Marathon of Pain

Ok, so a recap of last night's battle (pics are in the previous post):

The original plan was to have a quick fight of my Orcs & Goblins vs the High Elves.
Then we decided to introduce a new player to Warhammer, and next thing you know we have a full scale 2000pt battle on our hands. Not the best way to get a new player started, but it was still fun.

The lineup was 800pts of Orcs & Night Goblins, plus 1200pts of Skaven, vs 800pts of Dwarfs plus 1200pts of High Elves.  The newbie would control my beloved Dwarfs, while the rest of us would command our Escalation armies (without the Bretonnians, obviously).

The Good:
High Elves rolled with 8 Dragon Princes, 10 Swordmasters, 10 Archers, a Repeater Bolt Thrower, 18 spearmen, Level 2 Mage, and a High Elf Prince Lord as the Alliance General.  The Dwarfs had two blocks of 25 Clansmen, one of which had a Dwarf Hero (I refuse to use the term "Thane"), 10 Dwarf Crossbows, and a Dwarf Cannon.

The Bad:
The Orcs & Goblins went with a variation of the escalation armies that I plan for round 5 and 6. Two blocks of 20 NG Spearmen, one unit of 20 NG archers, (3 fanatics in the spears), 16 Orc Archers, 18 Orc Boyz, Level 2 NG Shaman, and a Night Goblin Warboss.  The Skaven had a huge block of 40+ Clanrats (i have no idea how many rats were actually in this unit), about 15 Plague Monks, 2 Warp Lightning dudes, a Warpfire Thrower, 3 Rat Ogres, and a Plague Lord as the Evil Alliance General.

The Ugly:
This battle took an ungodly 6 hours to play, finishing at 2:30am.

What happened?

Basically, having 4 generals in the room (two who are new to the game, one who was playing for the first time, and one (me) who can't keep the rules straight between 20 years and 8 different editions) is not a good combination.  Plus, with four different army types playing, we had four different sets of army-unique rules, etc, so it really slowed things down. And we hadn't played in over two months. Yikes.  I think this will be the last of our 2v2 "alliance" battles for a while.

As for the game, the evil hordes moves across the field, while the Elves and Dwarfs stayed put for about 3 turns.  The Dwarf Crossbowmen win the game MVP, annihilating units left and right, and almost repelling the plaguemonk charge in turn 4 (5?). Warp Lightning dudes kept getting Irresistible Force until the very end, and the Dwarf Cannon was brutally bad.  The Orc Boyz in the center kept getting pummeled by the repeater bolt thrower, and the rest of the greenskins were either failing animosity checks or failing panic tests.  Things were looking bad for Evil when the big charge that was setup in Turn 3 got only halfway home. The Clanrats charged the first Dwarf Clansmen unit, while the Plaguemonks attempted to charge the second Clansmen unit and failed. Ouch!  This left the flank of the Clanrats wide open for the charge in the flank the next turn, which the Dwarfs wisely executed and caused the panic check we all knew was coming. Fleeing rats followed.   At this point, Evil was contemplating conceding the battle.

Some other things of note: the plaguemonks decided to take their frustration out on the dwarf crossbows, killing them, but then ending up right in the path of the dwarf cannon for the rarely used grapeshot.  This of course took out half the plaguemonks.  The Rat Ogres on the right flank charged the cannon, routing it off the board (yay victory points!).

The other shocker of the night was on the Evil left flank. The Dragon Princes were holding that extreme flank and eventually tried to march directly in front of the Orc Archers that were advancing on the same flank.  This left the Dragon Princes with the flank exposed. Now, Orcs aren't that smart, but they're smart enough to know when it makes sense to charge a unit of knights. This made sense. The 16 Orc Archers charged the knights in the flank, tying them up for 3 turns, effectively taking them out of the battle until turn 6.
Anyway, by the end of the battle the Good Guys started giving up victory points when the victorious flanking Dwarf unit got hit by two vicious Warp Lightning storms, killing 15 dwarfs and causing a panic check, which caused another panic check on the other dwarfs, running off the board. Suddenly, all of the Dwarf units were gone and 800 victory points went to the Bad Guys.
After all was said and done, the entirety of the Dwarf contingent was gone, and almost all of the Orcs & Goblins, and with table quarters, etc, we ended up with 863 vs 853 in VPs, a Draw!