In our on-going quest to find some fastplay ECW rules we tried out Warhammer ECW at the club the other week. We played with 1,000 points a side and I (attempted to) umpire on the basis that I’d played Warhammer Ancient Battles before.
I am a big fan of WAB. The rules provide a quick, fun game for Dark Ages battles that can provide a result in under three hours. The Warhammer ECW rules are based on the same basic Warhammer mechanics of rolling to hit, wound and then armour saves. The major difference, this being a period with muskets, is that the muskets reduce your saving throw and thus only heavily armoured infantry and some cavalry actually get to save against wounds.
The system plays pretty well. It is quick and easy to understand, though I did find the rules layout slightly confusing as we didn’t find the rule for Salvo firing and trotters getting extra ranks until quite late in the game.
I wasn’t completely convinced by the mechanisms used to model the ECW style of game though.
In ECW battles, musket fire was not decisive and it came down to a push of the pike to defeat your opponent. This should be something that Warhammer handles quite well as the other systems (such as WH40K) reward melee over shooting to provide a more interesting game. (Though I have never understood an SF system where guns have a limited range and you have to melee your opponent instead of shooting him from a couple of miles away!).
In Warhammer ECW they have made the muskets too effective by reducing the saving throw if you are hit by musket fire. To balance this, each musket armed unit only has 4 shots in a game with a salvo counting as 2 shots.
I would need to play some more games to get a real feel for the rules but on this initial showing, musketry is too effective and we also found trotters too effective due to their use of pistols.
However, the game was fun, it provides a decent set of ECW skirmish rules and I’d like to play it again.