NauticalSoup

Haven't had a fully painted army since the early 2000s when I quit 40k for the first time. Now I'm building two Sigmar armies in parallel and it would be nice to get at least one of them painted to a tabletop standard up to at least 2,000 points - both would be gravy! Probably not realistic though with work, and if I end up following through on starting a new degree in September that'll probably can all my hobby ambitions for a while.

Just that if you are deep striking the shooters you will not be able to doubleshoot turn 1 with the CA since they deploy at the end of the movement phase and you will have missed your hero phase. Otherwise you seem to have pivoted heavily into vanguard units and I have never used or seen anyone use any vanguard stuff besides longstrikes/hurricanes. Not sure if they're particularly effective compared to the sacrosanct units, or if vanguard-hunters compare favourably to judicators as battleline. I would imagine not or I think they would appear in more lists.

readercolin's advice is prime here. Agree 100% with all those suggestions as someone who has been playing small games as stormcast - understrength SCE hammer units and shooter blobs are incredibly underwhelming and whatever your strategy you want to maximize your synergies and damage output. I would definitely emphasize ditching the Balewind Vortex for a Lord Arcanum on Glyph-Charger since it immobilizes him which guts one of the main advantages of having a mounted general. Also Stormcast spells feel kinda weak, I never really have much desire to cast more than one (and would usually rather have the extra unbind from the Stormcast hoverdisk thing - Dias Arcanum I think?). One thing worth noting is that the main advantage of the Lord Arcanum seems to be taking Sequitors as battleline, which is nice because at least in my group the consensus seems to be Liberators are one of the worst troops choices in the entire game. Too expensive to screen with, they hit like a wet noodle, their bases are too fat to utilize their max squad size well, and the vaunted 4+ with shield re-roll has been power-crept pretty badly since the early days of Sigmar making them rather squishy for their points. Most people on here seem to prefer Judicators or Sequitors if you want a unit that can at least do a little work and only take liberators as a necessary but unfortunate tax to save on points. In a friendly game just see if your opponent is okay proxying them as Sequitors to get a little performance boost from your battleline. Also if you have a Soul Wars, the Knight-Incantor is actually pretty rad due to the void scroll and having one of the better SCE spells on her warscroll. My last thought is that having played a lot of small points games, I actually have the opposite feeling from Evantas - your understrength units and lack of support characters makes SCE even weaker than usual below 2000 points. As has been said a lot of your stuff shines in max-sized units and those units can be further amped by the appropriate support characters which means you could easily be investing so much you are left struggling just to fill out your 2 battleline units. 9 Longstrikes + 2x3 Aetherwings is already 610, and then you need your general for the CA. 6 Dracs + a Knight-Hereldor + the Lord Arcanum on Drac is already 810. The Lord Ordinator + Celestar Ballista blob doesn't even work at low points due to the artillery cap. I think if you want to have any chance at all against those better tomes and armies you want to be playing a full 2k game. Not that you'll be favoured - by all reports SCE is in bad shape right now, so you will rarely be at parity with your opponent. Finally, in friendly games if you just can't compete with your opponent, it never hurts to ask if they'd consider letting you play with a handicap. A few extra points, a CP, an extra roll on the triumph table, hand-picking favourable missions etc. Better everyone has fun and a reasonable chance of winning than worrying too much about constructing proper tournament-legal matched play lists.

The addition of the ability to pull from the invigoration lore makes this confusing since it is intuitive to expect the warscroll to tell you you can pull from invigoration - but it doesn't, it's in the FAQ for the lore. @Danish Bull @flemingmma the phrasing of their FAQ change is thus: "Page 122 – Lore of Invigoration Add the following under the title: ‘Units of Evocators can know and attempt to cast one spell from the Lore of Invigoration. This is an exception to the rule that they cannot attempt to cast spells other than Empower. If a unit of Evocators attempts to cast a spell from the Lore of Invigoration, it cannot attempt to cast any other spells in that hero phase.’" As others have said their warscroll plus the wording of the FAQ leaves no ambiguity, they can cast only Empower with a single exception for the Lore of Invigoration.

I wouldn't spend much money on it, given that greenskinz have gone the way of legends. The easiest way would be to see if there were any current/former orc players in your local community willing to sell you one. Tons of those WHFB plastic orc warboss kits have been floating around for years and they include a guy on foot -and- on a boar. Otherwise looks like there are still a lot of the old pewter boar-riding orc warboss floating around on ebay.

Perfect - thank you for the clarification!

