soak314

It's way sparser than you'd think! The current layout lets certain warbands pretty much keep on the floor for the whole game, and I'd prefer people actually move onto things because they have to, and not just because it looks cool.

Had my first few warcry games on this custom set during this week's hobby night, feels pretty good! I'll definitely need to triple the amount of barricades as it can still feel pretty wide open in some configurations. I got some 6 inch bridges and 3 inch ramps in progress, too. I'm already brainstorming another terrain set, since 22x30" is a very pleasant size to make these sets for.

It's close to what I run, and is pretty good! Squigs are threatening without being ridiculous like the hoppers, but are also way more manageable.

Lovely stuff! Do you mind sharing the blank template for that? I'd love to make a duardin warband for people to use their warriors/thunderers/miners in (rip).

I find the "just run over and whack each other" criticism very troubling, because Warcry goes well out of its way to provide some very specific mission goals while setting a hard limit on the time to achieve them in. Consider the situation: "kill all of your opponent's hammer, which is just a couple of 8 wound plains runners!". Sound dead easy! But with a mutual 2-3 stage staggered deployment, over the course of 4 turns, while your opponent's hammer is actively nyooming away from you, WHILE you have a 30 wound chaos beast messing around the middle of it all because loltwists, you'll then be provided with some very meaningful decisions to make.

Yeah literally no reason to ever use it if it didn't last the whole game. As it is, it's a good dice sink if you aren't immediately engaging. Have had 7 games with my boyz so far, I think we're in a pretty damn good place! A quick breakdown of units, from least to most useful IMO. 7. Morboyz: 110 points for a 1 inch juju stick with no juju? And they give you access to Toof Shiv, possibly The Worst Double In The Entire Game? There's very little reason to take these fellas unless you reaaally like their look. Shockingly bad relative to the rest of our options. 6. Arrowboyz: Now that the morboys are out of the way, we get to the good stuff (i.e. the rest of what we can take). Arrowboys are excellent goalkeepers, and a good pick for anti-horde. You'll find most bow wielding units are really good at gunning down chaff, so you'll likely want couple of these on your roster for when you face the inevitable 12-15 model skeleton/grot list. 5. Shieldboyz (Chompa/Stikka): Your bog standard boyz are relatively cheap t4 models at 15 health with a massive footprint! If you support these guys with a juju stick, they will be a rock solid wall of ork. Take em in a mix, stikkas and chompas paired up, to maximize your attacks! 4. Morboy Boss / Shield Boss: Standard boss spread on a thicc stack of wounds, these guys are pretty good, if quite pricey. I don't like having my leaders stuck in, so I tend not to use em, but they are by no means a bad pick. But the discount on the shield boss isn't worth the dip in damage, IMO. The morboy boss on 3/6 can really help him pack a wallop. 3. Arrowboss: Oho now we're talking. 125 points for a 4t 25 health Waaagh battery! I knew from the get go I'd run the arrow boss almost exclusively, and he's been my favorite model for playing warcry with in the dozen or so games I've had so far. You can sink triples into him early if you don't have anything else to do with em, which lets him clear chaff like a, uh, boss. His melee's also nothing to sneeze at! 2. Big Stabba: A cheaper version of the ogor breacher with less toughness! I have a couple of these, and whenever they get rammed into the opponent's battleline on the first turn thanks to a waaagh + charge, it always does their morale in. The 30 wounds, intimidating model, and massive footprint can really help em be the distraction they need to be, while being capable of dishing out some awesome damage on a good roll. These guys are primo targets for Onslaught and Rampaging Destroyers. 1. Totem Boy: And here we are, our single best unit. With precision use, the totem's beast juju ability is what can elevate the Bonesplitterz from pretty alright to just plain overwhelming. The ability just also happens to be attached to a relatively cheap model that has 3x str 4 attacks from a 3 inch (!!!) range. Stick him next to a cluster of shieldboyz and they turn into what feels like an invincible green blob. Have one tail your Big Stabba/s to get rid of their glaring 3T weakness. Stick one next to your boss, and get him up to 25 health 5T, which is as tough as a Stormcast Eternal. All this in a 6 inch bubble from the model, which provides no small amount of threat by himself. An absolute must-take unit, I'd take two to a list for most cases.

