The point cost of Bretonnia

[Melcar]

So, a friend and I have been discussing whether or not Bretonnia is any good, or more precisely whether or not they have any chance against equal opponents of other armies. I argue that they are too expensive in points cost, compared to what they offer, and I therefore think, that for them to be a viable option, that we need to house rule them down by about 20%. He argued, that the game should be played “by the book” and thus did not think anything should be changed, but that simply correct tactics needed to be employed.

So, what do you guys think? Are the Bretonnian model/units correctly priced?

 

NB: I have made a poll, for easy response, but I would love some comments and arguments too.

 

Thank you in advance

 

Cheers

[ledha]

like most of the "compendium" army, they are extremely overpriced and weak.

I'm not even sure a 2500 pts of bretonnian army could handle a "solid-but-not-meta" 2000 pts stormcast army played by someone with average tactic skills

[flamingwalnut]

One way to find out: play then a lot. Try it even, 2000 v. 2000 against a variety of lists, both casual and competitive. If it seems unbalanced, as to test your theory, drop it all by 20% and see how they fare. SCIENCE!

[rhyfelwyr]

Playing just Bretonnian is a nightmarein my opinion, and you won't get many results against any of the updated armies. The battlelines units are too few and overcosted for what they are, which isn't particularly great to begin with, and a lot of the units just don't compare with their like for like equivalents.

They're also not written with the double turn in mind, and struggle massively if you don't get it due to your units losing almost all effectiveness by not being able to charge.

Bowmen/men at arms come in unwieldy sizes of 16 models and are more costly and less effective than their free people equivalents.

There are a few decent units though (grail knights if you are playing against undead, pegasus lord) and I still enjoy playing Louen in my mixed order force, but I don't think you will get away with a full bretonnian army, unfortunately. I've gone down a fully mixed order route after they removed the paladin buff to peasantry, as they're almost completely pointless now. I'd also prefer to play the rules as officially as possible so am averse to trying to change the points and stuff. I have seen the fan compendium though and agree with almost everything they've done - would love it to be acknowledged by gw so I would use it but I known that ship has sailed!

[someone2040]

My gut feel is that they're probably overpriced and hindered by odd unit sizes that match box sizes (God knows why they decided to only do this for Bretonnians).

This largely comes down to Compendium not receiving the same point adjustment love that all the standard AoS factions did (If you notice, they still have errors like Orruk Mercenaries being 140 for 5 which is absurd, and the only points adjustments made were to increase the points on stuff that was too good). Overall I probably wouldn't expect another Compendium matched play points update unless something ends up being problematic and needs a points increase next year.

That being said, they still have some quite good units like Grail Knights, which benefit hugely from being Cavalry with innate rend. Being a complete faction also means I would probably say they're better off than some of the current factions in the game. So they're definitely not unusable, but definitely not near the top tier.

[Davariel]

It's difficult to make sweeping generalisations to an entire faction... but here goes: 

Most things were either about right or slightly overcosted under the old compendium. Then we got the new compendium which rewrote most if not all warscrolls from the ground up, and applied a huge array of changes, most of which were sadly nerfs, to just about every warscroll. However for some baffling reason, the points were not changed at all. You can pretty much draw your own conclusions at this point!

Now, that said, some things are definitely far worse off than others. Most heroes are quite reasonably priced, as are Questing/Grail Knights, and the Trebuchet (well, this one's at least not worse off than any other Artillery). However, our battleline units, along with Peasant Bowmen and Pegasus Knights, were nerfed hard, in addition to already suffering from awkward and expensive unit sizes, and are probably badly overcosted at this point. This makes a pure Bretonnian army difficult to run and a little underpowered as you suspect.

However, if you run a mixed order force utilising generic order battleline units and complement it with Bretonnian heroes and elite units,  you can still build an army that's pretty solid. Stuff like freeguild guard, liberators, maybe even Reavers would be worth a look.

Tl;dr - most Bretonnian stuff is on a spectrum between "about balanced" and "horrifically overpriced". The trick is choosing the former rather than the latter

[Melcar]

Thank you for all your answers and comments. I do agree that some units are worth more than others, but there seem to be a small consensus among survey takers, that Bretonnia is overpriced... I think that an easy fix might just be to lover the price 10%. Boring, but it might just do the trick!

Anyways, keep the comments/ opinion coming!

Thanks again!