I have seen people use both longstrikes and hurricanes and the math suggests both hold their own. Longstrikes and hurricanes both recently got a pretty (some would say unjustified nerf) in that their 'stand still' ability doesn't work when you use the anvilhammer CA due to them not technically having stood still yet in the movement phase. Longstrikes lose 6" range which is annoying but probably manageable given their base range isn't bad, while hurricanes lose 30% of their firepower which is a brutal downgrade. I would imagine going forward longstrikes will therefore be preferable most of the time. I haven't played much with either though so I'd look to more competitive players to know for sure. Aetherwings are not 'necessary' but they ARE rad. This rule is what makes them great: 'At the start of the enemy charge phase, if this unit is wholly within 18" of a friendly unit of VANGUARD-RAPTORS, this unit can move up to 2D6". They must finish the move wholly within 18" of the same unit of VANGUARD-RAPTORS .' I mentioned screening before. This lets the aetherwings block enemy chargers and protect your soft shooters from getting dogpiled. I haven't had a change to use them much, but I understand that there has historically been some ambiguity about aetherwings being able to move within 3" of enemies with their special move thus 'shutting off' their charge move and wasting a turn - the logic being that this is in the charge phase and is not a normal move, so the 3" limit should not apply. I'd post about this in rules questions though if you want a firm tournament-level answer if this is still allowed though.

Other more experienced players may be able to help you more with the nitty gritty of listbuilding as I am still a relative novice, but one thing I can tell you is that the competitive anvilstrike shootcast lists all seem to use a big blob of Vanguard-Raptors with Aetherwings. Besides just being a solid pair of units (by SCE standards especially) they couple ideally with the anvilstrike CA since all 9 longstrikes/hurricanes can take an additional second volley, whereas using the CA on a single celestar ballista is... well to be honest, the shooting output of single ballistas without an ordinator is pretty mediocre. Assuming your rend completely obliterates the target's save, and you are in 18", it's still only 2-4 damage per ballista. 5 Judicators produce a similar amount of damage to a single ballista although at a worse rend, so your 10 Judicators will be the best target for the CA and still only dribble damage. For comparison 9 longstrikes do 11-13 damage (with a sixth of them being mortals) so doubleshooting them lets you clean up a couple critical targets right away - they also have better range. That's not to say celestars are useless, I have 4 and have had success using them coupled with a Lord Ordinator - but if I can't take at least 3 + the Lord I find they perform so poorly that I'd rather save the points for something else that can dish out some real damage, like Evocators. Without a really strong target for the Anvilhammer CA (like a massive shooty unit, or even a massive hammer unit like 10 Evos or 6 Evokitties) I wonder if maybe you would be better off just going with no stormhost so you can take Stout Defender. Maybe a more experienced SCE player can weigh in. Also having played a number of (punishing) 1k games as SCE I am pretty confident in saying you're going to want more than 5 sequitors to screen your shooters and dracs. It's not ideal but 5 sequitors are pretty easy to either destroy or go around which leaves all your damage dealers completely exposed. I suppose the Judicators can also screen but they're likely serving as your CA outlet so I wouldn't want them to die frivolously protecting units with less damage output. Important note: you are taking too many artifacts. The army gets one + another for each battalion (zero in your case). Since you are playing a stormhost your one artefact is eaten up by the mandatory soulthief. The tables having different names (scroll, staff, etc) really just serve to indicate who is allowed to take them.

If you read back a few pages in this very thread you will probably be able to answer that question for yourself lol If you can't be bothered the answers are: 1) No 2) Shootcast ie take a max-sized missile unit like longstrikes and use the CA of Anvil Strike to doubleshoot them (there are a number of good list ideas scattered throughout here but I can't imagine any of them will win you a tournament - SCE seem to be one of the weakest books in the game right now.) If being competitive is what matters to you there are many better choices.

Thanks for all the guidance! I will probably run Gotrek occasionally because, to be honest, I like him more than I like the Stormcast and a major motivation to not just sell the SCEs I won was that they could work as an Order shell to run him in. But for games where I want a coherent functional force not hobbled by my favourite dwarf it is good to have some direction, and those list options all seem very manageable to reach with only a handful of added miniatures. Now I've just got to get painting!

Was reading the thread about everyone's favourite battleplans, and I'm wondering: is there any sort of master list for battleplans, matched play or otherwise? It would be nice to have a shortlist of documents from which to draw the best plans from. Presumably most are from GHBs and the core book?

Been lurking for a bit. Picked up that SCE are struggling due to their aging book so I'm looking for some guidance on assembling a force (or forces) that can do the most work with the figures that I already own. I won a Soul Wars box at a local 40k tournament a couple weeks ago and then traded for a second one, so I have two sets of Soul Wars guys which I expanded by grabbing a christmas battlebox & an ETB celestar ballista. This means I have a stable of: Lord Arcanum on Gryph-charger (two but can't imagine using both) Knight-Incantor (two but can't imagine using both) Lord Exorcist 25 Sequitors 10 Evocators 6 Evocators on Cats 10 Castigators 3 Celestar Ballistas Gotrek (friend bought me this a while back before I had any sigmar stuff) I'm seeing a lot of 'shootcast' lists that use vanguard-raptors and aetherwings - trouble is I don't really want to buy a bunch of the kits they're from, although I could always proxy the castigators in casual games to see if I like it. I am willing to add some stuff, especially characters, but SCE has such an enormous number I'm not really sure which ones are most critical. Some are obvious (Lord Ordinator for ballista blob, Gavriel for Gav-bomb) but after that things start feeling murky. SCE units are so expensive it seems like I probably need to lean lists into one or two things at a time ie Evocators on Cats OR on foot. I'm also sorta stuck on how to build a list around Gotrek, which is something I definitely want to at least try.