Really good guidelines, but 2c on painting: IMO it should never be a requirement for matched play tournaments in particular. It's just another barrier to entry. Yes there are cheap and fast ways to get your stuff done, but a lot of people won't want to rattlecan their expensive models just so they can see how they do in a tourney. The more inclusive your events are, the healthier your scene will be. You can use the painting as a tiebreaker, like the GHB suggests. If it were a narrative event (those do in fact exist) then by all means, impose the painting rule. In the case of the narrative event, immersion is paramount. The painting does actually add some very important flavour to the experience.

I don't think a game's swinginess and unpredictability has much of any bearing on its worth as a competitive format. Underworlds has a similar crits mechanic, and it's by and large one of GW's best tourney games by a wide margin. Consider the case of Infinity: it has a hideously lethal system and dice rolling + a focus on removing the strict pre-fight knowledge transparency the meta for competitive GW games seems to be obsessed over. You don't show your opponent your entire list, and if you have things that are hidden, they are hidden in every sense. Those AHA! moments GW tourney players hate so much are just part of the show for Infinity games, and you're expected to be able to prepare and react to them accordingly. But given all this, Infinity is still miles ahead of pretty much all of GW's attempts at competitive organisation both in terms of format support, and the usability of models across the range. All that said! I don't think Warcry was made for matched play primarily in mind. It certainly has the tools for it, and I think it's pretty tight given you play in the prescribed format, but I also think it's fairly boring in matched play. Unless you draw a really cool twist or play on a very vertical board (and i betcha cash most tourneyheads will want those twists gone and the terrain standardized anyway).

How about a quest endstate that asks for your number of convergence wins, that rewards you appropriately? Won't need to stop, and each of the three win levels gives a different reward and ending spiel, no branching paths, just different endings. You could have stronger items in the 3 loss category as a sort of balancing mechanism.

Pretty sweet! One thing I'd recommend people do for both custom campaigns and the existing ones, is to write them as branching story paths that don't come full stop when you lose a convergence. i.e. losing the first convergence sends you down one plot thread, winning the first then losing the second sends you down another, and all end up with different endings, with varying rewards (or lack thereof). It'd still take exactly the same amount of games to truck through the campaign, regardless of how often you won or lost, at or at what points. The convergence system is neat, but the mandatory win bottleneck can bring people out of a relatively high immersion setup.

No clue what's inside in terms of cards but just the terrain itself is pretty light for warcry. Shattered Stormvault is pretty good because there's so many hard LoS blocking in that set, but i can imagine people being annoyed by the stairs. It doesn't really have anything climbable either. I haven't gotten to measure the Corpsewrack fences, but unless you rule em as hard LoS blocking. It'll be a board that's 85% cover terrain. It might be interesting, since the climb actions to pop over the fences makes for some interesting movement situations. Not sure if the box rules the fences as dangerous, but that'd be an engaging setup. Either one or both mixed with the warcry terrain will make for some awesome set-ups I think.

Yep! People will appreciate the extra beasts in case you ever need them for a twist, too. Not everyone's gone off to buy the 200 dollar box set to get the khornate turkeys

