Arkhanist

Given it's not been corrected in the FAQ, and that everyone else I've seen comment concurs, yes, the 1 in 4 unit rules applies separately to each type. The legal extreme is thus 1/4 CoS, 1/4 SCE, 1/4 KO and 1/4 allies. So from that perspective, a quick count of your units says that that's a legal list. Only allies have the points limit in addition, and you're just below that; with 2/13 stormcast, 3/13 KO and 2/13 allies, each is below 1/4.

When I dent the backlog a bit, I'm really tempted to steal an idea for a flying hurricanum with thermalrider cloak that's particularly fitting for Tempest's Eye.

That's correct; you can add a commander to a steam tank for 50 pts which makes it a hero plus a couple of abilities; and if one is your general then steam tanks become battleline. This also means a tank with commander can take an artefact - like the thermalrider cloak. Flying steam tank! They are great models and a classic unit. The rules are not trash tier, but general consensus is that they're not particularly competitive for the points. So definitely 👍 for casual games, less so for competitive cut-throat games.

Basically, yes. Since CoS has special (overall more beneficial rules) for our 'not-allies' like stormcast that means they can't be taken as conventional allies, we can't take the battalions, even though we can take the units that make them up and they have the CoS keyword! But yes, we're not the first tome to have issues with battalions because of that particular FAQ. Beasts of Chaos battalions was a mess until they fixed them as a special case in their Errata; it's still fairly broken for several Death factions if I remember correctly.

Ello There's a lot of scope for your own background in Cities, and a bunch of us are doing 'counts as' cities already, so no issues on that front - the more the merrier! Cities is also one of the most conversion-friendly armies, both because of the relatively 'low fantasy' models, and the scope for your own backstory. In terms of female models the aelves have by far the best range, as Aelfric lays out; either already female units, or since they share much the same bodies in dual-kits, you can swap in the existing plastic female aelf heads on pretty much any aelf and have it work. The next best is stormcast eternals - Sequitor and Evocator multipart kits come with 2 in 5 female bodies, with helmet or bare headed, and they're not radically different from the male models in the set; if you can live with the slightly stockier chests, you can just add human female heads to all of them and they look fine. To avoid too many duplicates, you can get the forgeworld stormcast eternals female heads. There are also some other female stormcast; most of the the easy to build stormcast sets have 1 in 3 female models, one of the ballista crew is female and there's also naeve blacktalon. Most of the older kits pre soul wars (liberators, cavalry, heroes) are male only though. That said, the armour is so big compared to the heads it wouldn't look super out of place to put female heads on them too. statuesque 'heroic scale' female heads are designed to convert larger male-sized GW models, while the heroic scale narrow female heads work better on slighter or originally female models. e.g. heroic vs heroic narrow For normal sized slighter human models, e.g. freeguild, the narrow-scale also looks a better fit, especially if you keep some of the original male heads. All the freeguild models are male, but sufficiently clothed (and usually with breastplates) so you could get away with just smaller head swaps, e.g. the statueque heroic narrow options - but I'll come back to this with an even better option in a minute. For more heavily armoured women, 'borrowing' 40k sisters of silence definitely works - Sisters of Silence vigilators are a perfect stand-in for greatswords, and would also work great for a female freeguild general, with statuesque heroic narrow head-swaps optional (obviously you wouldn't use the gun versions) Another great source of bits for female human models is anvil industries - the range is biased towards 40k imperial guard, but they have several bits that you could convert freeguild units with some carving/chopping, particularly some of the torsos combined with statuesque female head swaps; hussars for cavalry, cuirass for freeguild guard and crossbelts for crossbows/handgunners, for example. Most of the rest of the female models out there don't fit GW scale; the frostgrave soldiers II box would be great, but they're a head shorter than GW's 'heroic' scale, and the hands are noticeable smaller - they're 'pulp' or 'true' 28mm scale rather than GW's effective 32mm scale these days. If you weren't mixing and matching though, it could work as the basis for an entirely female unit. One exception is reaper minatures; they have a bunch of single-pose female models, that would work fine for characters or the odd female model and blend right into GW size. Lastly, merely for completeness, if you can live with very exaggerated ******, there's *some* raging heroes models that fit in freeguild, but their range is mostly near-naked (or completely naked) dark elves or chaos in 'joints don't work that way' poses so not to my taste personally.

