Our small tournament will be in the end of May, so we tried some more lists. I exchanged Butcher and Tyrant for Huskard on Thundertusk, Bretonnians came with the same list. We played two games, Blood and Glory and Escalation.

First game:

Battleplan: Blood and Glory

Armies:
Points: 1000
Bretonnian army:
5 Grail Knights
8 Knights of the Realm
5 Freeguild Outriders
10 Freeguild Handgunners
1 Empire General (general)
1 Paladin
1 Paladin Standard Bearer
1 Battlemage

Orc army:
3 Ogors with ironfist
3 Ogors with ironfist
20 Savage Arrowboys
1 Huskard on Thundertusk (Battle Brew)
1 Savage Big Boss (general)
5 Savage Boarboys

Both had exactly 1000 points, no Triumph Table.

Pre-battle strategy: I put Arrowboys and Boss on the right, Huskard in the middle and both Ogors to the left flank, Boarboys far right. Bretonnians put most of their cavalry units to their left, against my Arrowboys, and quite near the edge.

1st ROUND
Turn 1: Orcs started - I didn't want Outiders to reach my Arrowboys. Arrowboys moved forward with Boss, Boss gave them +1 with Bellowing Tyrant plus special Command Ability that allows extra attacks on roll of 6 (due to +1 to hit I got rerolls on 5 and 6). Others did not move much, not to give Bretonnians a chance to charge. Arrowboys shot Outriders, killed 4 and last one fled. I left 20 Arrowboys in the middle to stop charging Bretonnians.

Turn 2: Handgunners gunned my Arrowboys, some died, many fled. Cavalry moved forward, did not get charges, but hoped for double turn. 

2nd ROUND
Turn 1: Double turn for orcs. Lucky me. Arrowboys shot, killed 7 Knights of the Realm, last one fled. Incredible luck with dice, I think most rolls were 5 or 6 and I rolled lots additional attacks. And Knights failed with their 4+ Saves. Huskard blasted with ice, 3 Grail Knights died. Some Arrowboys shot Handgunners, some died.

And here we ended the game, there wasn't much Bretonnians left.

SUMMARY: Arrowboys with Big Boss' +1 to hit and Command Ability are rather devastating. But my rolls were incredibly good, mostly sixes and fives, I won initiative etc. And Bretonnian dice just hated him.

Second game:

Battleplan: Escalation

Armies:
Points: 1000
Bretonnian army:
5 Grail Knights
8 Knights of the Realm
5 Freeguild Outriders
10 Freeguild Handgunners
1 Empire General (general)
1 Paladin
1 Paladin Standard Bearer
1 Battlemage

Orc army:
3 Ogors with ironfist
3 Ogors with ironfist
20 Savage Arrowboys 
1 Huskard on Thundertusk (Battle Brew)
1 Savage Big Boss (general)
5 Savage Boarboys

Both had exactly 1000 points, no Triumph Table.

Pre-battle strategy: I deployed Ogors on the left and Ogors on the right. Bretonnia put Handgunners to the left with General, Knights of the Realm to the middle. I wanted to put Arrowboys to the middle next round and overwhelm the objective, while holding right objective and fighting for left objective.

1st ROUND
Turn 1: Bretonnia started. Did not move. 

Turn 2: Orcs held their ground. There was no points to get and I wanted to stay away in case Bretonnia gets the initiative. 

2nd ROUND
Turn 1: Double turn for orcs. Lucky me. Again. Arrowboys arrived with Big Boss who gave them +1 with Bellowing Tyrant plus special Command Ability that allows extra attacks on roll of 6 (due to +1 to hit I got rerolls on 5 and 6). Moved to middle objective and claimed it. Then last battle repeated itself: Arrowboys shot, killed 7 Knights of the Realm, last one fled. Incredible luck with dice (AGAIN!), most my rolls were 5 or 6, lots of additional attacks.

Ogors on the right got to the objective, on the left they didn't.

Turn 2: Bretonnia put Paladin next to Handgunners, Outriders to cover close to Ogors and left objective, Battlemage next to Handgunners. Handgunners shot Ogors, Paladin charged Ogors, one died, Ogors didn't do any damage against the Paladin. General moved to get Victory Points.

3rd ROUND
Turn 1: Orc won initiative again. Huskard arrived with Boarboys. I deployed all to the left side. Huskard killed the General with ice blast, Boarboys forgot to move. And lost a Victory Point with that. Ogors fought instead of retreating and lost a Victory Point due to that, didn't do any damage, Paladin killed one. Arrowboys shot Handgunners and Outriders. AGAIN, incredible dice rolls, all Outriders die, some Handgunners as well.

Turn 2: Bretonnia put Grail Knights and Paladin Standard Bearer in the middle, charged Arrowboys. Didn't do very well, but 6 Arrowboys died. I rolled for Battleshock and got 1, so no-one fled either... my luck just didn't seem to stop.

Paladin Standardbearer killed the Big Boss. And Arrowboys were zero after that. I think they did 2 wounds after that.

Paladin on foot missed ALL 5 attacks (1s and 2s...). Ogor did some damage to Paladin. 

4th ROUND
Turn 1: Orcs won again. Huskard moved to the middle and ice blasted 3 Grail Knights, Boarboys forgot to move, but opponent generously let the do it later, so they charged to Paladin and killed it. Before that Paladin missed all 5 hits (again!).

After that Bretonnia only had 2 Grails, handful of Handgunners, 2 wounded characters and no chance to get enough points for 5th round to beat the orcs.

SUMMARY: My dice rolled incredibly well. Opponents dice incredibly bad.

I would like to say that Arrowboys are crazy good with Big Boss even in unit of 20, but actually was just very lucky, I rolled mostly 5s and 6s and their victims mostly 1s, so actually I don't know.

I could not really try Boarboys with their cool retreat and attack ability.

As I hindsight I feel that Bretonnians actually deployed badly: their second reinforcments should have been Grail Knights to kick some ... before Huskard arrived. Second deployment had Outriders and two heroes, so he played all the time understrength. 

Altogether I liked the scenario a lot, much more different than others. Although 1000 points on normal sized table kind of forced us to fight for 2 objectives and "forget" the third.

The list itself seems very powerful.

Weak side is Saves: all have either 5+ or 6+, only Huskard has 4+. No magic users to give +1 to Save. Against rending units it can be awful. Maybe it would be good to change boarboys for wardokk to get some spells and probably triumph roll. 

But otherwise: first round the Arrowboys shoot at their full power and delete one unit from afar. If they are lucky, they kill another next time. After that, when there is more combat, they serve as great chaff: there are usually less of them and/or Boss has died, so they suck at killing, but 40 wounds is hard to kill even if there is no save. Huskard snipes characters or kills elite units with good save. Ogors take objectives, fast Boarboys support them where needed.

However, it is probably much weaker against armies that can alpha strike etc. Our Bretonnians don't have really competitive and tuned army, the player has mostly just bunch of cool models that he uses.

We could see the winner in the second round both times, so I would not use it again in normal friendly games. But I have no idea what kind of gamers/lists come to the tournament, so I think I'll stick to that.

And as a side note: I have no idea, how people play these games so fast: we had 1000 points, last game we played only 3 rounds and it took us 3 hours...

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