Cities of Sigmar : Lists and synergies tactica

[zilberfrid]

48 minutes ago, Trayanee said:

How are you guys equipping your freeguild guards? I suppose their advantage lies in numbers so I will probably be taking 40 of them.  With halbers they can do some serious damage , spears offer mostly range but I am not sure those extra attacks from second line are worth -1 to wound and no rend. With swords they finally start to look like a guard but seem to me mostly harmless (intended) to anything with a good save.

With staggered lines, your second line would be attacking anyway, it's the third that needs reach. Technically, you don't even need staggered lines because the bases are 25mm and an inch is bigger, but staggered lines make it clearer.

Models that are there but can't reach the enemy don't care what the statline is, they don't do anything.

For me, it's sword shield if all they need to do is tarpit, and halberd if my killing power is lacking. I have one unit of both at the moment, I don't think the spears are worth it, to be honest, even with the vs charge bonus. Now if the damage characteristic were improved vs charge, that would be different.

[Maturin]

@Trayanee I've got 50 painted halberds guards so I won't be touching that unit and anyway I think it's a very good one on the offense.
If you want something more tanky, I'd look towards dwarfs units or Phoenix Guards, although they're more expensive.

[Trayanee]

Just now, Maturin said:

@Trayanee I've got 50 painted halberds guards so I won't be touching that unit and anyway I think it's a very good one on the offense.
If you want something more tanky, I'd look towards dwarfs units or Phoenix Guards, although they're more expensive.

Thanks. I would like my army to stay human-only with maybe some SCE conversions, so I will probably go with 40 halberds and later maybe a smaller unit with shields.

[Trayanee]

22 minutes ago, zilberfrid said:

With staggered lines, your second line would be attacking anyway, it's the third that needs reach. Technically, you don't even need staggered lines because the bases are 25mm and an inch is bigger, but staggered lines make it clearer.

Models that are there but can't reach the enemy don't care what the statline is, they don't do anything.

For me, it's sword shield if all they need to do is tarpit, and halberd if my killing power is lacking. I have one unit of both at the moment, I don't think the spears are worth it, to be honest, even with the vs charge bonus. Now if the damage characteristic were improved vs charge, that would be different.

Yes, The spears dont really look tempting. I mean, why bonus to hit for a unit which already has access to it from different sources. It could have been rend when being charged. It even makes sense...

[zilberfrid]

1 hour ago, Trayanee said:

Yes, The spears dont really look tempting. I mean, why bonus to hit for a unit which already has access to it from different sources. It could have been rend when being charged. It even makes sense...

Yeah, rend would also be quite good, or even wound. As longs charging headlong into spears sounds like a bad idea, which to hit does not provide. Note that the bonus does not care whether or not the charging unit attacked the guard or not.

[Maturin]

I edited the first psot of the thread. In the near future, I'd like to set up here a kind of sticky and what's good in CoS, in order for players to not have to scroll through 100 pages or more!

 

[Maturin]

So, tell me guys if i'm wrong but, in the COS BT it says :

"If a model already has a city keyword on its warscroll, it cannot gain another one. You can still include the model in your army, but you cannot use the allegiance abilities for its city."

How do you guys understand that ? To me it looks like it's possible to have let's say a Hammerhal army, with a Living city battalion.
Your hammerhal units would play as Hammerhal, you'd have all tha abilities from the allegiance and if you had a batallion from another then, you could play those units as CoS, reap the benefits of  your batallion but not have access to anything partaining to the abilities of the cities battalion.

If you think I'm wrong please prove me why. So far, I think Cos is not as flexible as I would have liked it to be, battalions are meh, except one or two, SCE units aren't really fitting rulewise (the 1/4 limit is ok, but they should have given the possibility to SCE heroes to buffs COS units) and the limited choice of allies is disapointing (No priest for the flaggelants ? Reaaaaallly) .

Edited October 9, 2019 by Maturin

[Zanzou]

51 minutes ago, Maturin said:

So far, I think Cos is not as flexible as I would have liked it to be

This was my discovery as well.  The flexibility it appears to have is deceptive.

[Arkhanist]

1 hour ago, Maturin said:

"If a model already has a city keyword on its warscroll, it cannot gain another one. You can still include the model in your army, but you cannot use the allegiance abilities for its city."

This is similar to wording in other battletomes. It's so that if there is a named hero in future with a fixed city, you can still take it but it won't benefit from the city allegience rules that apply to the rest of the army, or its existing fixed allegience.

