Vastus

Goldchaser Maw-Walkers Tried something slightly different for the basing this time. In addition to the metallics, I tried to create very ordered cobblestone and some pools of liquid metal to represent them inhabiting the abandoned Seraphon temple-city. Went pretty well I'd say for a first try, I'd like to expand this to more complex basing schemes.

Haha yeah, I've seen lists like that before, with as many Big Stabbas as possible. It really clogs up the board, so many units makes it impossible to move around and they hit decently well.

Goldchaser Maw-Walkers When the going gets tough and blood starts flowing like a river, it all comes down to the Ironguts. Alright, so I've been more busy with other stuff and haven't done a lot of painting recently, but I did churn out these chunky guys. Converted them from Glutton bodies, greenstuff and some spare parts I had lying around. The hat was fun to make, even if it didn't quite work perfectly.

My memory is failing me right now, but I am quite certain I once read about a Free City where people and undead lived and fought together. I always thought it would be fun for that to become a sub-faction for CoS where you could coalition in some undead. As for the second idea, imagine for a second a city built atop the ruins of another city. The old city was once a glittering citadel, and to the ghouls that make this place home, it still is. To the humans who live above it, it's simply a pit. I think that could work quite well. With how incredibly underpriced some of the endless spells are after the update, a more magic-heavy army like that could work well. Scintillating Trail is a nice touch, but the one issue I see is that there's a lack of casting bonuses as far as I can tell. If you're paying a bunch of points for spells and you don't get them off, you're basically playing with a smaller army. This does make me think though about the possibility of a Hallowheart endless spell spam, since they can stack casting bonuses so easily (Arcane Channeling, Sorceress, Hurricanum) that you can basically guarantee all of them going off.

Seems like it pools more in crevices and you get less of an overall darkening effect looking at these images. That's nice I guess if you want things to look cleaner.

Oh god Harridans sre awful for this reason. Their poses mean they hang over the base a little and the claws are mostly directed forward (Grimghast scythes, Bladegheist swords etc are often pointed up at least). It's a massive pain to get them in formation without getting them all tangled, and it gets do much worse when they're in combat.

I'm honestly surprised by that Grinnin' Blades change. Felt like Big Yellas was rather over-rated and this was already their best sub-faction if you wanted to actually play the objective game, now it is the strongest by far. The Seraphon change is nice. Won't knock them down by much, but a subtle nudge that also makes thematic sense. Would've liked to see something for Ogors, but oh well.

Teethbreaker Mining Outpost (Tempest's Eye rules) See edit in first post for lore keynotes. These adventurous duardin have stamped a thriving trading outpost out of the ground, fueled by the raw metal deposits of the old mining system they have rediscovered. Wealth also brings in opportunists however, so military forces are a must. The outriders of this town are exceptionally fast, mounted on automatons powered by Kharadron technology and aether-gold. They also know the mountainous terrain like no other, allowing them to traverse it at high speed. So yeah, these are the first two of my pistolier conversions. I rather like the look, so I think I'll order more of the wolves and make a full 10-man squad. It will probably be a bit lower on the priority list since I want to focus a bit on the Ogors right now.

Just looked through all the Endless changes. There's some clear standouts like Purple Sun and Cogs, although Quicksilver Swords is pretty nice too and on-theme for Quicksilver Dead. The other one I want to shout out is Lauchon. A mere 30 points to yeet your wizard wherever has some useful applications. But what I really want to mention is a less useful and much funnier application. If you stick an Arcane Tome on a Cairn Wraith, you can possibly yeet the guy into the middle of an enemy castle and get a ton of attacks and let him go ballistic. Is it a good use of such a valuable artefact? No. Is it competitive or reliable? No. But it sounds incredibly amusing for more casual games.

So Terminexus actually doesn't return models, but you can get Lifeswarm instead. I think Nighthaunt don't have the level of recursion of SB, but if you add all the different sources up it can become quite a lot. The main source of recursion that you've missed are the Spirit Torments, which will return 3 wounds worth every Battleshock phase. A unit cannot benefit from more than 1 per turn, but if you bring multiple you can regenerate multiple units of course. If you want to make a list based on this, I think you can do so. Just bring Olynder, a Guardian of Souls with MoM (and Midnight Tome to guarantee Lifeswarm), one or two Spirit Torments and the Emerald Lifeswarm. You also need some blocks of units which depends a bit on your subfaction and if you want to adjust for the upcoming season, but Chainrasps are always a cheap option which means you can easily get two blocks of 20 and have points left over. If you go Scarlet Doom you can go Bladegheists of course, but you won't be able to fit as much support (Spirit Host, Banshee, Dreadblade Harrow etc). Would've recommended Reapers before, but reach seems to be less relevant in the upcoming season.

The Demonstration of Strength grand strategy does specify 'Galletian Veterans from your starting army', so it does seem likely that summoned units can count as GV. Interestingly the Show of Dominance grand strategy does not specify that they have to be from your starting army.

