Terrain:
I like the placement of terrain, I was deliberately trying to play the system and I managed to "use up" the options I didn't like on the terrain list and tried to put them out of harms way, this met with varied success as by the end there was a table that I felt gave me options and my opponent was thinking the same.
Minor point but we managed a roll of 0 on the terrain modification table (for compulsory terrain) maybe the lowest band should be <3 rather than 1,2? I think it's pretty obvious what it's meant to mean, a global "no roll can be modified below 1 or above 6" would probably be a decent catch all.
Deployment:
Couldn't find anything that prevented deploying up to the side edges, this worked IMO.
We seemed to be a mile away from each other after deployment, only 10 inches in for anything non-skirmisher caught me out. This will probably work out to be a good thing and bring back some of the maneouvre that I think DBM 3.1 has lost. Didn't come into play a great deal in this game as both sides were pretty committed to getting some troops into combat and looking at the mechanisms.
With only one read of the rules under my belt, I stopped at the appendices as I thought the fundamental rules wouldn't require anything but references into the appendices, I was definetly under the impression that BG had to be in multiple ranks, wasn't clear until I'd gone through a couple of the reference tables that I realised how much better my Cv would be in a single rank.
Movement:
Very easy to get to grips with in general, makes a big difference to have the charts in colour as I'd printed mine off in black and white thinking that the columns would be enough differentiation.
CMTs seemed clear enough, though Lh weren't quite as free and agile as I'm used to.
Shooting:
Strikes me that you can dramatically reduce the effectiveness of shooting by making sure the shooters are facing the join of two BG, noticed this on the first read but forgot about it and then saw it in practice last night. Because you need a number of hits before things potentially happen my cavalry ended up in the situation that they couldn't really do any shooting damage to the big line of men in front of them because of where a join between the enemy BG lay. It was frustrating to find that I would have gone from having zero impact to actually being dangerous despite the fact that the troops in front have only changed in groups they're assigned to (ie shooting at a wall of shield bearing infantry in both cases).
Any defensive shooting on charge? Lf armed with bows can support Hf charged by mounted but are unable to shoot if just a rear rank of their own BG, just seemed an anomaly as Lf can charge from beyond shooting range.
Combat:
Missed POA for equipment/opponent combos. Was a disappointed that my Heavily Armoured Kn didn't seem that much better than if I'd used my CvS to charge the Sp, turns out that we missed a combination of equipment/opponent that would have improved things. This corresponded to my first impression on the complexity of the POA system. I'm sure given enough time this will become much easier to use.
The impact POA table has a large '+' block on the reference sheet but not in the main rules, is this a formatting error? If not, how should it be read?
Disruption by shooting seems a major factor before charging home for the kill, this would seem to favour those CvS based armies more than the Kn armies. One option would be to screen Kn with Cv to do the shooting and let the Kn burst through for the fighting, is this the effect desired?
Do both sides check for losing bases after combat? Even after winning a combat and driving down my opponents cohesion I was the only one to lose a base. This makes the Kn very brittle but I'm assuming playtesting has balanced this vs hitting power.
Kinks:
Maybe we didn't do things right but a kink in the spearwall created multiple overlaps as the Kn contacted, this didn't help the Sp in the impact phase but made a big difference in the melee.Conclusion:
Nothing bizarre happened, after my devastation at what has happened to WWg, Lh and Lf behaved as expected when in contact and terrain, Cv were interesting in that they now shoot but not to any great effect in this case and Kn still got kinked against and ended up going into combat severely disadvantaged. I wasn't wowed in the same way I remember after my first DBM game, but I'm a different beast now so it's probably not a fair assessment (plus the rose tinted specs effect:).
Have some more experienced heads show me how it _should_ work.