I've done a fair number of battle reports in my time, often from tournaments, covering 8th,
AoS and
40k. I prefer to read heavily photographic reports, so that is the style that I write; the photographs also help me to remember what happened. Unless you have a good memory, you will need notes if you want to be really specific about what happened in the game - this is particularly notable for Command Abilities and spells in Age of Sigmar, which are important but frequent enough that you can forget them.
Other general comments:
- Make sure to explain (succinctly) what each army had. Like, people don't care whether your Reavers have two or three special weapons, but they do want to know how many knights your opponent had. A photograph of each army, with a listing below, is probably the quickest method.
- Pick and stick to certain ways of describing the action. Using phrases like 'the left flank' repeatedly on different turns will help the reader to understand the spatial relationship of the units; don't expect the reader to have remembered who the paladins are and what they did last turn, unless you keep this kind of recurring description.
- Photographs of dice rolls are not really that interesting. This works better in certain styles of video reports, where part of the fun is seeing the action unfold; in written reports showing the dice doesn't really add anything.
- Something that is easy to forget - add your thoughts and analysis. Why did you deploy the way that you did? What were you expecting to happen when your knights charged that bloodthirster? How did the combats benefit you? As Boss Salvage says, the end of turns can be good places for this. But really, add that analysis; it is far more interesting than the simple events, as it allows the reader to understand what you were planning, and whether they want to follow your army selection/whatever.
Something that is cool, but is harder to pull off, is to have your opponent do the same. Their pre-and-post analysis on the game can be really interesting.
- There is a balance between photographs and text. Old White Dwarf reports were mainly text, with a few explanative pictures and maps to accompany. I always aspire to match this, but tend to have way more photographs and less text (even after filtering out photographs that I took for memory purposes). Their reports tended to have very clear descriptions in the text - partly because they gave different units fancy names, so that the three units of archers were all easily distinguishable. Anyway, it is worth noting that entirely textual reports, with no photographs, tend not to get many replies; while purely photographic ones are pretty but confusing. You should pick your own poison in this regard, but be aware of the consequences of that choice, and tailor your writing/photography to suit.
Anyway, just a few thoughts. Here are a couple of my own reports, which show the sliding scale of text-to-photographs:
Immense team game in 8th edition, mainly photographs
40k Orks, more text but still lotsa photographs
[edit]This may all be a bit uselessly general for your action question, but I hope that there is some value here and that it helps!
We didn't do a Triumph & Treachery treatment, though we are thinking about the cards and bribes and seeing what we can import. Fyreslayers and Ogres the mercenary thing is pretty easy to fix up. So, I want to do a batrep from this amazing game we had. I took pics and jotted down highlights from each turn. Then at the end I recorded an brief discussion between the three of us for inclusion of ep 139 Combat Phase podcast which will go up Sunday night. Still, reflecting on this I think it needs more than the brief recap on the podcast.
But, I want something. So I figure you all encounter a wider variety of batreps than I so I'm looking for any input at all on how to do a milder batrep for this forum. I want to cover not only action in each turn but we discuss how 
) with combats every player turn up through turn 5 (15 close combat phases) and how it worked against us in hero phases. Most notably was the objective to hold the chaos shrine in the center but that pesky Runemaster kept turning it to lava and no one wanted risking death. Unfortunately for them, I went first round 2 and last round 3 so they had 5 player rounds of keeping away. This also happened with other command or hero abilities.
