Skirmish in the Vale of the Temple: 3rd ed Warhammer 1000pts Dark elves Vs Dwarves.

Fairly recently Dreamfish posted on the oldhammer forum about trouble she had encountered fighting with his Dark elves against Dwarves:

Forum post to be found here.

So when a club friend challenged me to fight his dwarves I knew I just had to take dark elves. To keep things simple we decided to go with just 1000 pts a side.

The battle was fought over a vale bordered on two sides by rocky hills.  In the center there was a wood and a ruined temple to some evil deity.

Here's how the armies stacked up:

On one side the dark elves deployed masked by hills and woods from the dwarves.

On the other the dwarves set up hoping to catch the pansy elves in the open with their war machines. The thunderes in the army all fired as crossbows. Must have been a new powder mix.

Separated by a large rocky outcrop from the main dwarf force was a unit of giant slayers.

The battle started with the dark elf force rushing forward behind what cover was available, this meant that almost all the dark elf force was on the right most side of the battle field. The Dark Elf sorceress Mistress Glutton struggled to keep up. Her singular chaos mutation was to be enormously fat and traveled at half speed. Her spells had also been close to useless with such spells as immunity from poison and flight. Where was wind blast. 

Realising his firing line had no targets and the dark elves were going to take his flank the Dwarf general started to redeploy his army shifting it round to face the coming threat. The giant slayers surged forward eager to engage the witch elves in a sky clad frothing frenzy.  The stone thrower launched an indirect missle at the unit of warriors and missed.

However after another two turns the indirect fire had wiped out most of the warriors, luckily the general Lord H'ward (he how has something of the night about him) had escaped so far but things didn't look good. Drastic action was needed. The chaos hound handler was instructed to send her beasts directly towards the main dwarf  battle line hopefully to draw fire.  Mistress Glutton took to the air like a depraved blimp eager to take on the warmachine crew in single combat.

Before the Crossbows began picking their way through the wood as was their orders they let loose a single volley towards the oncoming Giant slayers.

The giant slayers edged ever closer and the dark elf warriors were all wiped out by indirect fire from the stone thrower. Lord H'ward was killed. The witch elves were only too keen to charge the Giant slayers and they proved to be more than a match for the frothing loonies. 

These vents took place over several turns and in the meantime Mistress Glutton had managed to position herself (with several flight spells) in order to charge the stone thrower crew, once these were dispatched she was able to deliver the same fate to the cannon crew aided by strength of combat giving her an extra attack.

The dwarf general, a slayer himself had worked himself up into a frenzy and charged the chaos hounds who quickly fled. The dwarf warriors in Tesudo were unable to catch the venerable general up and he was pin-cushioned by the Dark elf crossbows.

The witch elves managed to work around the dwarven flank to make short work of one unit of crossbows. The second would be easily dispatched however the main unit of dwarf warriors was too large to be engaged. Equally the dark elf forces were too fast for the lumbering unit of warriors to catch. The battle ended in a stalemate.

It was a fun game and really brought home the Dark Elf vulnerability to war machines.  I have some thoughts on the issue but as I plan to challenge for a rematch I'll leave those thoughts until another time.