MEK OP Game Night: More D@W Playtesting

Usually I try to put up an in-character recap of the previous session, but this week the detailed roster for the player army was taken home by Walley to prep for next week. So instead I'll just provide a summary.

• We fought four battles, three of them relatively balanced. The humans won three battles, and the beastmen won one.
• In the first battle,  the player army split, and a couple companies of cavalry rode off to intercept a company of lizardmen that were getting rather close to a supply link. Both sides had roughly 30 BR, including a small dragon commanding the saurian troops. This resulted in a strong victory for the humans, at the cost of a heavy cavalry platoon.
• In the second battle, which was concurrent with the one above, the remaining infantry force attacked a mobile gnoll company investigating from the south. This featured a little under 25 BR for each side, and was again nominally balanced. This time the humans fared much worse, and were sent quickly into a rout. Without any "tough" units to take losses, the humans had to lose a larger number of units, and were on the losing end of the +2/-2 morale modifier for number of units lost.
• In the third battle, the cavalry returned to regroup with the survivors, and pursued the gnolls and their prisoners. I allowed a spy to roll as an act of "sabotage" to see if he could release some of the prisoners to fight in the battle (the non-wounded ones from routed units, presumably), but this failed. In any event, the gnollish survivors were totally outclassed by the cavalry, and were destroyed.
• In the fourth battle, two more companies of gnolls joined up to meet the humans at a bridge. A human mage went all Horatius Cocles on them, and fireballed the bridge as they were attacking. I ruled this was good for a -4 terrain penalty, forcing them to hit only on a 20. The gnolls then proceeded to roll 87 consecutive non-20 results! Outcome: Human victory with no casualties, and a river that you probably don't want to be drinking out of, any time soon.
• After cutting back on the number of recon rolls (using range modifiers) and eliminating the distance modifier, the recon system seemed to work more smoothly. I'm contemplating adding a "rumors of distant battles" trigger for long-range recon, i.e., battles count as a recon-triggering event with a longer range. That will give distant domains some chance to be aware of the outcome of a major battle, which seems like the sort of thing that would more easily attract the attention of scouts from dozens of miles away. I like the idea that a dramatic victory by an invading army puts all the other domains in the area "on notice" that something new is happening.
• Spoils/experience calculations are still a bit slow. I think it might be possible to speed them up with a standard worksheet form. It would also be nice to have a worksheet to keep track of wounded soldiers, and when they recover from wounds, as well as experience point totals for units working on Veteran status. All of this is something I could do myself... if I had more time!
• I feel like I'm gaining a better understanding of the strategy of assigning losses. There's a natural need to find balance between trying to kill only your weak units (which pushes you quickly to being forced to make morale rolls) and killing only strong units (which are valuable and can't easily be replaced, providing more staying power in one battle at the expense of hurting you in the next one).