastards are so hard to kill.

My Pistoliers in a Vanguard position.

My 20 year old Battle Master knights. Veterans!

Fire!

And the fun stops when the Chaos Knights charge.

More of my guys down then the other guys, "Altdorf, We have a problem"

More pics and write up on my blog:
link

Xin

Nice little skirmish!!

Tally Ho!

Very nice. Is that Thrud I see lurking in the back?

Very inspiring!

I've never played a game with less than 2k on a side. How did that work out?

And what edition did you play?

It was 8th Edition.

What you need against Chaos Warriors are:

1. Never yet them charge you.

2. Hand Gunners or Crossbows and actually you should have both. Shoot them before they can get to you.

3. A unit that has strength 4 or better weapons in hand to hand combat, you really need to have that -1 to armor save.

4. The pistoleers should have been facing the mounted Chaos Warriors so that they could misdirect them.

5. Pick the right magic school for your spells like Lore of Metal

Just what I have always disliked about WHFB, 20 chaos against 82 empire at "equal Points" and they run right through the empire like shite through a goose……. Man do I ever loathe GWs "chaos is the greatest"crap….. I once nearly annilatded an entire chaos army of 2500 hundred points down to two figures wth less then ten persent losses to my dark elf army. My opponant then took his TWO remaining figures a sorcerer and a hero… And proceeded to wipe the table clean of my army…. By themselves…..two of them…… Man I grew to dislike that game something fierce….. Not sorry to see it go at all…… But on another note … Your troops look really nice:)

Great looking battle, Xin. I enjoyed seeing the pictures and reading the battle report.

Interesting DKG, my Dark Elf experiences have been not dissimilar to yours barring the ending – I just wiped out my opponent's Warriors of Chaos army and that was it. Only thing left was his daemon prince but my noble on a dragon was matching it blow for blow pretty much; they spend the first half of the game flying around the table watching each other until he finally got stuck in, and then got bogged down lol.

My 8th Ed experiences have been amongst my best with any edition of WFB; we are still playing it and building armies at my FLGS. Sorry that yours were not.

With the upcoming points sytem perhaps we'll find AoS more palatable

A man after my own heart painting his Empire regiments in the livery of the different States & cities, rather than all the same as GW started doing with 6th edition.

I love the old BattleMasters models. Could you give us a sense on how well they match the regular Warhammer stuff? I have a full set in my attic, but I've never pulled them out and painted them because I had always assumed that they were slightly smaller than regular models.

There are also a handful of old 90's models in there, which is great to see. Have you ever tried going back to a 90's edition of the game? I play WFB 4th Edition and love it… Prefer it to 8th Edition, actually. The rules were a lot more simple and streamlined and units had some really fun and crazy abilities (like the little homunculi on the Undead Carrion who grew stronger as he reaped souls!).

Just for fun, here is an analysis of that battle in WFB4e: Chaos Knights with Chaos Armour 1+ save cost 80 points each, so a unit of 5 (without command or any upgrades) costs 400 points. For that price, you could get 4 cannons, which should do the trick (nearly 1 cannon for each Chaos Knight). You'll have to use Empire and Dwarf cannons to get around the 25% war machine limit, of course. If you want to be really safe, take Dwarf Organ Cannons instead (you can fit 3 of these, and although they only shoot 24", they are just as powerful as a cannon and can fire five times in the same turn).

However, if you want to be more friendly, then buy a cheap, flying monster to march block and get a wizard with access to spells that ignore armour saves (light, gold etc). Wizards can be quite powerful, but they are glass cannons and are easy to hunt down. In fact, everything in WFB 4th Edition has at least a half dozen ways to counter it. Given that the actually game could be only 4 turns long, this leads to some really manic playing and crazy and unexpected things happening on the table every time you play.

@Wizbang, the old 90's Warhammer Armies Painting Guide has a good section about painting units in coordinating colours. That is, not all the models have yellow socks, but almost all of the models have yellow somewhere on the figure. It gives the unit terrific cohesion while still being natural and organic. There's a great review of that book here: YouTube link

Your observation that this changed with 6th Edition is astute. Mike McVey, one of the best painters that has ever worked for GW and the author of that painting guide, left in 1999 as GW was moving to multipart plastics (which ruined GW for me). After McVey, GW minis were painted up in drab, solid, uniform colours (just as the parts were now meant to be interchangeable and thus had to be neutral and generic enough to fit any configuration). The colours and the autocad models just sucked all the life out of it for me. I still love and game with my 90's lead, sculpted and posed by true artists and lovingly painted in bright colours with Coat D'Arms paints (the original Citadel paints from the early 90's) using the techniques McVey describes in his books (which are must-haves, all of them).

Actung, my Knights in the above pics are Battlemasters. They fit very well. I fact I think the horse is the same. The Empire foot from BM is very small. I sold them off years ago.

Wizbangs, I didn't intend to paint different units as different city states. That's just an Empire Army painted over the course of 25 years.

If I did it again I would pick one unifying color and paint units different but all would have the one color to tie them together. It's funny after 25 years, I still need to fill in some wholes in my Empire line up. Of course GW kept changing my list so I had to drop troops I had painted. Like Hobbits/Ogres/Horse Archers etc.

Xin/Jeff