Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Back so fast! I was expecting to get this game in a little later in the week, but Geist was raring to go and we ended up smacking heads Monday night. I thought I'd change some things up for this one. Geist is something of a regular here on Relentless. I've been massacred in Dawn Assault (Relentless 8.5), won in Watchtower (no report), and won in Blood & Glory (Relentless Lite 8.4), so I thought I'd give him a chance to give lay out some of his pre-game thoughts.

First, his army list (and please note, this is from memory, so there may be a minor error or two).

Dreadlord, Dark Pegasus, Ogre Blade, Pendant of Kaeleth, The Other Trickster's Shard, Dragon Helm, Shield, Sea Dragon Cloak (1+ armor, reverse ward, enemies re-roll wards, 2+ ward vs. flaming, +2 Str)
Dreadlord, Dark Pegasus, heavy armor, sea dragon cloak, Whip of Agony, Shield of Ghrond, Talisman of 4+ ward (5 str 5 armor piercing attacks, incoming strikes at -1 str, 1+ vs. shooting, 2+ in hand to hand)
Master, BSB, Dark Pegasus, Cloak of Hag Graef, Dawnstone, Lance, Heavy armor, Shield (incoming shots are halved in strength, re-rolls 1+ armor vs. shooting, 2+ in hand to hand)
Sorceress, Level 2, Seal of Ghrond, Tome of Furion (fire)
Sorceress, Level 2, Dispel Scroll (fire)
30 Repeater bolt throwers, standard, mus
30 Repeater bolt throwers, standard, mus
3 x cold one chariots
2 x War hydra

Your army is certainly unorthodox. Can you explain how you came to it?

Geist wrote:<The army build> stems from several schools of thought. The first is that not many people tend to use the entire 8th build ideas much (yet). The 8th ed builds are simple things like horde formation, using the massive shooting edge you get, the speed of flyers and lastly of course the much harder point system. With it being so much harder to get full points out of anyone anymore building a list akin to how mine is makes bleeding points a hard task.

You've played against this dwarf list 3 times already in 8th, and many more times in 7th. What are your thoughts on the matchup?

Geist wrote: Your weakness seems to be in not taking any line shooters, but that is balanced by the fact that you have several very useful units that can not only fight well but benefit from high leadership and usually are steadfast. Tossing the flaming from your grudgethrower is a bad idea in my mind. But if points say you cant afford it then you cant. Of course only having 3 warmachines seems odd to me as well. Always would think you would have more guns.

What was the game plan before we rolled into this one?

Geist wrote: Truth be told I usually kinda fly by the seat of my pants when it comes to a game. I find the fluid thinking of my martial arts idol Bruce Lee, to almost always be a better way to go into a game, than having reams of static combat plans laid out and having to sort which ones work. The challenges of course with your army remains as they always are for me, get to the warmachines. If I can bust those guns early in the game then I do not need fear your army. When I can't bust them then I have to fly into your blocks where you have the edge in combat arms.

Editor's note:Meant to get a comment regarding the Lore of Fire, but forgot. Geist has taken it almost exclusively for dealing with hell pits in tournament play.

Regular readers of Relentless should be very familiar with this list by now, but I've reprinted here for any newcomers.

Dwarf Lord w/shield bearers, Runic armor (1+ save, immune to kb, heroic kb, poison, re-rollable), Runic weapon (flaming great axe)
Thane BSB w/Runic banner (Strollaz, 5+ ward)
Thane w/MR of Challenge, Great weapon, 3+ armor save
Runesmith w/2 dispel runes, shield, rune of stone (for combined 2+ armor)
Dragonslayer w/capri pants
25 Warriors w/full command, shields
25 Warriors w/full command, shields
19 Longbeards w/full command, shields
10 Rangers w/great weapons, heavy armor, mus, veteran
19 Hammerers w/full command, shields, MR of Grungni (5+ ward vs. shooting, magic missiles w/in 6")
12 Slayers
Cannon w/engineer, rune of forging, rune of burning (flaming, re-roll misfires)
Grudgethrower w/engineer, rune of accuracy, rune of penetrating (re-roll scatter, +1 str)
Organ Gun
Gyrocopter

After seeing Geist's list in action against earlier, I was feeling ok about the matchup. Fire magic was much better for me. Priority still had to go to dropping the hydras, which were the only thing that could single handedly make a mess of my ranked blocks. My dwarf lord could deal with one at a time, but not before they did a lot of damage to his supporting unit. Unfortunately, I also was going to need him to challenge the unkillable Dreadlords so that I could bring heavy static combat res to bear and hopefully run them off. The other trick in the book was the MR of challenge supported by the gyro to pull the BSB away from the dread lords in order to separate them. My main concern was if he could find a way to pick off enough small stuff (war machines, slayers, rangers) to be able to retreat and sit on a narrow win.