Got 3 campaign games in today, first I've had against an actual other person (have had a bunch solo against myself, too). Bonesplitterz vs Stormcast twice, and Gitz vs Stormcast once. Both were fairly down to the line, except for the first one where he didn't focus on chasing the target down for a treasure hunt mission. The games are incredibly tight, as most people have noted. You don't have a lot of decisions to make and all it can take is one bad choice to doom your fellas to defeat. Looking back to previous discussions on how this game works, I have a very hard time seeing how people could possibly interpret it as "you just move to the center and hit each other". The game's very close to Underworlds levels of move management and risk mitigation. The rando gen can hurt certain warbands on a bad draw, but I think the chances of that being absolute are pretty slim. Consider the ability to pick your shield/dagger/hammer, from a roster of 20 models, while being able to see the composition of your adversary's. If you build a flexible warband, and make good deployment decisions, this shouldn't happen often if at all. But I think the one thing I've appreciated the most about the system is the sheer ease of everything. By our third game we were rolling for the full three turns without consulting the rulebook. We both commented that we could easily keep going all day. There's barely a hit on your mental fatigue, especially compared to a full 2 and a half hour game of AoS/40k. I've got more detailed battle reports on these three games in the Stormcast warcry thread if people are keen to get a gauge on how they do (they're oppressive, intimidating, but from what I've seen definitely not OP.)

I have, and they are nowhere near that level of killy? Have some battle reports: First game vs my Bonesplitterz: Victory Condition: I pick a model turn 2 and he has to hold onto a piece of treasure til end of turn 3. I waagh a big stabba up and nearly gib a hunter in my first activation. A second one stays in the rearline to spook the incoming enemy hammer. My arrowboss hides behind some LoS blocking terrain (if you don't have loads of this you're doing it wrong) after having done his waagh. Next two turns is the SCE player trying to maneuver into position to shoot my arrowboss (who now has the objective), which proves impossible for him to do on time. Easy win for my boyz. I lose a big stabba and a couple of boyz who went around to tie up the stormcast and waste one of their 3 turns. Second game vs my Gitz (same SCE warband) Victory Condition: i secretly pick a quarter of the map and have to make it so he has NO models whatsoever on there by end of turn 3. My squigs spread out, supported by a herder and a moonclan boss. We've rolled a fight at dawn, so I'm relatively safe from fire for the first turn. He manages to get a hunter up using the stormcast double movement ability, and gets a potshot off on a squig who takes all of 3 damage. I'm picking my engagements here, trying to fake out which quadrant I've selected. Purely by chance he deploys a hurricane crossbow onto the danger quarter, and I promptly run 3 squigs and a herder across the board to try and gib it. Turn 3 ends with that hurricane crossbow at exactly 1 health, and he takes the win. I lose 1 squig, and 1 moonclan boss. Third game vs my Bonesplitterz Victory Condition: SCE Convergence 1! Assassination at Dusk (4 Turn Limit) The name of the game is to kill my arrowboss. I park my juju stick next to him and stick him in cover. I can't end any rounds with the boss within 4 inches of a board edge, or I immediately lose. The scenario specifies dusk, so if he doesn't close in he'll very quickly lose all his range. Turns 1 and 2 are him utterly pushing the limit on his movement and possible shots made, dealing a total of 13 damage to the arrowboss. I shank a stormcast with my big stabba (these things are a must take for the bonesplitterz) and my juju stick's buff soaks up easily 10 points worth of damage for the boss (+1 toughness up to 5, making everything on the map wound him on 4's at best). At the end of turn 3, he takes a huge gamble and double moves his leader hunter up into base contact with the arrow boss as his final activation. Turn 4, he nails the initiative on a draw roll, stacks onslaught onto his hunter, and lops off 10 more points of health from the arrowboss. After a solid 30 second decision I decide to Charge my stabba headlong into the only other stormcast that can possibly hurt my boss. I attack twice, and he comes out of it with 4 health left. That last stormcast shoots, and scores the one wound he needed to win. This drops the arrowboss, gets him his first ever convergence win, and puts a big smile on his face. *** Stormcast in campaign play are way better off than they are in matched play, I think. In matched play, they'll be obligated to bring their birds, because of how heavy (9 of 12 battleplans) the focus is on objectives. In a campaign you can just bring more stormcast. I don't feel they're OP, not by a long shot. It can feel like you're shooting arrows or swinging weapons at a solid, stainless steel statue at times when you fight em (which is good) but they aren't invincible. I did 24 damage to one with a precision strike with a single buffed squig, that's enough to instagib the nonleaders. And every stormcast eternal you kill is a massive amount of fightyness taken out of their warband right there. Don't forget the cover rules exist (cover gives +1 toughness, which is enormous), and always use terrain layouts with hard LoS blocking if you can.

