Hi guys! me and my 4 friends played the hell out of battle companies, to the point of having 3 companies each and our original one's about the 1000 pnt mark (we removed the restrictions, and having a repeating ballistia in my army was fantastic.)
any way, after swamping my mates 310pnt Uruhkai hero with 14 models for 5 turns and never once winning a combat, i deiced something had to be done.
These are my alternate rules for battle companies, and yes it does borrow from 40k.
fight value- roll to fight as normal, and strike blows as normal, however in the event of a tie, all combatants get to strike blows. Treat the fight value as an initiative step (so a F6 would strike blows before F4) This does mean that two models can kill each other simultaneously. This means heroes don't auto win fights on a 6.
Defense and strength values- armor and shields no longer put up your defense, (except in one circumstance) remove these bonuses from the profile and use the 40k 'to wound' table instead.
Armor save- each time a model takes a wound, you make a roll against it's armor save to see if it saves the wound. (fate and fury saves may be taken after) models with no armor (like uruhkai bizerkers) have a 6+ armor save, models with armor have a 5+ models with armor and a shield (with out a bow or cross bow) have a 4+ models with heavy armor have a 4+ and with a shield (with out a bow or a cross bow) 3+, get the idea? you cannot have an armor save better than 3+ if it would get past it (dwarven heavy armor + shield) then you may add 1 to your defense. (note horses do not come with armor nor do wargs, but armored horses do and have a 5+ but Def4)
shielding- at the start of a combat a player may chose to shield, (if that model has a shield) this means you get to roll an extra die for your "to fight" roll off, if you win, you may not strike blows, how ever if you lose, since your model was focused on parrying blows, you improve your armor save by 1, this is the only way to get a 2+ save. (horses do not benefit from shielding.
Note on dwarves: across the board increase their base points value by 2, and heroes add another 5 Pnt (however they max out at 110pnt rather than 105pnt), this counter balances how bloody hard they are to kill. also, no they may not take a second Def upgrade, and it costs 4Ip to roll on the influence table.
A note on heroes: The fight value is not incorporated into the points cost until it is 4 or more, we felt it was unfair that your main guy gets instantly over shadowed by one of the elite solders that gets turned into a hero.
as far as we can tell, all other armies are balanced, and we felt a lot better about ourselves because we where wounding so often, sure they got saved but hey, our guys weren't so fregin useless at killing each other (as per the regular rules).