We rolled up Dawn Assault, which was going to be a problem for me. As much speed as the Dwarfs have gained on the charge in 8th, we still can't easily redeploy, and my army relies on blocks supporting each other.

Deployment was a mixed bag- I was able to deploy the bulk of my forces away from the hydras and crossbows, but my runesmith and a block of warriors ended up badly separated from the rest of my army.



My master strategist sense is tingling. Someone is missing.



Oh, there they are. Better burn those spellbreakers in a hurry.


The Dark Elves brought 2 fireballs, sword of rhuin, flaming bolts, and firestorm to battle.

I had set up second, so was only going first on a 6, which didn't drop. And we were off!

Turn 1
With heavy separation between the armies, most everything had to march to get into range for later mayhem. The squadron of chariots, general, and BSB advanced into the wreckage of the Empire village, with several drawing a line on the rangers I'd set a little far forward, hoping to flank something once it was engaged on my main blocks. Magic was light, though I did have to burn a scroll against a 32 casting of a big firestorm.

The runesmith and company sprinted as fast as they could, which, really, wasn't all that fast. The gyro thought about trying to do something valiant, but decided to get the hell out of dodge and flew over the doomed evacuation, pretending not to hear the cries for a ride. On the right, I backed the slayers off and jumped the rangers into a building for protection.

Shooting was a mixed bag- the cannon cracked two wounds and the regeneration off of one hydra, but the grudgethrower couldn't seal the deal and sailed wildly off target. The organ gun was just out of range of the same monster, so contented itself with obliterating a chariot. I also shifted the lord and BSB into the longbeards to try to help counter the threats coming down the right edge. On the good side, the pegasi were getting towards the table edge, which meant the MR of Challenge could make it a "charge or die" proposition. On the down side, I realized I was letting myself get drawn away from the war machines and would be in a lot of trouble if they leapfrogged my battleline.



Yep, that one chariot is going to turn the tide.

Turn 2

The dreadlord general charged my warriors tree-house, but had to tie up his flying pony outside. The monsters rampaged right at the isolated warriors and runesmith. Magic was again fairly soft. An irresistible flaming bolts put a little damage on some warriors but the miscast wounded both sorceresses. A fireball also nicked a wound off the grudgethrower. I'm not used to seeing much in the way of magic missiles, which are kind of nifty with the new LOS rules. Hydra breath weapons burned up some of the runesmith's bodyguard.



No, don't lead them back towards us! Run the other way!

Combat went just fine- the dreadlord only managed two wounds on the rangers, who put 4 back on the dreadlord, but pendant of Kaeleth saw all of those off easily. Steadfast in a building, and the elf was kicked out of the Dwarf only tree-house.



Hijinks on the right.

I continued to shift around to try to react to threats, again, probably pushing to far out from my war machines on the right. My lord left the longbeards to block a chariot charge into the slayers. He'd also have a counter charge at the dreadlord general if he kept trying to get at the rangers, though this wasn't ideal. If no wounds went either way, I'd only be putting him on a re-rollable eight which wasn't really going to get the job done.

Runesmith and co. resigned themselves to the grisly fate of death by hydra and turned to face the enemy to at least get parry saves. I had a moment of recklessness and hopped the gyro out between the crossbow blocks and behind the hydras, lining up for possible charges on both mages. I realized this was probably going to cost the gyro, but figured it would buy me another turn in the middle.

Shooting was mixed. I had a perfect flaming cannon shot clip both hydras, but rolled a one to wound the first one, so it stopped dead. The grudgethrower sailed off target again, but the organ gun cracked the rest of the wounds off the wounded monster. This forced a wave of panic tests. Without a BSB present, one of the repeater units failed and fled, giving the gyro another harassment opportunity and boosted chances of surviving.

Turn 3

In went the hydra and dreadlord to my isolated unit, where it would just be a matter of how fast they could burn through the steadfast. The crossbows continued to flee, pulling them further out of the game, and the mages scattered to try to get away from the gyro. On the right, the general took another crack at the rangers, while a pair of chariots went into my longbeards. The BSB pegasus hid from the MR of Challenge.

An irresistible flaming sword went off on the active repeaters which meant they were wounding the gyro on 5s. One shooting phase later, the gyro crashed and burned hard. Dang. To boot, the miscast had no effect- burning anyone in base to base of a lone caster.

The chariots killed 5 longbeards for no damage in return, but ld 10 steadfast was headed no where. The dreadlord general also made no significant progress on the rangers, killing another couple, for no real gain.

I had some easy choices in my turn- counter charging hammerers and my lord into each flank of the chariots that had just hit the longbeards. The dragonslayer started running as fast as he could for the hydra, hoping to lay a couple wounds on the thing, but was too far away. Shooting gouged a chunk out of one unit of crossbows, but they didn't panic away. I also tried to cannon off a sorcerer that was out on his own, but scored the dreaded short skip instead.

