Evil moves first. The Demon Knight Cavalry on the near flank moves towards the objective forest, and will prevent the two broken units there from rallying. The imps move alongside the Sun Temple, ready to attack either the archers or the tree spirits as needed. The tree spirits kill four more Chain Demons, and again take few casualties. However, The Cacodemon Firesprays the unit, killing Nichole before she can Strangling Thorn the Cacodemon. The unit of scouts advances to help secure the temple if it is required.

The second unit of Demon Knight cavalry charge the Noble Cavalry, but it is too late. The Noble Cavalry kills the last of the fire demons, and while they lose half of their number, they remain alive.

The air elementals attack a unit of archers, and keep the howlers from rallying.

The skeleton warriors skirmish to get through the woods to the halflings. Halfling artillerymen swarm forward to engage the skeletons, while the oriental dragons attack the rear of the formation.

Meanwhile, the newly rallied centaurs again charge the undead Lancer unit, overrunning the last Undead chariot on the way.

On the far flank, the Noble Cavalry pursues deep into the Undead territory, preventing several units from rallying.

This was a well fought battle by both sides. Neither side made any bone headed mistakes, and luck was pretty even. Brett had some amazing armor save rolls with his demons, but then they would be averaged out by bad attack rolls. Magic did not seriously impact the battle - both sides got some spells off, but neither side could get a real advantage with it. There were 23 mages in the battle, and amazingly none died until turn 4. Both sides did a good job countering each other's magic when it could have made a big impact.

Micah got a little unlucky early when Rob passed the two Death Howl morale tests. However, the end result of succeeding probably would not have been significant - there were a lot of elf units that could have destroyed those cavalry units before assistance would have arrived. It might have been better to save that one more turn.

My scouts did nothing the whole game. About 2000 points of troops sat out of the battle. One could argue that they forced the demons to push forward, but they would have done that anyway - I've seen Brett play demons before J

Brett felt taking the initiative on turn 2 would have been better for them. It's possible, because letting us move first let us paralyze his flyers for the rest of the game, and their flyers were a lot more potent than ours. However, if they had charged, they would have had to fight within the short range of sylvan bows (5's to hit), and if they had brought their flyers forward, they would have still been engaged by our air forces. If they retreated, they would have either chased them, or been free to help wreck the first wave of hell hounds. The Demon knights could not have got into combat with the centaurs if the demons moved first - in all likelihood, the centaurs would have helped wreck the center and then the whole elf and centaur cavalry line would have been free to deal with the remaining demon knights together. Of course, there are many ways it could have worked, but I don't think that was much of a mistake, if any.

Good winning initiative the next two turns helped a lot, especially on turn 4 when the demon knight cavalry on the near side could have got free. That might have made turn five look a lot different, with a mass of knights charging the elf archers on the near objective hill, or crushing through the temple. Those guys are bad news.

Of course, so were the Noble Cavalry. They dominated each combat they were in, though with a lot of help from sylvan archers on my side of the table. They make me want to play high elves, all by themselves.

The game itself went so smoothly. Everyone stayed pretty focused, even with a store full of watchers and a pizza delivery. I had some concerns that this game would bog down the system, but it came through beautifully.

So, 40,000 next week? J