And up now are the first games for my mostly-Mantic, mostly-Free Dwarfs! For better or for worse, outside of support slots, I can’t swing a ton of variability yet, so the builds are primarily “what I had done”.
I don’t feel like have a ton of valuable insight to offer up yet. Generally-speaking I’ve been trying a ranged / combined arms approach with the army, looking to add some damage at long range early, waver opposing units for tempo and positional advantage in the midgame, and then just try my best as the scenario concludes. We’ve given a good and competitive game every time, but the collection is stretched a bit thin right now. I guess generally:
Rangers are indeed a lot of fun, but have had some tough games and hard situations. They have been useful in each game, but I am no where near using them competently, let alone to their full potential!
Rifle Horde has been great and Piercing 2 useful, but positioning is important since they have Reload. I have done ok at this so far, but they are usually pretty central, which can be a little dangerous.
Brock Riders are very scary, but need protection and support.
Ironguard are strong, but regiments are still quite breakable, especially with multi-charges, and despite the extra attacks, which I do like, they aren’t breaking much on their own, and really want a Bane Chant in order to grind and push back better.
Berserker infantry are fun, and good instigators, but also really want Bane Chant to deal any damage. An infantry-heavy list with them and Shieldbreakers could be a lot of fun though.
The old, metal Berserker Lord on Giant Brock is pretty iconic for the army, but I have not been using him well. I think he’d do much better if I had some Stoneclaws or more Brocks to have more speed. Maybe someday!
I have been very impressed by your Dwarf play, you’re really achieving that tempo control goal and removing far more units each game than I expect, with what feels like a rather unassuming toolbox army. I was pumping my fist for you several times in that Xirkaali game in particular
As for the Undead, loved the zombie troll game, it felt like everything worked and the army performed as designed and as the narrative suggests, with undead of all sizes swarming the poor beleaguered men. Another standout game, extra cheers for that one
Well done! Nicely thematic overrun and close in. The first game an example of dispersion of force from your opponent, though; I think they went too wide and splitting their high value units between the two flanks meant they couldn’t win either. In the second game it seemed that the shooting wasn’t brought to bear as much as earlier games.
Thanks for the reports. Makes me keen to get my undead out, though I’m not playing much KoW in general. I’ve only managed to get my (3) armies out for 1 game each, of 4th.
I’m also undecided on the barrow wraith. Seems cool thematically though.
I haven’t played much 4th, but still like the Revenant King with surge.
The price of the Reveneant is not nice; but having an individual that can take a charge, do a damage and isn’t yielding is nice. If I want to take a warlord I replace the Revenant King, though.
Wraiths are definitely not chaff. Too expensive, but also too useful as an all round support unit, that may (or may not) block in a chaff-like manner eventually.
The rather variable durability on troops is very thematic for ghosts. I have found that generally troop can stand up to low quality units, but pop against the good stuff. Luck swings it both ways though.
10 attacks with CS (1) and strider are enough to make a difference, even with Me 4+.
While the troops’ base helps them hop lines and squeeze into uncomfortable positions, the regiment only needs to recover 1 damage to be as durable as ironguard.
I forgot to say, the Rev King with surge on a pony is IMO legitimately good, and will be even better with some orders worth shouting. His rally is the cherry on top of that sundae that I’m always forgetting about.
I like to say that you have to match your playstyle to dwarfs, they’re too stubborn to get tossed into a different style.
You started with the playstyle down, but then started spreading out in the other two games.
Dwarfs need to stand together and plan ahead.
(all your units need support, so don’t go to wide, and start playing the scenario at deployment).
Good to see I’m not the only one who likes second line shieldbreaker regiment and rangers!
I like the new ranger rules overall piercing, feint, ironwatch keyword), but the change to pathfinder is uncomfortable.
It has been a bonkers week so apologies for not keeping up. Cheers, and thanks gents, I appreciate the wonderfully kind words! Plenty of things to improve on still, but I am immensely happy with my recent games here.
I keep forgetting to revisit the Revenant King. I’ve gotten good use out of him before, but he’s just so expensive at 180. He and the similar KoM Hero both caught my eye early on, but just feel weird, and I think it is some sticker shock still. I think expanded Orders will make both more attractive, and I think DarkBlack has the right idea, slotting him instead of an even more expensive Warlord. He could fit in nicely as 4th character in a more Champion-focused game, like I’ve been trying with the Nerco and ASBs. I will keep him in mind, but my Undead Dragon has yet to see the table at all, so it might be a while before I circle back to him.
