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I don't feel like copy/pasta right now, and the site could use some traffic.

http://www.classichammer.com/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=427&pid=1103#post_1103

Either here or there, feel free to reply.

Yessss! I loved 6th Edition!

Great report! Nice to seem some battle report activity here.

Thanks, there are more Bat Reps on the Classichammer page, maybe I should link those as well

Loved 6th edition. Great stuff, thanks!

Nice report, I am old and love seeing older models getting a new lease on life

I enjoyed 6th when it was out. The only drawback was that if you were charged all the other player had to do was kill your front rank and you couldn't attack back. It did have a good balance between magic and army books, skaven were a bit cheesy though .

I did like how 8th had Step-up and Attack in 2 ranks. That correct the old issue of "kill the front rank". Magic was crazy though.

I never had that issue with an entire front rank dying to a charge until Chaos came out with their million attacks per model lists. For the most part my infantry units were designed to be relatively survivable when charged, or had spears so I could still get attacks back. Before I was perished on Warseer we had several discussions where I posted the math on how difficult it was to actually wipe out a front rank on the charge most of the time, and I was battled on that constantly. Basically you had some people that swore a 5 man cav unit could wipe out a unit on the charge every time, and after the math dispelled that theory suddenly every 5 man unit included a Lord in it. At any rate, I feel that Step-Up and 2 ranks was added in because the multi attack model concept from 7th carried into 8th and rather than fix the army books, it was easier to add a rule to the rulebook. In my mind it was this add rather than fix that cost us WFB.

I played a lot of WH during 6th and 7th up at the US headquarters and if you had a T3 unit, its front rank was wiped out all the time. Given that at the time most units were 10-20, 30 on a rare occasion it wasn't difficult to break them. Back then it was referred to as "the magic 5", meaning if they had 3 ranks a standard and outnumber all you had to do was cause 5 wounds to tie and anything else you had (ranks, standard) was going to win the combat for you. The Chaos book made it bad, but there were other things that added to it, most knights, Saurus, Ogres, Vampires, minotaurs, orcs with choppas, and blackguard after their update. Ogre Kingdoms were really good at it because they had the gut charge along with their attacks.

The ability to wipe out an entire rank in a round was so easy that it made some units practically useless. From 6th to the beginning of 8th, I was one of the only people in our area that ran Empire Halberdiers. Before 8th they were a complete waste of points. They had no armour to speak of, light being no better than tissue paper. Swordsmen were not much better, even with the handweapon/shield bonus, once you were hit with S4 they were left with a 5+ and the charger went first. It's not that hard to take out 5 T3 models. Elves suffered the same problems that Empire did in 6th. White Lions were horribly bad as were goblins, peasants, and Kossars. Basically if it was T3 infantry and didn't have spears, you were leaving it at home.

Even if you take Chaos out of the equation a 5 man knight with a champion had 6 attacks going in with a strength bonus, plus the attacks from the mounts. There is a reason that the big tournaments in 6th & 7th was full of folks rocking 5-6 man knight units.

A lot of hate gets put on 8th for bringing about larger units, but the shift really began at the end of 6th with people moving to 6 and 7 man frontages to at least have something to hit back with. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of fond memories of 6th. It had the best army book balance (with one exception) and best internal support from GW. However it had its problems, magic dice generation was often one sided, the Skaven book was insanely powerful, and basic infantry was pretty useless beyond holding table quarters. 7th was badly over powered army books, let's face it Ward flat out admitted that the only reason he made Daemons so OP was so they could bust up the last book that Gav wrote. 8th started out decent but fell into the same old GW power creep, and ET was a ridiculous money grab. The biggest issue with 8th was the magic, but the core combat rules were a huge help to infantry. 8th allowed infantry to be relevant again, something that had been lacking in the game since 4th. In 8th we actually saw people field units of T3 infantry and they could actually do something, until they were sucked into a vortex . I have often felt that the perfect combo would be to play with 6th army books and spells, but use the 8th rule book.

I really wish I could agree with you on these points, but that sort of thing wasn't the case in any of the clubs I was gaming at. I faced several armies of varying strength and skill, and once again it comes down to the math:

5 models attacking 5 models. Assuming better weapon skill for the attacker and +1 attack for Champion = 4 hits. Rolling to wound assuming +2 Strength = 3-4 wounds. Now comes the part where you have some more abstraction. with no saves you have 1-2 models attacking back. And since we didn't declare challenges or whatnot, we can say Champ which gives you 2-3 attacks back. Assume half hit and half wound, we get 1 wound that might make it through armor, depending on the loadout of the attacking unit. So we move to CR for the deciding factor. Assuming both units are built to maximize ranks and add banners, the bonus res is a wash until you get the outnumber. So in the case of the attacker, you have 3-5 res, and that's assuming average rolls across the board. Maybe 1 res potentially for the defender.

Now cav coming in you have the same resolution for rider attacks, so 3-4 wounds plus 1 1/2 wounds from the horses allowing saves. Seeing as most cav units were running 5 man in people's examples, you are at -5 CR just by showing up. By the example here you are damn lucky to break even unless you are rolling stellar. And if the unit is armed with spears or has any decent armor, then even more of an uphill climb. You ran Halberdiers, why didn't you run them as detachments to Spearmen? Still fluffy, and much more viable considering how restricting the halberd is with armor options.

Your analogy doesn't hold water. You are forgetting the very important strength modifiers. There are NO spear armed units in 6th or 7th with heavy armour. The best you can get is light with shields, that goes for all elves, empire, Bretonians. Saurus amd Storm vermin may be the exception to that, but they only got a 6 up save unless it was S4 cave with lances and then back to no save. But essentially T3 spearmen are getting no armour saves from cavalry. Even the S3 cav with lances is -2 to saves so that takes out the shields and light armour. Also most cav was WS4 with the rare exceptions of Bretonnian Errant Knights so Empire, skaven, Bretonian, or goblin spearmen are also being hit on 3s most of the time. So most of the time cav on empire and goblins were getting 4 hits and 4 wounds with no saves. All they needed was the horses to do 1 and it was a draw, if they had a standard or the horses did 2 or more wounds it was bye-bye spearmen. Horses hit way better than people give them credit for.

High elves didn't suffer from this as bad because of their special rule to fight in 3 ranks, but they still died in droves because they had no save to charging cavalry. Dark Elf spearmen still got their teeth kicked in.

And I haven't even mentioned chaos horses which were S4, so spearmen were only getting a 6 to that as well. Same goes for Boars and Cold Ones.

Something else you are forgetting is that in 6th-8th you could allocate attacks to people's unit champions without a challenge. So smarter/veteran/tournament players would kill off your champion on the first round of combat. Again if they got 5 wounds you were left with no attacks back.

I know you think your math is solid but you are leaving out key factors. There are reasons why the top tournaments in 6th & 7th saw people bring 5-6 mam units of knights. They were perfect for busting low WS, low armoured units and to hunt war machines.

I was originally going to type up a wall of text with figures to prove my point, including quoting your post AND mine highlighting where I used everything you said I neglected in my rather fast model, but I don't want to bog down this discussion even further. I think I'll wind up posting a complete table of survivability over at classichammer and simply link to it from now on...


In the meantime, I think it's high time I linked to the other batreps on that site.

Updated with better photo hosting.