We playtested the house rules found
here.
We played Dwarves vs Dark Elves using the Dark Elf uber stand and shoot: 5 Slave Warriors, 2 Pure Blood Coven, 2 Lords of Dusk. The Dwarf army was 6 Axemen and 2 Antonian Horse. We figured that if the match was close with Dwarves vs the DE shootyness, then the house rules made it close against any matchup.
This is actually his first turn, and that's why his Antonians on the flank are moving out. The center is his 6 Axemen. My line consists of Slave-Slave-Salve-Lord-Lord-Slave-Slave, with the Covens in the back. The d10s are objective markers, the black d6s are Witching Hour markers.
I actually took turn 1 and managed to inflict 4 pts of damage on the 1st turn. He then promptly failed his Courage check. Right out of the gate, the Disrupted rule prevented the game from basically being over, because although it cost 2 CAs for him to get th eunit moving (the same number of CAs it takes to get a routing unit back into the fray) he wouldn't be losing any space between the unit and the rest of his line (i.e. not opening a hole in the line).
I needed 3s & 4s with 5 dice and then 4s and 4s with 4 dice. Should've been 3 pts, but I managed to do 4 pts on that first shot. This was a pattern all day, my dice rolling were insanely hot.
This a few turns later, after his axemen unit failed their second Cge check and became Disordered. Again, my dice were really hot. I needed 4s and 4s with 5 dice on one shot (should've done ~2 pts) and I did 4 points. By this time, the axemen unit had 1 Red box left and so he chose to leave them Disordered because my Dusk Lords had objectives to shoot at him, thus forcing me to either waste a round shooting or to spend CAs to change the their objectives (obviously not a tough decision for me).
His Antonians go on a suicide run. His hope was to bust through the Slaves or at the least tie down the Coven the turn or two so they couldn't use Witching Hour while the rest of his line closed. If one of his Antonians could fight their way free they could roll up my line pretty quickly.
Judicious use of Evil Eye stripped off a very useful 6th die which meant that rolling up the Slaves in one-round wasn't going to happen. But at least i also fled so no free attacks. Worth noting that I needed 1s to hit and got 3 hits and then 3 wounds. I did not play a Red card here.
It's all over but the shouting here. On my left, pinching Coven and Slaves take out the Antonians, then turn to expose the Axemen to Coven coming round the far flank, Slaves on the front, and Slaves on the right. The best thing he could do was take the pinch and protect the flank of his axemen engaged with the Slaves and the axemen that had engaged the Lord of Dusk.
Note the Lords of Dusk have no units in front of them. One unit of Axemen made it into combat, but were in the Red from combined fire from the Lords. More good rolling on my part, although not as insane as before, but still good. i.e. was getting 3 hits with the Witching Hour (should get 2-3, so the rounding was still going in my favor and not evening out from my previous good luck).
This is where we called the game. Pinches all around with the Dwarves about to get rolled hard.
Okay, so the Dark Elves still won pretty easily, but honestly we expected the Dark Elves to win. The idea was to set up the best case scenario sans terrain for the shooty build in that the Dwarves's slow move would give the DE a full two extra turns of shooting. The fact that my dice rolling was just sick only made the game even more one sided.
That being said, given that this was (literally) the best case scenario for the shooty army and that I had hot dice on top of it, the fact that it was one good die roll on either flank from being a dog fight says we're on the right path here. For example, had the Slaves on the left fled when charged by the Antonians, then the Coven would've had a much harder time even though it was flanking. And if the Antonians win that grind match, then they can set up flanking when the Dwarves hit the Slaves on the right.
Similarly, on the right, where the Antonian's charge was much more suicidal, had they not fled and wiped out the Slaves then although they still would've died it would've taken the Pure Bloods charging in to do it. That's fewer Witching Hours cast, which is fewer points, which means the fight in the center is a closer fight. And the Pure Bloods probably don't win that fight, even though the Antonians probably die in a grind as they only have 3 boxes left.
Also, in the center, the Axemen which failed not one, but two Rout checks to go Disordered meant that I could turn my attention to the second unit of Axemen a turn early. That's 9 more dice that I got on those axemen that would've had to go towards killing the original target. The odds of failing both the Yellow check (on turn 1 no less) and then the Red check is 1-in-5. That is of course discounting the fact that I had such insane shooting to put 10 pts of damage on a unit in 3 turns (shooting at Extreme & Long range).
But even given all that, the fact that being Disordered only meant losing CAs instead of having a unit 5" behind the line gave my opponent a chance. It meant that I had to continue to pour firepower in on that same unit and the game wasn't decided literally on the first turn. So my feeling at the end is that once we control for the fact that 1) this was intentionally set up to be the ideal scenario for a shooty army and 2) literally all the breaks went to the DE and none went to the Dwarves, that the Disordered rule shows some real promise.