Yes, I basically immediately ate my words regarding the Shieldbreakers. They’ve been very nice, and have gotten multiple charges off at this point, and have have really just surprised my with their reliability. I’m excited to hobby some more up!
Rangers too have been put in some rough situations, but have also been generally impressive, which makes me really happy. I have not gotten to use Feint yet (I was really hoping for a lucky break against the Lionsnarls), but they’ve been doing good work themselves so far. Agreed on the Pathfinder weirdness – I still don’t have a good feel for it nowadays. I think Scouting the Rangers into terrain is still great vs other shooters, and good if I need to try and bog something down, but it might not be the go-to move now since it so greatly diminishes their melee effectiveness if I need to press outward. Overall, the Rangers have been fun but I am still sorely lacking in experience.
So far, I would agree! This is good advice. We’ve experimented a bit with battle groups, but with the lack of speed, playing more compactly has felt much better. My default approach is to focus on 2/3rds of the board and play for narrow wins, which I think fits the Dwarfs, so I’ll try to double-down on that approach more often than not in their future games.
I had the pleasure of exploring the Fracture update a tiny bit this weekend! We were both exploring new things. In the end, my opponent’s Phoenixes did not quite deliver, and his dice went cold at a critical moment, allowing the Brute spam I brought to overwhelm and envelope the Basileans.
The Herd have definitely seen a lot of changes over the last few months. Albeit with only one game in, I think they (and the Forces of Nature) are in a more fair spot, though yowza, there are indeed tons and tons of changes and rejuggling, and it is a bit frustrating that none of those made it into the initial 4E list to bridge the gaps between releases go a little more smoothly.
Guardian Brutes are back as a distinct unit and with yet another stat-line overhaul. They hit hard but feel more fair, being in the support slot, like the similar-looking Abyssal Molochs. I wish they still had Brutal for their namesake, but they are still around and still very strong!
Avatar of the Father is back! And he’s got Fly, which looked doubtful based on the spoilers. Previously fliers really wanted other fliers, in order to maximize the efforts and thought needed by your opponent to mitigate all the various angles. I was doubtful I’d get much mileage out of him, but I protected him well, and while he didn’t carry the game for points routed or anything, he was a massive headache for my opponent. He’s a nice centerpiece for me, and a good distraction carnifex.
The Core for the Herd got a lot of returning “new” options, and while neither the Tribal Hunters nor Centaur Striders are amazing, both are welcome and design-wise I really like the Centaurs in core, even if they aren’t amazing cavalry.
The unique spell “Life Awakening” targets difficult terrain, which is a cool design choice, and it has some neat effects, but is a little weird to use. I think it is probably best for trying to swing a fight in the woods your way, giving your unit Barkskin and maybe slipping a point of damage or two into the opposing unit. Definitely neat, but more testing is needed.
The new generic commands are meh (probably as they should be), but the new army commands are nice. I liked more reliable 4+ Striding command, especially since the Xirkaali just do it naturally, but fiiine. The more interesting Command looks to be “Entanglement of Thorns” though, which prevents enemy units that rout it from reforming. It did a lot of work in this game slowing things down, and there seems to be a lot of clever tricks you can do with this.
It was a great afternoon trying out some new things! Thanks for the game!
Great to see the blue Herd back on the table! I’ve been jonesing to get my green Herd out and about too, with the Father no less Few things:
Good to see Guardian Brutes still get the lead out! Do note that they’re monstrous infantry now, so you’ll need to plop those units on 150x100 trays Yea, annoying to be sure.
I was pretty sure Entanglement of Thorns would be a game changer, nice to have you putting that theory into practice. I feel like it makes any sort of trap setting particularly brutal, and critters double plus good (apart from being slow).
Speaking of commands, Nature lost its heal command in favor of the more interesting Blessing of the Lady (barkskin N). It was probably bad that every Druid would spend most games double tapping heal
Thanks for setting me straight @Boss_Salvage! I completely missed the Brutes getting resized. Sheesh. That is definitely going to be a pain.
I must’ve been on auto-pilot with the Command Heals… keeping the same name didn’t help my brain and the failures to get them should have clued me in, not to mention casting the command correctly 3 times in Round 1… Yeah, probably a good thing the flat heal went away, and Barkskin seem much more thematic.
The Entanglement is super-strong. Good for chaff like the Critters, but potentially useful in really any combat.
