overtninja

Alright, I took basically no pictures of the tournament, but I can give a rundown. It was a 1500 point, two-round affair, and my list was - Nomad Prince(ss) with Starcaster Longbow, Wayfinder, Waywatcher General with Stalker Command Trait, and a Spellweaver; 20 GG, 20 WWR, 2x10 SotW, and 20 Dryad allies. I thought the extra melee help from the Dryads would help sure up my line and do some offensive work. They did the former but certainly not the latter, haha. In the first game, I was matched with a Nurgle player that I play many, many games with, he uses a GUO with the artifact that regenerates any wounds received at the end of each battleshock phase on a 4+, we call him Big Fat and he is a nemesis. His army also includes 4 groups of 5 Blightknights and the mounted hero who gives a 5+ Ward to a bubble with a command ability. It's a very durable army. He also brought a couple of those giant fly riders, which were very scary. We played the Shifting Objectives scenario, which we both immediately knew would come down to where it shifted. We knew each other's armies quite well, so it was a fierce game. It ended up a tie on points, but I lost more points in units when time was called so he took the victory. I made lots of deployment mistakes and my opponent got double turn and turn priority, which mulched my units without me being able to do the work I needed to in the shooting phase. I also over-worried about his giant flies, and had to feed my Dryads to him to hold the line, but in the end my WWR took out the flies and then charged through the middle to the center objective on the last turn and tied up the points total. Every game we play is always that close. I do regret that I didn't take more pictures of his army, since it's really nicely painted and is delightfully disgusting, right down to the glistening diseased flesh and rusty gross armor. He's also a real friendly dude and always has a great attitude, win or lose, which is really admirable. The second game was against a DoK army with lots of Witch Elves, a Medusa, two Kinerae drops, some Doomfire Warlocks and lots of cross-buffing, playing Places of Power. I managed to take out a unit of 10 Witches and all the Doomfire Warlocks on the first turn, but stuff went south from there. Once again, my opponent got a critical double turn on turn 2 and was immediately in my face with his blender Witch Elves, which handily obliterated my GG before they could even fire -_-. I got my Dryads in a wood, and they held off a unit of Witches for two turns even through all the buffs and a full round of attacks in the hero phase on turn two, though they died to the last. Godspeed, sweet kindling. I managed to shoot down the Medusa, but it made it to one objective, and the game came down to my opponent with 1 point and me with 0 on the final turns. I had been running my caster to the far objective to try and make some points for the whole game, and was confident that if the game went long enough I'd be able to bank enough to win, but time was short. My opponent tried to finish off my heroes with a depleted Witch unit, but I managed to weather the attacks and escape with my Nomad Princess, carrying the artifact, and use a banked command point along with my command point from my last turn to run both my caster and the Princess to objectives to score 2, thus netting me the win. General observations - my GG died both games because I put them too close to things, and I was too timid with my WWR. The former should be kept way back so they can do work, including deploying them far and moving them up to shoot so they can't get charged even on a double turn, while the latter need to plow the center. WWR ate everything they came up across - Witches, giant bugs, Blightknights... they are easily my favorite unit right now. Also, Dryads are... not that great outside of Sylvaneth allegiance. They gain so much from having Wyldwoods on the table, and a 4+/4+ attack line means that with like 40 attacks I'd get maybe 4 or 5 wounds out of it, which is frankly junk. They did their job of holding down the line both games, but for 200 points I'd rather get choppy with Kurnoth, as they function just fine without their special trees. Next time, I'll run them instead. Also, even though my Dryads were basically kindling both games, they held out with their 3+ armor in the woods for longer than they should have, so they did their job. EG would have been cheaper, but with the way the games went it was handy not to have had to get into position the turn before, since it turned out I didn't even have time to do that! Finally, I have to plan better for getting double turn'd on, since it hurts this army so much. Missing a turn of shooting before the melee is on you is absolutely crippling. Having more melee presence is definitely a good option, though putting my WWR front and center would solve that problem quite well, I think. I think also at 1500 I'd maybe drop the Wayfinder for a Waystrider and get choppy with his greatsword, or drop him altogether and take more units - another block fo 10 GG would have been nicer to have, I think, just for additional bite. The HoD Arrow is neato, but it doesn't do the work over the game that a simple block of Legolases would. Anyway, it was a really fun tournament and I got to play against DoK, which I can happily say was just as bad as I thought it would be but not bad enough that I couldn't squeak by, which makes me feel pretty good generally. Cheers for reading!