I wouldn't call it cheap in the Warcry context. One box isn't even enough to hit 1k points, even with everything in it. Especially compared to the bonesplitterz box, or factions like Gitz who have very cost efficient alternatives in the Underworlds kits.

They also gave us a whole bunch of free cardstock in the foil pack faction cards! All the languages you'd ever need to read your skills in! Seriously tho GW that was mondo wasteful. I'd love to have been in the corporate meeting where they decided that more than half of those foils contents would be useless to the customer..

Ranged support is good *against* us, as it lets people try and pick off our low T models at a distance without commiting to a more expensive attack. I think they'll have some siuatuonal uses ie sniping the stormcast hawks and other mobile chaff, but I wouldn't build a list around em. Maybe 3 of em tops?

Had a few games with my gitz! Stab Em Good + Backstabbing Mob is a lovely little synergy combo, that can get a little terrifying when you toss some squigs into the mix. I was running the on-foot grotboss, and offensively he's about as good as most of the other faction's bosses, just there's practically no room for positioning error with the 16 health. The limited mobility really hurts too. The mounted bosses are much more mobile better buff vectors, much better at staying alive, and way meaner in melee. It's up to you if you feel you can spare the ~100pts, but I'm feeling confident in seeing waaaay more of the bounder/hopper boss fielded. Also maybe prep yourselves for moaning about grot hordes being OP, cuz we kinda do have a massive edge in objective battleplans, especially in matched play. It's basically the "19 gaunts and a Warrior" issue you see in Kill Team.

Lookin to jump into Order with an SCE Warband, and I have no idea where to start. Are the Aetherwings available anywhere outside of the vanguard kits? Likely going to start myself off with the ez build Castigators box for counts as Raptors, as I love the tabard look and the doggie in that box is very cool.

I'm in the middle of my Bonesplitterz concept army atm, and have 1.2k of gloomspite done up, so I'm coming into Warcry fully painted! What I did prep for however is a custom built 22x30" board and terrain. I don't quite have the cash to drop on the box, so I thought I'd make my own. Turns out I've got quite a bit of enthusiasm for the process, and have almost gotten through it in just a week! One thing I picked up on while doing test games on the WIP pieces for playability: try and build your Warcry boards to have a bit more verticality than the core box suggests. This will become especially apparent if you run into someone who insists on running the box terrain as their true height (>3" tall). All the falling shenanigans really add to the game, and having sufficient bits for your fellas to clamber up onto, jump between, and occasionally plummet off just *feels* so nice.

Goood stuff man! Can't really comment other than to praise the effort atm, because I've barely even played Warcry as is. But this just goes to show, it's a very modular, plug and play ruleset.

The three part deployment system in a limited turn format is massive. It does my head in to see so many of the big YT names gloss over it for Warcry and Meeting Engagements both. Discourse inevitably keeps circling back to whichever unit has the scarier numbers in a vacuum because, honestly, I feel that's just what some people want the game experience to be.

I love how we can field a warband that's just one boss and 6 totem boys. Also what's the consensus on Lodsa Arrows? Is that +1 Attack on there for the rest of the game? I'd say so.

I've heard their book described as "a f***ing circus" and I think it's pretty apt!

Card leaks on the subreddit! Going off their statlines, I think gitz will be extremely flexible, good at playing objectives, and somewhat killy. Given their numbers, excellent skillset, cheapo T4 grunts, and punchy, mobile mounts, I predict they'll do phenomenally well both in matched and campaign play. All we need to get our games in is now out in the wild, so I'm looking forward to people actually rolling some dice!