Well played! Great use of a flyer and good job screening your hitters.
Thanks for the write up and showing the new commands at work.
I understand your frustration with the list changing so much. Hopefully it’ll stay this way now.
Makes me nervous of investing into any armies before their books come out. I was already holding off on any new dwarfs or undead until I see what Mantic releases though.
You did this super well. It’s going to make post combat reforms much more important after clearing chaff. It’s going to take a few reps to come up with a good strategy against it.
It is probably (depending on if it should work for the next close combat phase of your opponent, no matter if it is a new round) one of the best commands.
Against slow opponents you can hinder them to go where the action happens, because they will be stopped and slowed down further.
And because FoN have medium (Herde is normally speed 6, but doesn’t have much quicker units in numbers) or slow (shambling) speed, many opponents will charge you. But with critters or any other chaff in front, you can manage to charge them.
In general it is very useful because you can hinder your opponent to score in scenarios like Domination to get a horde in an important zone, you could stop units to get close to an objective or advance with a loot token,…
@TastyBagel You did use it properly so far I would say. If you master the use, it is a strong command.
Cheers, thanks @Sam_Urai! I appreciate another thoughtful player stopping by to comment.
The order is indeed strong, and I am eager to try it out again soon. I am also trying to hobby up a Great Totem quick – that Advanced Deployment rules looks like it could be a lot of fun for the Herd / Nature as well. The army lost a lot of speed, but has gained a lot of clever positioning tricks now, that should really reward clever play.
That’s unfortunately where I am at. Even with the Fracture revisions, my Herd still lost ~3,000 points of stuff (Lycans, Harpies, etc), which is about 1/3 of the collection. Slots make about another 3,000 of it much harder to use. It’s a bummer. Obviously still plenty to play with, but Battalions and such are really warping things now across all my armies.
A terrible scenario for my opponent, especially I got to go first. He played well, but the Free Dwarfs had lots of advantages with hot dice exacerbating things. Ironclad Troops were all-stars though, mucking things up well and setting up some good fights for me.
A very tough game against the new Abyssals and the super-strong Abyssal Guard hordes. I deployed a bit poorly, but was able to leverage my shooting for some lucky wavers to keep the tempo going, and luck kept the game competitive despite my errors.
For the Abyssals, it was really neat playing with and then against them with just a day in between. The new Command Orders have a lot of utility, and Dark Pit is a lot of fun. There could be some play with Flame Bearers, but that seems like a trap, as all the shooting for the army is very short range, and not particularly great. The Pit seems better used alongside of messy, grinding combats, helping you and your regenerating units break the enemy line.
Abyssal Guard with the 2H swap for CS2 is absurdly strong. I don’t think they should have an innate CS1, personally. Getting Regen 4+ on them should be very doable, and with the limits on units engaging facing, these hordes are going to be absolute beasts in any melee grinds.
Tortured Souls got an overhaul. They work better with the Betrayal Command Orders, and got Strider, but worse in a lot of other ways. They felt like worse Wraiths? I think there could be play for them, but more testing will be needed.
Abyssal Horsemen lost Fearless and gained Headstrong. In 3E they just had Fury for a long time, so this isn’t too big a change. However, coupled with them becoming all TC Cavalry, they are pretty basic cavalry right now, and I’ve been struggling to get multiple clean charges out of my cavalry regiments.
I think Warlocks are better than Efreets for casters and Champions. Efreets should be in a different slot, or get Inspiring innately, or be able to drop Fireball, in my opinion.
And then for the games with the (mostly) Free Dwarfs, I enjoyed the basic army approach. Lots of infantry blocks and just trying to play a good, basic game was good fun.
Ironclad Troops found uses in both games, and really shone against the Abyssal Dwarfs, as we were able to chaff them up relentlessly. I thought four might be a bit much, but I think I’m going to keep this for now.
Ironwatch units struggled a bit, and I’m still learning to not deploy my shooters centrally.
Rangers were still a lot of fun! The Ironwatch are ok, but these are much more fun, and I’m finding my legs a bit more with Pathfinder now thanks to this unit. It is not really an “offensive” ability anymore, but still a nice positional aid. The Rangers are still a high-skill high-ceiling unit,
Flame Priest, Warsmiths, and Stone Priests are all great Champions options, albeit for different unit types, and the Dwarfs are a bit spoiled in this slot. I’m still not sure what fancy spell would work best with the Stone Priest(s) though, so we’ll continue to explore.
