Whoo, we're back in business! I took the liberty of rolling init for both sides, and two fun things happened:
First, Baal won init against Valanna, so Red gets to hit Blue again. I considered having my archers shoot the crap out of that disordered Light Infantry #2 in hopes of deleting it entirely, since it can't withdraw while disordered, but instead opted to surround Valanna. She's got a relatively low morale, so if I can destroy her unit, she may well flee the field. Unfortunately, my archers do extremely poorly, and the first one whiffs entirely. The second one scores two hits on the flank, which is respectable, but in moving up that far exposes him.
Baal moves up, his massive armored phalanx rolling SIX dice against a disordered enemy! He scores exactly one hit, enough to force shock! Valanna's terrible leadership, combined with the natural cowardice of light infantry, means they'll rout on anything lower than an 8.
She gets an 11. Which becomes a 6 with the modifiers, so she just scootches back a step. Baal follows. Baal's other phalanx scores exactly one hit too, but I'm waiting on Bloblah to find out if they withdraw. Ultimately, Baal's great init roll has yielded little. It probably would've been wiser to delay until after her, and then counterattack. The good news is that the Jutlanders are getting really close now! They're going to participate real soon, I can feel it!
Meanwhile, on the other side of the map, Jagtai has outrolled Tarkaun and Mennic by the grace of nuffle. That means he'll get to go first, which is a VERY interesting prospect. I might get to see those elephants charge! I can't see anything Danir or Valanna can do about that.
Let's do the math real quick: An elephant gets four tusks at 8+, and 3 tramples at 3+. On a charge, everything is +2. We'll also be charging into a flank, so that's another +2. They've got 6 AC. That means in real terms, I'm looking at four 10+ and three 5+. That means I can reasonably expect two lance hits and at least two trample hits, and like all lance charges, buying one gets you one free, so that's a total of five hits, or 20 damage. As a medium value! That's three hits away from total destruction. The second charge could well finish his unit off, if I can just find someone else to charge it.
Those elephants are getting deleted though. Mennic is going to explode elephants, because he's the Thomas Edison of his generation. They will suffer his fury knowing they did their duty though, so #worth.
Overall, I think I'm very well poised to take the match, so it looks like this will be a big success for my ego. It's also been a big success in terms of learning the rules, because we've had a number of great conversations about "wait, HOW does that work?" most of which made it onto the thread. Seven to eight more of these, and I'll feel comfortable running against my players.