It's useful to keep in mind that while we can teleport a unit outside of 9 inches, we also shoot 18-22 inches, which means all we really need for shooting is to get our units close enough to fire, which may well end up being well outside of charge range. The only time I teleport deep into enemy territory is to snap up vacant objectives. Anyway, I've a small tournament today with my Wanderers so we'll see if I can put to practice all the stuff I've been saying in this thread haha I'll try to take some not-potato pictures and do a write-up when I get home.

@rosa @azmarusI made this spooky lady out of Dryad bits years ago when I played WFB, and I recently rebased her for AoS. It's never been painted but I think it looks suitably menacing.

@Gwendar 20 WWR seems a sweet spot, they stick around for long enough to do work that way and they'll delete any monster they hit if they have more than 15 models left, I'm pretty certain. As for more shooting, go for it. I would run 2 blocks of 20 GG and a single block of SotW, or visa versa, and be okay with my shooting power at 2k. I think the former has more alpha strike potential, while the latter has more precise firing and hoses Chaos armies just a bit harder. It helps that I had about 4/5 of my army already thanks to playing WFB for ten years or so, and I had all the GG and SotW sitting around. It's also not a bad idea to have more than one army setup's-worth of models in your collection, so you can change up or tinker with your lists after you're familiar with them. Variety is the spice of life, etc etc. I have started collecting Sylvaneth in addition (I had all those Dryads already, after all), they're a great, versatile army, and as I said it's fun to cultivate more than one army so you get different playstyles. If you like the trees, they make excellent allies in smaller games where you need/want melee bite but can't afford the battalion to bring your shooting to the next level. I'm a fan of Kurnoth and Dryads as allies - haven't tried the tree guys yet, but I'm going to buy and build a Son of Durthu (he shall be Sonny D), so I'll see what happens when you field 380 points of sylvan violence in a shooty list.

EG are fantastic for what they do, but they tend to run cross-purpose in a 2k army that's using the battalion because they fill a valuable slot up, and I think their function is cross-purpose for what the rest of the army wants to do, which is move around and shoot. I find that unless something is absurdly killy, a block of GG can do the same job of holding something off with their frail bodies if it comes to it, and they'd be able to retreat and shoot the rest off if they live, while a block of EG pretty much has to stand there and take it while doing nothing much back. That said, they have been an absolute roadblock in many of my games, holding off demon lords and other nonsense for way longer than they had any right to, but I think all considered I'd rather bring more expensive dudes with decent offensive profiles and mobility. Also, don't feel too attached to your little plastic men when you play - Wanderers die in droves, and sometimes you need to sacrifice units to ensure victory. As long as you sell their lives dearly and don't just toss them away, you'll generally come out on top, barring complete disaster. 😛