This is akin to how many named SCE have hammers of sigmar on the warscroll, but can still be taken in a SCE army with a different stormhost allegience. They just don't benefit from that stormhost specific allegience abilities (as they don't have the necessary keyword) and also don't benefit from their fixed stormhost allegience abilities either due the last part of the quoted rule.

It's a bit moot at the moment as there aren't any named CoS units with fixed city allegience, but who knows what the future holds; Aventis Firestrike could conceivably gain the Hammerhal keyword, for example, or we could see new named heros.

1 hour ago, Maturin said:

to me it looks like it's possible to have let's say a Hammerhal army, with a Living city battalion.
Your hammerhal units would play as Hammerhal, you'd have all tha abilities from the allegiance and if you had a batallion from another then, you could play those units as CoS, reap the benefits of  your batallion but not have access to anything partaining to the abilities of the cities battalion.

This wouldn't work, in matched play anyway. The first is how you pick your army allegience, just before the section you quote.

"When you choose a Cities of Sigmar army, you must give it a city keyword from the list below. All Cities of Sigmar units in your army gain that keyword..."

Since all the CoS units in your army (at the moment) don't have a fixed city keyword, this rule will force all your units to have the Hammerhal keyword, so they then cannot take Living City. Since none of your units are Living City, you can't then take the Living City battalion as that requires Living City keyword units. I presume you can't take them as allies either, since they're not in the Allies list (last page) unless there's some rule that allows you to ally units in from your own book I don't know about? (still fairly new to AoS)

If there was a Living City battalion you could take that used units with fixed Living City allegience on their warscrolls or something similar, then they wouldn't benefit from either set of city allegience abilities - because they lack the Hammerhal keyword in the example, and the last part of the fixed city rule blocks them using Living City too. They would benefit from the generic CoS allegience abilities though such as empowered endless spells, and their battalion rules.

 

[Maturin]

@Arkhanist Thanks for your reply mate.

It's a shame, it's not possible, it would have brung more flexibility to CoS, for now I really feel it's lackluster in that department. Fixed battalions for cities, that sucks, and not being able to bring something from another city, well, let's say its too bad, that would have opened a lot of possibilities!

[Arkhanist]

@MaturinDepends on perspective I guess! As a old WFB dwarf player who was distinctly unimpressed with the old lackluster hafhearted duardin allegience abilities (and how all the old war machines units got hived off to ironweld) I've rather changed my opinion on CoS somewhat after being entirely hacked off that they squatted a bunch of my remaining units. Fortunately I also have a bunch of old freeguild models, so can substitute those for my lost thunderers etc. And many of my squatted models were from marauder minitures, so they have done loyal service over many years and deserve a retirement, they're nearly in a different scale to current models. Some may still return as longbeards with some greenstuff!

I do think it would have been a lot better if they'd gone all the way to making CoS heroes buff all Cities units a lot more, instead of sticking to their old racial factions only, and having Stormcast be able to buff cities units would have been really good too.

I can understand your disappointment, I am still sad at what's been lost and what could have been; I keep looking at SCE units in particular and wanting to include them (call me a sucker, but I do like the aesthetic as a small amount of elite allies) but can't quite justify it yet.

That all said, there is still a fair bit of flexibility with different sections of the army that can buff each other, and there is a LOT of warscrolls you can take. I think they intended the buffs to come from city command abilities, spells and city allegiences themselves, rather than warscroll hero buffs and were worried about that being too good and allowing some stupidly overpowered combos. As it is, I think CoS has a number of competitive builds in it, and depending upon which city you take (and units) you can build some really very different style armies, much more so than say stormhosts or other equivalent abilities, olr keep the option of the flavour of your old army if you choose. And there's very few objectively bad choices, they've done a decent job of balancing units across the book so the options are strong in different ways, mostly.

So we could have hoped for more (as we often can from GW!), and I do hope the strong sales of the book encourage them to make the models more easily available again, but I've actually unboxed my old WFB models and started painting a whole new scheme with some previously never used models, and intend to repaint some (very) old models in my new scheme, and will probably buy some 'new to me' models from the tail end of 8th like a hurricanum and convert it to make it more duardiny. I've even started on some fluff for my own City and scheme, as I'm not sure yet whether to play as Tempest's Eye, Greywater Fastness or Living City. Each has some very useful buffs that tie in nicely to a majority duardin/freeguild army and I don't want to be locked into one choice yet, yet want to start painting now! Given I've sat out AoS entirely so far as I didn't want to buy a whole new army from scratch, that's got to be a good thing.

Edited October 10, 2019 by Arkhanist