Combat didn't go particularly well. The warriors on the left hung out a little while longer, but would probably be gone next turn. Both sides whiffed in the chariot fight, but I had enough static to put both on a double 1 test. Unfortunately one of them actually passed, which left me unable to make some post-combat reforms I was hoping for. The next turn or so would probably decide things. I had about 275 VPs in the bag, and had given up 140. On the other hand, I was about to lose about 450 on the left, so I needed to find places to get some points back. I figured on being able to pick up both remaining chariots which would keep things even, but needed to down the last hydra, or some of the characters to really pull ahead.

Turn 4

Here's where Geist made the main mistake of the game. The dreadlord general hopped over the chariot combat to try to get in at the warmachines. The problem was that if I was able to break or destroy the remaining chariot, a post combat reform in his turn would give me a combo charge on his general in mine. Sure enough, this is what happened, and leading in to my turn, I had a good shot at my ideal matchup for taking the guy out.



Got you now, you slippery eel!

Elsewhere, the runesmith and co. finally succumbed. The hydra pursued off the board, and the dreadlord turned to try a long charge at my exposed cannon. In an effort to boost the killing power of his crossbows, another irresistible flaming sword came down, which was enough to stop the dragonslayer in his tracks. Luckily for me, the miscast was enough to finish off the sorcereress, getting me some much needed points in return.


Slayers managed to wreck the last rallied chariot, and a combined charge from longbeards and dwarf lord did the trick, putting the dreadlord on snake eyes and sending him off the board for a huge stack of points back.



Nice! Now to send the lord over to work on the other dreadlord and hydra.

On the left, a dramatic reform protected the cannon from a flying dreadlord charge, but war machines couldn't find the mark for any further advantage there.

Turns 5 & 6

This pretty much spelled the end. As I was back in the lead, Geist had to take some risks and none of them came through. His BSB tried to slip past my lines, but got challenged into the hammerers and killed by the Last Stand rule. The returning hydra got a face full of war machines for its trouble, and the last caster even took a cannon to the noggin before all was said and done (though he did manage to get a vengeful firestorm off first...).



Ooo. Dang.

The organ gun finally took enough fireballs and bolts to go down, and the remaining dreadlord made a mess of the screening warrior block, but couldn't get through steadfast, and that was that.

We didn't add it up at the time, but were somewhere around: 1700-650 for the Dwarves.

I'll have a post battle recap from both players a little later today. In the meantime, and as always, enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Really nice battle report that was enjoyable to read and nice touch on the pictures also!
I like the pre-game "talk" about the armylist/tactics, it adds alot to be able to see what the sides had in mind before the game and watch how it turns ou
Looks like dwarves also can have secret treehouse clubs, not only Wood Elves
Though heavy drinking and climbing trees are a bad combination...oh well, atleast they got lots of beard to soften the landing

Awesome work as allways, love the humor

Excellent report sir. That is a really fascinating DE build, though it didn't seem to do quite as well as he had hoped. I can see where getting his dread lord into a position to be gang raped by short, burly men was a mistake, but I don't see what he would have done to get the points he needed to benefit from his strong denial abilities. I guess that if you guys had started closer he might have been able to get both hydras into your lines earlier, and thus chewed through two units, and maybe gotten a third while magic rained down. Kind of a brain bender... I would love to see some reports where the DE list did what it was supposed to. Such a strange and interesting strat

Also, what were the "8th edition ideas" you guys referred to? Is that from a thread somewhere?

Thanks again for writing this up; I look forward to the after thoughts!

@ Wehrkind: I'm not 100% on what all is included in "8th edition ideas". I do know that some folks in the area (like me) are still running armies that you might have seen in 7th edition. He's been on my case about trying to figure ways to take advantage of horde formation or firing in ranks, for instance.

And now, the summary:

It's easy to think only of how your own deployment was disrupted in this scenario, but I think on balance I may have come off better (some of that comes from deploying second). With so much of his army off to one side, I was able to focus more blocks on trapping and killing the pieces that did make it all the way to me.

I think I made two real mistakes- the first and biggest being trying to run the warriors and runesmith back to the rest of the army. They were never going to make it, and if I'd plopped them in the far corner, not much would have had time to attack them and still make it to the main fight. Need to learn when to cut your losses! The second was getting drawn out from the war machines. As soon as I advanced, I opened landing spots behind my lines. The pegasus riders were vulnerable to static combat, but had a pretty good shot at surviving war machine shots. This meant that I ended up having to freeze the better half of my army to make "no-go" zones.