There is a question mark over using certain allied battalions, precisely because of that FAQ entry. Cleansing Phalanx has an allegiance of "Stormcast Eternals" (this is specifically mentioned a couple of questions later) So, the 2nd part of the FAQ applies, as a Cities of Sigmar army is a different Allegiance to Stormcast Eternals. Specifically, Cities of Sigmar can't take Stormcast Eternals as Allies as they're not on the Allies list; same as Tempest's Eye can't take Kharadron Allies, and Living City can't take Sylvaneth Allies. Instead of course, we have our custom rules. e.g. "1 in every 4 units in a Cities of Sigmar army can be a STORMCAST ETERNALS unit. Those units gain the CITIES OF SIGMAR keyword and the city keyword chosen for your army." This is somewhat akin to the behemoth or artillery restrictions, where we can have X amount of those units but not a separate points section as allies do - and of course, they get the CoS keywords, which allies don't. So going by the Core Rulebook Designer's Commentary as written; if we're using a battalion from a different book we have to count the points for those stormcast units and the battalion itself in the allies section - which we can't use for Stormcast, even though we can take the units themselves by another mechanism. I had hoped this would get resolved one way of the other in the CoS Errata, but no joy so far.

Take Tempest's Eye as the city. They have a rule that up to 1 in 4 units can be Kharadron, and they gain the city keyword so benefit from city rules, no limits on points. You'll need to keep the CoS units cheap to take a bunch to give you more Kharadron slots. Pistoliers and outriders are pretty cheap points-wise, are battleline in Tempest's Eye, and can be used in the Tempest's Eye battallion (with a freeguild general and even 2 gunhaulers) so that's one place to start. Bear in mind Kharadron are one of the very last 1.0 tomes (only 4 left to do) so are expected to get a new battletome in the next 2-3 months, which may impact on what are the best units.

You can use any stormcast unit or character you like in any city, they all gain the appropriate city keyword to benefit from city rules, but not stormcast host bonuses. You can have a maximum of 1 in 4 units be stormcast but no point restrictions. This does limit you somewhat. The stormcast warscrolls aren't included, but you can get them for free from the unit pages on games-workshop.com or the AoS app.

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I agree with you on the new kits being extremely good technically, with one caveat I'll come to in a minute. But they also sell a lot of old models, particularly in 40k, where some armies are still slogging on with models that are 20 years old. They might have been recut with extra accessories, but they kept the same main models - or finecast. Compared to models from say Artel W, or victoria miniatures to pick just 2, GW does not look good in comparison, yet those kits continue to relentlessly rise in price too. Blood Knights, 5 for £61.50! Of course, the cities of sigmar book was the reason they ended a lot of older kits, and effectively ended their rules too. GW are being much more aggressive at killing off older factions (rather than updating their models) than they dare to with 40k. Still rather salty on how many dispossessed models I've got that are effectively useless now (some still technically have warscrolls and points, but won't survive the next handbook and it's not like dispossessed were in a good place ruleswise before). The various other factions in CoS have seen similar butchery of their options. I do have a legions of nagash army, I'm fully expecting that to get mostly squatted in the near future. So yes, the new kits are lovely, but it's such a lottery, as they rarely update older factions but launch entire new ones instead. Will your new faction get a handful of units then get forgotten about (kharadron & fyreslayers)? Will your models hang about for many years never getting an update (classic undead, say hello zombies), or will they just get wiped out when GW wants to sell the new shiny? Will a key character be in a very limited run box that's sold out before it even releases, and never be seen again? Lastly, that caveat. The models are very detailed and the layout engineering is basic genius to eliminate seamlines etc, but at the cost of much more monopose design. The legs + torsos are almost always a single layout, only certain arms fit certain torsos; often the only significant decision is which head to pair with which body, so the unit looks very repetitive. It makes conversions and posing significantly tougher, not least as all those detailed dangly bits are moulded across multiple parts so you can't swap things about without major reconstruction; and you have to be good to make it fit in with the existing detail. So you mostly have to like the kit as it comes, and live with the repetition. This isn't a discussion about value for money or prices because those are ultimately subjective - of course my opinion is no more valid than anyone else's. But the above issues, in combination with the - for me - eyewatering prices, are what have impacted on my purchasing dropping off dramatically.

