Cinquecento League Battle Report: Dwarven Mountain Holds vs Chaos Daemons
Sometimes a battle report writes itself. Sometimes it takes a bit of prodding, a heroic reconstruction effort, and a healthy amount of self-inflicted dwarfen shame. This one is definitely the second kind.
In our Cinquecento league game for Warhammer: The Old World, End3r’s Dwarven Mountain Holds marched out onto the plains of Northern Kossuthia to face Chaos Daemons. On paper, it sounded like a proper Old World classic: stubborn short-legged warriors, gyrocopters buzzing around the flanks, and a wall of crossbow bolts darkening the sky. In practice… well, let’s just say the dice, deployment, and several tactical decisions had other plans.
The armies meet
The Dwarfs spent a long time thinking about deployment. Every unit had to matter, every angle had to be perfect, every charge lane had to be respected. The army’s advisor, the illustrious Great Khan Gee Petee, reportedly stressed just how important positioning would be, and how one bad charge could undo months of preparation.
Spoiler: the Dwarfs deployed tragically.
Instead of going for a straightforward brawl in the middle — which might also have ended in a massacre, just more quickly — the Dwarfs tried to play a more careful game.
- Rangers with the General took position on a hill, hoping to rain crossbow fire onto the enemy.
- In front of them stood the main combat block: sixteen Warriors with great weapons, extremely eager for battle and apparently so eager that they left their shields at home.
- On the flanks, “strategically” placed, were two Gyrocopters: one regular and one Scout Gyrocopter.
Across the field, the Daemons did what Daemons do best: they advanced immediately and made the whole board feel smaller.
The trap that wasn’t
Early on, the Dwarfs actually managed to set up something that looked promising. The Flesh Hounds were boxed in from multiple sides and shot at with basically everything available. It looked like exactly the kind of focused effort the Dwarfs needed.
Unfortunately, the daemon doggos simply refused to die.
That failure mattered right away. Instead of being removed, the Flesh Hounds charged the nearest Scout Gyrocopter. On the other side of the field, a unit of Bloodletters of Khorne, together with their general, did much the same to the regular Gyrocopter.
Meanwhile, the Chaos Furies sat on a hill and quietly collected easy points while snickering at the unfolding disaster.
A very dwarfen overcorrection
At this point the Dwarfen Warriors attempted a carefully practiced move: a reform and march with a pivot in front of the Bloodletters, trying to line up properly and avoid having the fleeing Gyrocopter run through them and cause panic.
Which would have been a very sensible concern.
Except, as was discovered too late, Gyrocopters do not cause panic when they flee.
So the Warriors performed a neat little maneuver to solve a problem that did not actually exist.
That feels very on-brand for Dwarfs, honestly.
The grind in the center
The regular Gyrocopter didn’t last long, and before long the Bloodletters charged into the Warriors. That became the key fight of the game.
At first, things looked decent for the Dwarfs. The Warriors absorbed the charge and swung back with their great weapons, cutting down several daemons. For a moment, it looked like the plan might still come together.
Then the Chaos dice woke up.
The Bloodletters started chewing through the Warriors at an alarming rate. The Dwarfen line, which had looked solid at the start, began to collapse under the pressure. And when the Furies joined from the flank, that was effectively the end of the central fight. The unit was shattered, leaving only a lone standard bearer fleeing the carnage.
The hill that achieved very little
While the center was imploding, the Dwarfen General and Rangers on the hill kept up their shooting, mostly into the Furies on the opposing hill.
Sadly, this also failed to make much of an impact.
At the same time, down south, the Flesh Hounds and the Scout Gyrocopter stayed locked in a weirdly inconclusive combat for longer than expected, neither side doing enough damage to decisively finish the other. It was one of those side-fights that feels almost comedic while the rest of the army is actively losing the battle elsewhere.
The final gamble
With defeat looming and the ancestors presumably shouting unhelpful but traditional advice over the battlefield, the Dwarfs made one last desperate play.
The General left safety and moved out in front of the advancing Bloodletters and Furies. It was a bold move. Or a pointless one. Depends who you ask.
To be fair, he did manage to put wounds onto the enemy with his impressively runed, fire-spitting pistol. So it wasn’t entirely for nothing.
But it wasn’t enough.
The standard bearer escaped. The Scout Gyrocopter finally went down. The General died on the field. The Rangers failed to bring down the Daemonic Herald. And despite the Dwarfs still having a numerical edge by the end of the final round — as captured in the dwarfen scribe’s illustration below — the result was not close where it mattered.
Final result
Chaos Daemons 5 – 1 Dwarven Mountain Holds
A total defeat for the Dwarfs.
Painful, but educational — which is a very hobby-blog way of saying we got smashed but at least we can talk about it afterwards.
Post-game thoughts
The biggest immediate takeaway from End3r was the Gyrocopter setup. The Scout Gyrocopter just didn’t really justify itself here:
- no bomb,
- underwhelming shooting if it takes the multiple shots penalty,
- nowhere safe to sit on such a small table,
- and it ends up being chargeable almost immediately anyway.
That makes a return to two regular Gyrocopters sound very likely. At least they can drop bombs and breathe fire before getting dragged down, even if, as this game showed, that still won’t necessarily impress Flesh Hounds all that much.
Still, that’s league play in a nutshell. We test ideas, we make mistakes, we discover rules interactions after making plans around the wrong assumptions, and occasionally we hand the forces of Chaos a very convincing win.
And honestly? That’s part of the fun.
If this battle taught us anything, it’s that in small-format The Old World games, deployment mistakes hurt, daemon units punish hesitation, and Dwarfs need every inch of efficiency they can get.
We’ll be back with more from the Cinquecento league soon — hopefully with fewer tragic deployments and slightly less heroic self-sabotage.