Geist made a couple of key errors: One was heading in to the building a second time with his dreadlord. Statistically, he'd need 4 turns (more with bad dice, or if I timed a challenge right) to wipe the unit out, and in the meantime, they'd be steadfast. The bigger one was to leave his general open for a reform, combo charge from longbeards & dwarf lord, which ended up as the clincher.

Unit of the match: Difficult to say. Probably the two warrior units who managed to jointly delay and distract half the Dark Elves long enough to down the hydras with shooting and take out the enemy general and BSB.

Chump of the match: Gyrocopter. Pulled a risky move with the thing for no real gain. In a game as tight as this one was looking to be, it would have been a lot better to preserve its points, or get it over to work some of that MR of challenge combo magic.

Villain of the match: Hydra #2, scoring most of the Dark Elf victory points. With unkillable handlers and thunderstomp, that thing can keep up a fairly sustained damage output.

I'll leave it at that. I asked Geist what changes he plans to make down the line, and it looks like things will start to look at least a bit more familiar:

Geist wrote:Lord level caster, level 2, lord on peg, bsb on peg, hag with pot (cauldron), 46 spear warriors, 2 28's of repeaters and 2 hydras. Had to lose the second lord, and the 3 chariots.

I'm personally a pretty big fan of the cauldron, and taking spears with a flaming banner gives him something to deal with regenerators, which in turn allows him to get away from the sub-par lore of fire. I will admit that there were some handy spells in there- flaming sword of rhuin is kind of a nice buff to be sure (with great potential against particularly tough targets), but I'd rather deal with that stuff all day than have to go up against death again. Anyway, this isn't the last you'll see of Geist on this series, so perhaps a later incarnation will make a showing.

Up next: An army I've *never* played in 8th edition...

Another awesome report! Did the dreadlord run off your table edge since you had a unit with greater numbers on the far side of him? And did you kill the chariot that fled, or did it eventually run off the board?

We've had interesting times here with fleeing units not counting for VPs... and apparently they don't turn to run towards the nearest table edge anymore, but just keep going in a straight line (unless we're playing it wrong). Makes for some interesting tactics in preserving / getting VPs!

The dreadlord did indeed run off the board. I was worried about the BSB coming in and scoring some war machines, so I elected not to pursue hoping he'd go off. Since you see units flee before performing your reform, I figured worst case scenario, I'd keep both units facing him to hit him again if he rallied.

The chariot that escaped rallied in front of the slayers who were able to charge it. It's one of the better targets in the army for them.

You guys have been playing it right. The dead or fled rule is my main reason for retaining the gyro. I need to be able to catch fleeing remnants or at least herd them towards a table edge to lock in VPs from defeated units.

Thanks for the report Zeke, always glad to read others!

Now, as a fellow Dark Elves player, I have some concerns with your friends list:

Tell him, if he needs to deal with regen, maybe lore of metal could help. Outside of trolls, I can't think of something that has regen without at least a 4+ armor save. Metal also works well as a high armor threat (duh) which is a big weakness for Dark Elves. The enchanted blades (or whatever it's called) spell also boosts RXBs as well.

No shadow magic was a bit surprising. From what I've seen, this is almost a staple in all dark elf lists. Not to mention, a nice pit of shades on top of one of your units would have been nasty.

His set up was rather...odd. The 30 strong RXB just seemed like a waste, was he 10x3, or 15x2? If he was the former, then he's wasting around 100 points of something not shooting, if it's the latter, then it's fine.

I don't get what people have with this BSB on pegasus idea, I take mine on foot and stick him in a unit of RXB, he seems to do just fine. Putting him out on his own is like asking to have him gibbed.

It's nice to see a different list set up then what I take, however, just wish it performed better. To me, it looks like it relies too much on hitting power (chariots, hydras, dreadlords) with no real units to stick around.

I think the list he's leaning towards for the next iteration has a shadow level 4, metal level 2.

As far as regenerating threats without armor, the absolute first that should come to mind is the hellpit. Skaven lists are in abundance in these parts, and most sport at least one HPA.

The BSB needs to be mobile for this list- he ought to go with all the hard hitting fast stuff most of the time, but retains the ability to shift back to help the blocks if they need it.

The pegasus gets you maneuverability, a few extra attacks, an extra pip of armor, and perhaps most importantly, an extra wound. I definitely see the attraction but understand why it isn't appropriate for every build.

RZ

That's an interesting point about the Pegu. I wonder at how one never sees WoC BSBs on a disk like that... could be a useful trick to shepherding troops out on the flanks and such. A 3+ ward would help greatly in survivability too.

Well, perhaps because WoC don't have quite as much to gain. The disc doesn't add a wound, for one. But I think that's a viable option. BSB, disc, Golden Eye, Blood curdling roar/stream of corruption, flail, and... 5 points to spare on a charmed shield?

That is a pretty interesting build... I might have to knock that around one of these days.