@Gwendar Without screens, you're relying on being able to soften up targets before you let your characters and WWR into them, or just shoot off the small stuff, and generally playing fully towards objectives and making use of your superior movement abilities to snatch up ground. It's a fragile strategy because one double turn against you or one below-average shooting phase can sink your whole game, but it's always been that way with this faction, even back in WHF. Deep striking also really hurts a Wanderers list, and terrain can really mess with us - chiefly not having enough on the table, such that horde armies and speedy armies can run across an open field and turn-1 charge to victory. The reason I've moved away from units of EG to screen is that when you run the battalion, you are aiming to 1-drop, and filling one of your four available infantry slots with EG is a terrible plan, because they do nothing except sit in a spot and wait to get charged. They are only really good in cover, also, and they wilt under mortal wounds, which many armies can bring in abundance, and even with a 3+/3+ attack profile they have one swing each and you tend to chain them in a line anyway, so they have no offensive power at all. It's a far better plan to bring blocks with offensive bite instead of running a defensive game when you are limited to bringing 4 infantry and two mounted units. I've found that Wanderers are only good when they're being aggressive - trying to dictate opponent's movement by threatening a hail of arrows, flanking hard, sniping characters, focusing down targets, and generally picking apart the enemy while being mobile. We can't sit and hold things with our army, but because we do most of our work in the shooting phase, very little of our opponent's field is out of our reach, and our BS is high enough that even Look Out, Sir! doesn't keep their heroes safe. Clearing out the field and holding objectives, or even just being able to teleport where your opponent can't possibly reach, and snagging them that way, is as best a strategy that we have. I end up making high-risk plays a lot, like teleporting a whole block of GG behind my opponent to try and shoot them off an objective, leaving them potentially stranded, but if the reward is potentially winning the game by doing so, it's got to go down. It's what makes them army exciting to play for me - the continuous underdog feeling, the go-for-broke plays, the all-or-nothing gambits, the if-this-doesn't-work-all-my-dudes-perish positions. It also means most games have lots of tension, because the wheels could come off at any time, and you could do with a drink after pretty much every game, but that's a small price to pay imo. Other armies have the capacity to be flat out better on the table, it's true, because they are far more failure-tolerant, you don't have to be as careful when you play them, they can just roll up and sit on objectives and wait, they have tanky models or huge piles that you can't shift - there are a lot of advantages that in play end up being bluntly superior to what Wanderers have. What Wanderers have is a play style that's very different from most armies, and while it's not a superior strategy, it's a fun and interesting way to play the game. Most Wanderers players I know cultivate other armies so that they can play more 'normally', because otherwise you'll go prematurely gray. (Also, our entire model range is gorgeous and we look fly as all get out, especially if you do some sweet conversions and give them a rad paint scheme. It's really easy to Your Dudes a Wanderers army, and that makes them awesome, even if they are mid-tier. ;p)

@Gwendar Nice report! Glad to see your guys are doing well for you. It's very hard to fight 50 witch-aelves with Wanderers at 750, so good job hanging in there! And yeah, you'd probably have gotten creamed if you were playing objectives, but Wanders can do really well on those games if they can teleport in early and claim things, and then back up and shoot as necessary. @Aelfric Both those Wanderer lists look extremely solid at 2k, I like both of them. The Forget-Me-Knot is a really nasty surprise to spring on fighty hero. I'm torn on whether to bring 2 groups of 20 Glade Guard, or two groups of SotW, because the latter is super cool, but the former presents a lot more bodies to shift. Thanks for suggesting the video!

Keep up the good work on the Wanderers, they have a lot of great modeling potential and most of their units are easy to pose in interesting ways. Looking forward to seeing what else you come up with!

Oh yeah, certainly, if you're not a Battletome army you're playing hardmode, but we knew this already. ;p Honestly, if playing the faction didn't feel like trying to squeeze water out of a rock sometimes, it wouldn't be in keeping with the fine Wood Elf tradition.

I run 2 groups of 10 (I use the old metal Waywatcher models, since I have that many and they are cool as all get out), and I usually position one along one table edge and the other along the other, so they can scoot wherever they need to. If my opponent lets me, I teleport behind them and snipe characters out with them, particularly the ones that buff things or soft casters. They hit on 4s even with Look Out, Sir, so they are fantastic for that. On my opponent's turn, they either have to divert a unit to chase them down, or leave them to continue their reign of terror, and I can (hopefully!) teleport them to safety if they end up in trouble. And honestly, if they kill a buffing hero or severely damage a hard target so you can clear them up, but subsequently die, they've usually messed with my opponent enough that they've done their job. It gets a bit ugly if my opponents direct spells at them, so I try to hug terrain and otherwise keep a LoS block in between me and casters. It helps that I also run Glade Guard up the middle, since they can move and shoot, though I put them down last usually so I can see where my opponent is soft, and if the opportunity presents I put a group of them on a flank also to teleport and snag an objective. I try to cover a lot of angles with my shooting, so that my opponents are forced to focus on a flank and get shot the whole way in, with the risk of being focused down by a cross-table teleport from my general's Stalker trait. In big games where I can use the battalion, I'm hoping to also bring a Wending Wand to allow extreme flexibility for my units' teleporting. Um, I'm rambling a bit, but with Living City you'll want to park one unit of SotW front and center so they can shoot as much of the field as possible without moving, I think. You can deploy on table edges with other units so you will be better served by deploying serious melee threats close to your opponent and a pretty beefy shooting bunker in the middle to soften up opponents. If your opponent presents a juicy target and you feel you can get away with it, don't hesitate to put a group of them close to the target, and if you have to, just have them move and shoot. You'll lose out of the extra shots, which is a shame, but it's better than shooting nothing, and might set you up for next turn.

