1000pts vs. Dark Elves

This, my first battle with the Dwarves, took place at the local university games club. I was anxious to try out my new army, and Alex was willing to give it a go with his Dark Elves.

The Karak Kadum forces:

• 20 Warriors w/Thane
• 10 Thunderers
• 10 Thunderers
• Cannon
• Grudge Thrower
• Organ Gun

The Dark Elf forces:

• 18 Spearmen w/hero
• 18 Spearmen
• 12 Crossbowmen
• 6 Cold One Knights
• 6 Shades

The Battle:

I cannot recall the turn-by-turn but here is the general idea of the battle.

The Dwarven cannon, stone thrower and thunderers destroy the cold one knights as they tried to out-flank the Dwarven forces.

Dark Elf Shades hide behind a hill then come after the thunderers on the Dwarven flank. The thunderers hold for a few turns but are quickly dispatched by the great-weapon-wielding shades.

Stone thrower and organ gun soften up the Dark Elf spearmen units, panicking the one unit not being led by a character.

The unit with the character advances into the Dwarven warriors, charges, and the characters fight a challenge, doing 1 wound each to eachother. The elves flee the combat after a minor victory by the Dwarves.

The Dwarven organ gun and remaining thunderers get in a shooting battle with the Dark elf crossbowmen.

The Shades, having finished with the thunderers, move on to take out the Grudge Thrower crew.

The Dwarf Warriors charge the Dark Elf spearmen (now rallied) and the Dark Elf general meets his end in a challenge with the Dwarven leader.

The result is a solid victory for the Dwarves.

Lessons Learned:

• At 1000 points, 3 war machines and 2 units of shooters is pretty much a gunline, kinda nasty.
• Night elves hatred is scary - lots of hits! Luckily, elves are weak and dwarfs are tough.
• In a straight-up shooting battle between elves and dwarfs, dwarfs win (due to toughness and armor, and the organ gun puts us over the top).

We had a fun game but Alex was concerned from the beginning that the Dark Elves would be no match for the dwarfs. I wouldn't say that any significant tactical errors were made, however I had no idea that the new shades were so powerful and I would have been more careful in deployment to try to avoid their ambush (or at least have an organ gun ready to shoot them). As it turned out, feeding them the flank of a line of thunderers prevented them from killing very many each round of combat and my thunderers fought to the last man, tying the shades up for quite a while.