Neil Arthur Hotep

I get the desire, and you can always try, of course. But personally, I think you lose more meaningful information than you gain by doing this. I find "This combo costs 390 points and requires a command point and your command trait" more informative than "this combo costs 590 points". Because you can't actually exchange list building points for extra comand points or command traits and you also don't actually spend 590 points from your 590 point budget on the combo.

You could definitely be right, full shooting castles have been successful in the past. For example, for Lumineth, for a while 40-60 Sentinels with Teclis was one of the best lists. However, AoS is still a game about going out and doing stuff. Having a large amount of your points stuck in/near your deployment zone for the majority of the game goes against what the basic rules/battle plans want you to do. Running 60 Fusiliers is just barely possible. You can fit them into the Alchemite's bubble for his spell. But beyond that, two units of 30 become much less efficient than one unit of 30. One of the blocks will definitely miss out on +1 to wound, because that is tied to your general issuing the command. One of them will likely miss out on All-Out Attack completely, because getting uses of the command would mean running Greywater, but that competes against running a city with a casting bonus. You would also need to run 2x10 Steelhelms to make the units battleline in order to reinforce them. At that point, you are 1190 points down and have not even started to include units that can play the objective game. Or other really valuable stuff like the Command Corps or Zenestra. In my opinion, Cities has better options than to try to double down on shooting. You can have a good, powerful shooting unit and still play in other phases, which is generally preferable if you are going for consistent tournament results. You can split shots. One unit can shoot at as many targets as it can see/has in range. However, Blackpowder Bombardment becomes a lot easier to do if you run other units with incidental shooting attacks alongside your Fusiliers. Steam Tanks can definitely shoot a screen off the table on their own, for example.

For the above, I assumed a unit of 20 Fusiliers (300 points). Without a hero, you can put them at +1 to hit by self-buffing. With a hero, you can potentially get them to +1/+1 with the Master of Ballistics command trait for a command point. That hero can be an Alchemite (90 points), who can cast his mortal wound spell about 70% of the time. About 80% in Settler's Gain. About 95% in Hallowheart. The Alchemite can also give them an order, of which three are applicable: Advance, Counter-Fire and Suppressive Fire. The unit can potentially help you get two battle tactics. If you want to double-reinforce instead, you will need at least one unit of Steelhelms (100 points) to make them battleline. I don't think it's possible to reduce stuff like hero slots, reinforcement points, command traits and subfaction choices to a point number. Even the days where you could buy an extra command point for 50 points are long past by now. You just kinda need to weigh the trade offs. A unit of Fusiliers does lock you in to a certain extent during list building. Depending on what else you want to do in your list, the reasons for or against them change. However, a unit of 30 Fusiliers with full support is probably part of the best human-centered lists, and I think those lists are better than elf or dwarf centered ones, from a purely competitive point of view. EDIT: I also don't 100% believe that damage per point is the best metric. What matters is whether or not you can reliably take on common threats. It might well be worth over-paying on a point-by-point basis for that.

Feels all rumour engines recently have been called FEC, but it really seems like an FEC thing. But of course, a skeleton on a spike could go in a lot of faction. In 40k, too.

For units with buff pieces the normalized values also get better if you run them double reinforced. Which in a competitive context is probably the right play in the case of Fusiliers. Dedicating 540 points to a shooting unit is about right for competitive AoS. 640 if you include the points for the unit of Steelhelms that is required to make Fusiliers battleline (although that cost is debateable because having a few cheap screens is independently valuable). Still leaves you with under a third of your points invested into pure shooting, which I think has historically been the sweet spot.

Yeah, I added in +1 to wound from the command trait. As I said above, I think it's a fair investment to use a command trait and earmark one command point for them. You can also use a different command trait and just give them +1 to hit from All-Out Attack. The damage is still reasonable for their points if you do. Not running any Fusiliers is also defensible, though, if you really want to free up your command ability and Alchemite spell. Literally any other human unit can also make good use of it, after all. Still, the ability to just put ~30 wounds at 24" range from 30 fusiliers with the spell likely just beats out all other options in a competitive environment. Personally, I find that at least among the human command traits, nothing obviously competes with master of ballistics. Like I said above, Grizzled Veteran is good if you want to make a Griffon beatstick and reroll charges is always good, but the use case in which it is better than just using the command ability is fairly specific (several separate units around the general units that all want to charge). Of the elf and dwarf traits, only Unparalleled Duelist for a Dreadlord and Secretive Warlock for a Sorceress jump out to me. And the value of the latter is kind of dubious, since you can get a sorceress to +3 to cast even without it pretty easily.