@Gwendar Alpha strike is well and good, but strong, reliable shooting helps over the whole game. I'd much sooner take the waywatcher for character sniping (he's still amazing at it, hitting on 3s if he doesn't move even with Look Out, Sir), and SotW always do me proud, especially given how many Chaos factions I play against and see around in general. Those ballista are no joke, but I'd much prefer the elves who hit and wound always instead. Besides, elves look cooler imo. @Popisdead Yeah, cavalry in general sacrifices a lot in AoS in return for moving fast, but given the nature of the game it makes sense that they do. I do like that a Spellweaver's signature spell can bring up to 3 models back, though, since it's really good for the points if you cast it on cavalry. As far as whole-army composition, they are easily the most mobile thing we have, and grabbing objectives with something that can fight decently is nothing to scoff at. It would be nice if they were a bit cheaper, but I understand their price point give how strong movement is.

@Ruhraffe That's a great video, thanks for posting it! That discussion about ruining movement of large models with Wyldwood tree positioning at about 2 hours in is something I hadn't really thought about, but given that you can't move your dudes through terrain, it's some really taxing things to think about. Something to practice! Glad to see that it doesn't seem to be Durthu or nothing at the high end, also - though honestly I'll probably make one in case I don't want to run Alarielle at 2500 for some reason.

@GwendarI'm going to guess that you'll be using a TLA eventually to get yourself some Wyldwoods? I think Firestorm was printed when you could just pay 40 points to purchase a Wyldwood, but that's no longer the case. The faction likely worked better back then. :s

When AoS was first starting out, they were trying to let people field basically whatever they wished to make cool armies and fight with, so they parted out a lot of armies into multiple sub-factions - probably because those sub-factions have rules that only affect their own keywords or whatever. I doubt they really intended to render a bunch of armies unplayable as a cohesive force, but with the way the game has developed that ends up being the case, especially for the old High and Dark Elf factions. The Wanderers still work really well as an all-elf faction, as they weren't split up excessively, but the other two are strangely fragmented. That said, I'd be wary of buying Dark or High Elves right now, especially their older models from when every army needed 'spearmen' and 'bowmen' and other rank-and-file, and that's basically not a thing in AoS. If you're going to invest in either faction, I'd be looking at the former Elite choices and centerpiece models, or anything with a really strong visual identity - Dark Elf piratey guys, for instance, or Dragon Princes. Avoid things like 'box of 20 dudes with normal weaponry', almost anything that's on a horse (because when you could roll out on a badass battle-beast like 80's cartoons, why would you bother to ride a normal horse?), and anything without dynamic posing (the older models were designed to rank up so they all look like they are trying to squeeze into a subway during rush hour on a rainy day). I'd be willing to wager that both ranges will see a good deal of revision, since a bunch of the simple infantry don't mesh aesthetically with AoS's visual vocabulary, which leans towards bigger, badder models or things with unique abilities or rules. I'm hoping that both factions see a book within a year or so, or at least get a nice update in the coming General's Handbook, to address their current shortcomings - GW clearly wants to keep them on the table being played, especially since many older players still have their armies, and with a bit of rules love they'll be just fine on the table. I just wouldn't buy into them if I'm starting out, is all.