I have definitely had a bad plastic crack habit over the years, but my purchases have dried right up. In previous years I would likely have bought the new ossiarch box, but that kind of impulse buy is just too much now. I've largely been limited to just the special box deals with heavy discounts the last couple of years (with online 3rd party discount on top) making it still affordable, but even those are getting rediculous. So now I'm putting a dent in my backlog (some of which is repaints), and recycling old minis by buying some new parts from bits sellers or other conversion companies to update weapon options, heads etc instead of buying new. The irony is that being middle aged on a decent wage I can afford to buy at the current prices, but they feel such a rip off now it really counteracts that 'so coool' impulse purchase for something new, or a cunning conversion - and once that passes, and I remember my massive backlog, I just go back to mostly painting what I already have. Even the 'boxed' games which I've usually found hard to pass up have gotten to silly pricing levels and I don't buy, like titanicus. Repeatedly seeing units be killed off before I can even finish painting/updating them is disheartening with every new book, and I'm seriously considering selling off a whole bunch of older models which would literally be a first ever for me.

The effect of doing burning skulls/bone/ghosts/fire successfully all follow roughly the same pattern; basically layer in reverse. You start with the lightest colours first, then layer successive darker colours over the top in smaller amounts, leaving the lighter paint in the 'hotter' inner recesses. To speed things up, you can do the mid-layers with heavy drybrushing, then transition to controlled highlighting with thin paint (which is kinda glazing-adjacent) for the final stages. You can obviously simplify a bit for small areas, but the principles are the same. Also works great for weapons, so you could extend the effect there to give them a bit more pizazz. Great tutorial here.

I see what you're aiming for, but I fear Contrast could end up coming out a bit too blotchy for the effect you're after. I'll suggest a different paint to get that effect; a colour change metallic, possibly adjusted with a light drybrush and/or wash. Two that spring to mind are from turbo dork. The first is turbo dork dark net. It's a pretty dark paint already, but a great subtle effect; it does change as you rotate the model to give dark blue-green highlights. It is a sod to photograph. To make it look less polished/reflective, you can use a matt coat varnish over it; it keeps the colour change effect, but it is a bit more muted. You could do a light drybrush with a lighter green just to boost the edges. The other option would be Turbo Dork electrum - here seen on the wing webbing between the spars; it's a darkish gold/green combo (you can see the two colours on each wing). You would want to darken down the crevices with a wash to get it closer to black. So either black templar significantly thinned with contrast medium, applied in a couple of thin coats; or another combo I've found effective without being blotchy is nuln oil mixed about 50/50 with contrast medium with acts like a 'super wash' - it seeks out crevices without pooling on the surface, if you wanted a lighter effect. Again, a matt varnish finish would make the surface less metallic/polished. Turbo dork paints are easiest applied with an airbrush over a black primer, but can also be applied as two or three thin coats by brush - just do the brush strokes in the same direction. I have a pot of dark net, if I get time in the next few days I could try and whip up a couple of test minis for you if you're interested.

The problem is that dispossessed are middle of the road. They weren't exactly strong before, they all got nerfed or squatted bar hammerers, and in CoS there's basically an equivalent or better unit in every slot point per point - and they've all got faster movement. Irondrakes can easily be replaced by darkshards, or crossbowmen, or sisters of the watch. Longbeards are a sad joke now, and ironbreakers are slower, less tough and do less damage than phoenix guard. Hammerers are hard hitting but fairly easy to kill - and slow. You're better off taking sequitors, or the various cavalry options. Basically, they don't seem to have considered movement at all when pricing units. Sure drakespawn knights suck, and that sucks; but the remnants of the dispossessed faction are all basically meh now. Have a look at the lists people at putting up, and see how many people are including any dispossessed who *aren't* old dwarf players trying to make use of the handful of units that are left. It's hardly any. It doesn't help that none of the batallions include dispossessed. Can we spend a lot of effort and points buffing them and replacing the squatted units with freeguild etc to try and make them work? Sure, and that's what old dwarf players are doing, because we already have the models, aned you can still get a fun list for non-competitive play at least - that's what I'm doing. But ultimately you could replace every single dwarf unit in a list with other CoS ones and have a stronger, more flexible army. And that's a shame.