I will go with 20 to start as well. Partially because I don't want to make things awful for my opponents, partially because I am not excited about batch painting 30 guys, but mainly because I don't trust the combo to stay intact in its current form through the next FAQ.

They are high because they currently do mortals in addition, while most other shooting units do mortals "and the attack sequence ends". It may not seem like much, but at 3+/3+, the damage is significant. It accounts for about half the damage at a 2+ save. Save Fusiliers Fusiliers +1/+1 Fusiliers with mortals Fusiliers with everything 2+ 3.5 6.22 9.33 13.22 3+ 5.25 9.33 10.5 16.33 4+ 7 12.44 11.67 19.44 5+ 8.75 15.56 12.83 22.56 6+ 10.5 18.67 14 25.67 - 10.5 18.67 14 25.67 Of course, there is more nuance to the whole thing. I would not want to claim that Fusiliers are clearly the best shooing unit in the game. As I said before, others have their own strengths. A unit I forgot in my last post were the Daughters of Khaine bow snakes. They basically do Longstrike damage. They also get to double shoot, but need a 700 point Morathi to issue them a command to do it.

Damage calculations of Fusiliers vs. various boogeyman shooting units I could remember off the top of my head: Save Fusiliers with Alchemite (390 pts) Blissbarb Archers (320 pts) Lumineth Sentinels (320 pts) Vanguard Raptors with Longstrike (460 pts) Man-skewer Boltboyz with Swampcalla (340 pts) 2+ 13.22 7.59 8.44 10.67 6.26 3+ 16.33 11.39 9.5 12.89 7.22 4+ 19.44 15.19 10.56 15.11 8.19 5+ 22.56 18.98 11.61 17.33 9.15 6+ 25.67 22.78 12.67 17.33 10.11 - 25.67 22.78 12.67 17.33 10.11 Details: Fusiliers are absolutely in the top tier of shooting units. Other units have advantages over them in some categories: For example, Blissbarbs are more mobile and are more spammable and Vanguard Raptors get to shoot twice once per game. But Fusiliers are still excellent. Their Fortified Position is actually a real upside, too: Combined with the counter-fire order, it means they can't easily be shot off the table by other shooting units, which is generally the easiest way to combat shooting. EDIT: I think the opportunity cost for the Master of Ballistics command trait is fairly low. The other human command traits only really shine in pretty specific builds. Grizzled Veteran can go on a Marshall on Griffon and very little else. Reroll charges is good, but you can just use command points for it. Becoming a priest and getting a +1 to wound prayer does not seem as good as Master of Ballistics in most situations. The most important buff for Fusiliers is the Alchemite spell. If you have that, you can forego Master of Ballistics and still do very good damage. You don't have to give up your command trait to get good Fusilier shooting if you don't want to.

This point kept getting stuck in my mind for some reason. If there is a weakness in the design of the new Cities book, in my opinion it's the Alchemite. It's just kind of absurd that this little 90 point wizard gives out both the best offensive buff and the best defensive buff in the book, for any human unit. It feels very restrictive for competitive list building. How do you justify a Battlemage for 100 points when this guy exists? What reason is there, if you are just going for peak efficiency, not to simply run 2 or even 3 Alchemites. Currently, the +1 to saves buff can be triggered as many times as you have Alchemites because it is not a spell and the +1 stacks because they didn't give it the usual wording ("+1 to saves if you are within 12" of this unit" vs. "...if you are within 12" of a unit with this ability"). I think we can only hope for an early FAQ for this guy, otherwise tournament lists will probably look realy samey for a while. EDIT: The Lord-Castellant is 180 points, also gives out +1 to saves (longer range, but only to one unit) and goes in a lot of lists. Just as a point of reference.

You can? I'll have to take a look at that part of the battletome some time. I have been sticking to the rule of "Path to Glory? More like Path to Ignorey!" up to now. They are cool terrain pieces, though. Anyone interested in them should pick them up, because the kits are leaving the GW webstore little by little without any notice. 3rd party retailers and ebay sellers have not yet completely caught on to that fact, though. I'm still hoping we get kits for the completed Dawnbringer houses from the Battletome, as well. Although I am somewhat afraid that we will have another Ossiarch bone palisade situation on our hands again.