My brain was a little mushy by the end of things, but it was a great bunch of games! I had a goal of 39 games played by the end of the year, and have been lucky enough to have smashed through that back in June. I’ll hopefully have many more to share by the end of the year!
Abyss is feeling like the next bandwagon army, and you can be sure there are going to be some painful guard horde spam lists in our pre-Arrogance future at the very least (if I had to guess: warlord + 2 warlocks + 3 guard hordes + 1-2 gargoyle troops + 1-2 moloch regs + lower abyssal regiments to fill). I realized today that I’m around two dozen games in with Abyss this edition and making peace with playing the army - and looking forward to the extremely fluffy demon vs demon mirror match
Not done with reading all reports so far, but regarding Tortured Souls: I don’t like them now. In Edition 3 there was always a slot for one troop or regiment in my army.
But with the rules now I don’t consider to take them. There need to be somebody first showing me why you should take them.
And some words towards Abyssal Guard: CS2 with potential 4+ regeneration? I have to play 2 hordes (one with Brew of Sharpness) and a Rregiment of them as long as it’s possible. I do play Elves myself and used 2 hordes and 2 regiments of comparable Palace Guard, but Elite seems to be rubbish compared to regeneration and CS 2.
I do like to see there is somebody else switching armies weekly.
Thanks for the report!
The later in a game the winner is decided the more fun it is.
The change to tortured souls is weird.
Translating the concept to the table and keeping them balanced appears to be an ongoing challenge, since they were released.
The efreet without fireball sounds wrong.
It’s a defining characteristic of the unit and probably in the lore.
I don’t think taking an eftreet is worthwhile if you’re not leaning into fireball, though. So if you’re putting another spell on, then not one that competes with fireball. Maybe something early game like veil of shadows?
In 4th edition; having inspiring and/or being a support option sounds like a better fit.
Commands are probably more useful than extra spells, though.
That’s great to hear, I’m glad that your KoW community is going strong!
That’s over 10x the number of games of 4th that I’ve played though, and I appear to have missed some kind of update; so what any comment I might have is getting more dubious.
Agree. I was excited to return to the army, but with Rob picking them up competitively and another player playing them religiously on UB with hopes to build them on the table eventually too, I don’t know how often mine are actually going to be hitting the table. The Abyssal Guard hordes are just such strong brawlers right now. Getting them in hordes are fine, and something I had long-desired for them, comparing them to the similar Elf Palace Guard back in the day, but I feel like the CS1 base for the unit is too strong here. Time will tell I guess. Teynne is an odd addition to the new army list (not sure why he is an individual… making him Monster-sized to replace the old, now-voided Manifestation would have been a better choice imo), but the Searing Pain to stop healing / Regeneration may help in the mirror. Hmmm. That might be something for me to explore. I feel like many of my Abyssal lists are just going to struggle against Rob’s honed tournament list though, and I’ll try to avoid too many mirror-matches.
Yeah… Big Fireball has been the Efreet’s identity for quite a while now. With mandatory Fireball, Veil of Shadows could be a better spell, like you suggest. I still think they need some tweak though to be really useful. The Fiend (and their Fireball) was stripped of Inspiring and moved to Support already, so imo making Efreet Inspiring or giving them the choice to drop Fireball and pick up a big Arcane Library spell instead seems like a useful tweak. A powerful solo caster isn’t too big a step from powerful solo Fireball caster.
Yeah, my three favorite units for the Abyssals back in 3E were Abyssal Guard, Tortured Souls, and the mighty Chroneas. As Darkblack notes, balancing the Souls has been a wild ride (iirc they were CS2, Fly 10, and Shambling in 2e?). The Tortured Souls just slotted in nicely to any 3E list for a while, but I have 6 troops of them sitting around and not sure how to use them now, especially with slot competition complicating things. The changes are … weird. They are a much weaker unit, but have some (slightly) better synergies within the army now, if one uses Commands. They are very awkward, but I’ll continue to experiment with them, and share insight as I am able to.
Cheers, all! I had a much-needed extended weekend away from it all, and it was wonderful to come back to some nice positivity and a good discussion.
He really really feels like his rules were written for a Large Infantry warlord meant to serve as a dark foil to the Basilean angel warlords, which would have been interesting and a worthy addition to the existing warlords, especially the many individuals. I’m genuinely curious if they got the model back from the printer sized incorrectly and changed his height and designation to match it
Few things:
Yea, annoying to be sure.