@Gwendar My advice is to not ignore melee in whichever list you build towards. You want to be able to do something strong in every phase, and most other armies do their work in the combat phase, so you want to not only give them something to interact with, but also be able to do some of your work in that phase as well. If you go too heavy into shooting you'll either win or lose on that phase alone, and it's not fun for either player that way, in my experience. Alpha strike for Wanderers is really strong, but you'll need something to either tank the offensive of your opponent (EG do a great job of this), or go in and fight what's left (allied Sylvaneth/other Aelves do great here, as well as WWR, and even like 10 Wild Riders on the charge). Wanderers have some of the most reliable shooting in the whole game but it won't do all the work you need it to by itself.

@Alezya Hey, thanks for the reply! I was hoping that with enough bodies in the units, the Spite-Revenants would be able to go to town on things, as long as they didn't have high armor - but I've seen what happens when Dryads go up against a hard target, and it isn't pretty. 😛 I was planning on something at around 2k with 2x10 Spites, 2x5 Spites, 2x3 Kurnoth (scythes and swords), 20 Dryads, Branchwych, Branchwraith, TLA and Drycha, which leaves 60 for some endless spells (probably Ravenak's Bitey Mouth and Shackles/Swords). I've watched plenty of battle reports where Durthu does work, but I'm holding off on building one as I want to slot Alarielle into the list at 2500 and it would be basically just adding her, and she's plenty fierce anyway.

Apologies, what I meant was that there are various rules on other warscrolls, particularly Dryads and Branch-things that work within 3", which I misremembered as 1". Also, Navigate Realmroots can be used from within 3" of Wyldwoods as well. They block LoS if you are deeper than 1" inside them, as well. Basically, you'll be in range to use every ability that's not a claiming cover within 3" of the whole terrain set, which is usually what you use it for, outside of just being a massive LoS screen.

Do you folks think a Dreadwood Wargrove is worth it? I really like Spite-Revenants a lot as models, and the Subterfuge abilities look pretty strong, but I'm wondering if anyone has actually played with the battalions and seen it in action.

@Gwendar Looks like a pretty solid run with a limited list! It's hard to do much interesting with Wanderers at 500, but looks like you did solidly. I'd had great luck being aggressive with my dudes on the teleport - sniping characters with a small unit is great, but sending a big block of GG across the field to claim on objective and pelt things from behind is awesome, and teleporting 20 WWR into your opponent's flank and charging can be absolutely awful for them to deal with, especially since our ranged power lets us severely blunt the capability of scary infantry blocks. I have been building a Sylvaneth army, since my Wanderers is basically complete up to 2.5k, so I'd love to hear what your experiences end up being with a Living City army!

I would guess not, since they are summoned, and thus not part of the battalion at the list-building step.

Go demigryph knights! They are such good boys, though Stormcast kind of stole their swag with their bird knights, too. :s

@AaronWIlson @frostfire Ah yes, I'd forgotten! Thanks for reminding me. Even though you can't summon more than once a turn, you'd have redundancy, and you'd have your lore spells to use as well with a Branch-something either way. A Branchwych might be cool to have so you can double escort your Dryad herd in the above list, actually.

This is a beautiful army, my dude. I really like how you painted the eyes on each model so that their expressions are clear, it adds a comedic element to their appearance. Also, your freehand painting skills are excellent. Any plans for your next army?

@Frowny You could snag another Branchwraith for another cheap caster, which would probably serve you well if you want to try and run a summon list. Park them both behind your Wyldwood, try to summon 20 Dryads every turn - could work well. Even with a list like yours, you'll want a lot of Dryads off to one side, between Big Al's potential 20 and the other summoning over the course of the game. Gnarled Warrior is great on big trees since only the strongest attacks will reduce their armor saves, but if you are fighting a lot of armies that put out lots of mortal wounds, I'd say Gift of Ghyran is probably a good bet as well. That, and you can hide in the trees and wait for them to come melee you, where Gnarled Warrior would be more useful.

I can happily report that a group of 20 Wildwood Rangers can basically chop through anything, which was really pleasing to learn. They do serious work against everything, but any monster that shows its face against that many attacks just gets mauled. It's just what the army needs to deal with serious threats that can't be purely shot away from the table, imo. I also tested out the Soulbind Shackles, and they are pretty great at gumming up charges, which also helps with our general strategy of not being in melee with most of our army ever.