They are usually pretty descriptive in their sunday articles, so I would personally expect one more thing. No idea what it could be, though. Maybe the completed Dawnbringer buildings we are all expecting, or something completely out of left field like that Blacktalon unit a few weeks back.

For the big dragon, I would wait until the base size for Tahlia Vedra is known and maybe use it as a proxy for her. It looks pretty good on that 120mm(?) round base, but seriously tight on the 120mm oval. For the smaller fox-dragon, I would rebase it by rounding off the corners of the rectangular MDF base in order to better blend the shape with the oval. And then just glue it on top. I think you can probably hide the transition with modeling paste/miliput/texture paste.

Also, if you are in mainland europe, their shipping times were kinda sketchy before and Brexit has not helped things.

People like the idea of chaos dwarves more than the actual WHFB faction. Which, in my mind, makes them ideal candidates for an AoS reimagining. The idea of evil dwarves that corrupt the land with their smoke-spewing factories is holds a lot of intuitive appeal for a villain faction. At some point, there was a "leak" that theorized the Chaos Dwarves would build a gigantic mega-cannon to blow open the gates of Azyrheim for the start of 4th edition. That's some super cool high-fantasy stuff that fits great with AoS. The actual old chaos dwarves models are actually pretty bad, and it's good that people have forgotten at this point why they were discontinued after 5th edition. I think the time is right for another go at their concept, though. It would fit very well as another exploration of the dwarf tropes present in AoS: Desire for gold, craftsmenship, tradition vs. modernity, belief/religion.

Same. I am not even sure if GW sent out my order yet, lol. Passing the time by painting Dawnbriger terrain: Speaking of terrain... Personally, I am kinda glad that our faction doesn't use faction terrain. I always just view that as an allegiance ability that you have to pay money for and that can get disabled by enemy monsters. It's not like there is a shortage of themed terrain for Dawnbringers (Aqualith, Nexus Siphon, Guardian Idols...), so that's just the best case in my opinion: You get cool, thematic terrain without having your allegiance abilites tied to it. As for endless spells, I never really warmed up to them. They seem nice for competitive play, but which ones of them are usable/broken seems to change with every GHB, FAQ and even battletomes sometimes. Plus, I always find them hard to justify bringing. Spellcasting is always a gamble (even easy to cast spells are coin flips if the opponent decides to unbind), and I rarely find that the extra point cost for an endless spell (even just 50 points) can be justified as just a "nice to have" thing. You kind of need to build around them to make them worth it, otherwise I find going for a triumph or a cheap unit more attractive. That's a fun bit of tech, even though you som,ewhat have to give the game away by revealing the strike first order at the start of the enemy charge phase. That's not all bad, though: People often get caught up with catching opponents by surpries when using hidden information mechanics, but broadcasting to the opponent that "if you charge me, you eat a strikes-first Black Dragon attack" is valuable on its own. It might dissuade the opponent from charging at all. Also, since counter-charge is end of charge phase, I think you still get to Monstrous Rampage after. Or can the opponent sequence things in such a way that you are locked out from doing it? Like, make it so that all rampages are resolved first, then the counter-charge order after? Looking at the core rules, I think the Cities player gets to order the counter-charge before their rampages: Not 100% on that, though.

I will mark my calendar and be sure to congratulate you on your foresight/clown on you as appropriate.

I really want the 4th ed. antogonist to be Chaos Dwarves. Only, you know, cool-looking this time.

"Nagash wuz here Sigmar is a loser 💀"

This might also be interesting: From the 2005 complete catalogue and hobby reference.

The lore in the new battletome even sets this up perfectly. In the diary pages scattered through the book, there is one that mentions the Dawnbringer Crusade from Hammerhal exchanging two cannons for a unit of infantry from Lethis, which later helps them survive an encounter with some Nighthaunt. Made it seem like the Crusades constantly exchange troops amongst themselves. I think having a mixed city army makes a lot of sense.

I was kinda dimly aware that Ogors were a pretty new full army at the time, but I still could not help but feel even then that some of their models like the Yhetees and Butchers, were among the worst-looking ones in the GW line up.

This kind of thing always looks super cool and you should definitely do it.