I'm not saying to avoid it because it is bad. In fact I was heavily considering swapping to it, but with the new batallions I'm holding off. I don't want my Harridans to take double damage, and they will likely be outside the Krulghast range, so making them Battleline would be detrimental. Edit: Actually, I just remembered that the additional range is only for Galletian Veterans, so you would need to go Quicksilver for them to get in all their attacks. Quicksilver Dead it is.

With the new reach rules, Harridans could be nice and effective MSU bounty hunters I think. They pump out a ton of attacks and are self-sufficient. They could easily steal an objective from most battleline. Probably avoid Quicksilver Dead though, since they're more likely to roam around than hang near your castle with the Krulghast.

Yeah, being (non-mounted) battleline seems more like a detriment right now. You want your battleline to be some cheap fodder to score some of the BT's I guess, but otherwise they don't benefit at all. The triple scoring is there as an option, but even that you'd rather put on your cheap MSU, since larger units will struggle to last versus the bounty hunters. That or you need a way to reduce damage. Praise the Krulghast, blessed be his torturous devices.

Wait, what the hell. That sounds insanely busted? Is the casting re-rolls for all casters within a certain radius as well? If so that's really good for deathstars.

Images are leaked, it specifies melee weapons only.

If those are the points of the new LRL I'm a little surprised. It felt like the trend was for everything to become more expensive pointswise, but seeing DoK and now LRL, it seems that is not a consistent change they're going for.

Love it mate. One small correction: you repeatedly mention MoM giving a +1 to casting/unbinding/dispelling, but it's a re-roll to one roll.

It would be if this were a game like Hearthstone or whatever where meta changes are rapid, but in model-based games they are glacial. Building an army takes time, so people tend to stick to what they have or what is easy rather than experimenting a lot. Even the people who commonly attend tournaments often only start innovating after they've finished a standard netdeck list to fall back on. While you have the usual culprits (LotFP, Maggotkin, Thunder Lizard) at the top, there's also been a decent bit of others at the top, and a general shift to less quality and more bodies. We've seen a TL list that opted for the cheap Arks instead and brought some Teradons (Hell, I've seen I believe two Dracothion lists win events iirc). We've seen IJ players shift to Big Waagh for greater flexibility. We've even seen a Gitz player win with Squigs. Etc, etc.. It's not as simple as going from the wild west of innovation to a figured out meta. It's more like a mess at the start with unupdated armies, then people slowly adjusting, and once things are figured out you start to see some innovation again to deal with the current meta. By the time people are somewhat adjusted to the changes from this book, the 6-month period is over and we're onto the next.

Nah, can we just make Artillery relevant for a change? Most of these poor pieces of scrap are generally outclassed by regular ranged units.

On a different note, this sounds interesting: 'With rules for exploding realmstone caches that must be claimed as objectives, vast tunnel networks to ambush opponents through, and scuttling horrors guarding valuable caches, the General’s Handbook offers a fresh crop of strategic conundrums to solve using the only language that makes sense in the Mortal Realms – war.' We may get some more interactive objectives and maps/battle plans.

Ah okay so a new keyword, that clears things up. I thought the 'counts as 3' batallion in the original rumors was called Veterans. That's...interesting but I'm not sure if I like it. Rules like the +1 damage batallion (assuming that's true as well) heavily alter the viability of basically all infantry in either direction and various magnitudes. It would take so many adjustments to properly balance that out, that by the time they could feasibly do so, this season has already passed. You now want your GV units to have as many models and as high a number of attacks as possible to benefit from this the most. Meanwhile units like Ogor Gluttons benefit relatively less from this since they have a lower volume of bodies and attacks. It does seem like conditional Battleline also qualifies, which can be good or bad depending. Have to wait and see a bit, but this feels a tad hamfisted and will have far-reaching effects far beyond just making battleline more important.

Way I read it, it only works against troops in the 'counts as 3' batallion, not troops in general. It's basically a way to make that batallion more risky, but it creates a weird rock/paper/scissors scenario where you can lose out massively depending on the choices you made in list building with no way of knowing that in advance until you see your opponent's list. I'm just hoping these are Veteran abilities for PtG instead and leakers got them mixed up.

There might be an interesting list option there. Realmshaper and Heraldors strongly disincentivize staying in cover, but Seraphon can put out a terrifying amount of shooting with large skink blobs (or Solar Engines) if you aren't in cover too. Maybe even a Dracothion's Tail list where you drop units on those who dare get out of cover. Maybe a key Endless Spell here or there to control space even further. There's a lot more options out there than your typical Thunder Lizard Engine spam. Although Thunder Lizard with a bunch of Arks of Sotek would provide some cheap and very tanky bodies that will effectively stall anyone trying to get near Kroak while pumping out MWs. The Kroak/Krondspine lists that have popped up a lot recently are pretty good at this kind of area control as well. You can't really remove the Krondspine quickly since it can lose only one stage at a time, and only at the end of battleshock, so it creates a lot of space while Kroak does his thing.

Nice to see them try some more varied contrasts rather than just light to dark transition of the same color. The Chill, Glacier, and Burgundy ones in particular look nice. Also that Strength in Numbers rule is absolutely amazing. It offsets one of the main weaknesses of large hordes, while being very appropriately thematic. Skaven rework is looking pretty good so far on the rules side.