I'm playing against Chaos on Friday. I think the mortar is not worth its points, he has small but tough units. The cannon would be a nice thing to have on the list but in order to get that I need 50 points.
On option would be to drop the five huntsmen and use the extra points to add a couple of greatswords to the list. On the other hand they could cause some damage with bows to warhounds (there will be 2-3 units of them) or even to marauder horsemen (they're going to be immune to panic though). They would also be good diverters if I could use them. Maybe I'll keep them on the list just to learn to play with them. Too many times they're helped the enemy to overrun into my lines and caused panic to my troops
The easiest way to get 50 points would be to drop one Divination spell from the wizard. With three spells I'll definitely get the signature spell (makes my unit hard target and distracting, 6" bubble is 10+ to cast).
Then there are two spells that are good in killing monsters. There might be plenty of tough targets but unfortunately they'll most likely have armour. So the spell 5 (2D6/3D6 hits with ap (2) wounding on 4+) would be nice, but spell 1 (D3/D6 automatically wounding hits, no ward or regeneration saves) not so much.
Spell 2 (+2 WS, +2I) would be nice but I have greatswords.
Spell 3 (normal version: re-roll to hits in close combat and shooting / buffed version: 6" aura re-roll hits in close combat) is a nice spell both for my infantry and of course for the helblaster! Re-rolling to hit with helblaster sounds almost too good to be true!
Spell 4 (stubborn and immune to psychology) is nice but again the greatswords are stubborn already and my smaller unit will be slaughtered pretty fast. The only unit that would benefit from this would be the spearmen - the enemy is not going to kill 20 of them in one turn and then I could flank them. But I suppose there are better spells in this game.
Spell 6 makes the life difficult for the enemy unit preventing it from moving/charging/casting spells/shooting with a roll of 6 on D6. Every character adds +1 to the throw. This would be a horrible spell against me with 3 characters in the Greatsword unit! But unless he has all his eggs in the same basket I'm not going to use this spell.
The attribute (use 3 dice to Ld test and remove the highest) is nice for my flagellants far away from the general to combat reform or pass frenzy tests. But otherwise I'm using the order to get my troops to stay in line.
So with possibly two spells with 6" aura combat buffs I'm going to place my two infantry blocks close to another and place my wizard in the spearmen unit behind them. This way I could really get some good stuff going in close combat. And the wizard would stay alive a bit longer than he usually does in my games.
In my opinion all the Divination spells are pretty useful for empire (not the spell nr 6 so much) and I like them quite a lot. Maybe I should drop something else to be able to take four spells. For example the Shielding scroll (4+ ward against a spell) and Engineers repeater handgun. Hmm...
