PlasticCraic

Also @Magnus The Blue worth pointing out that Mortek can only reroll saves in the combat phase, so if you take Arrow Boys they will be able to kill decent numbers just through weight of shots. I'd also suggest investing in taking down the Harvester first, if he brings one.

A couple of things to bear in mind: The best and fastest way to generate Waaagh points is via the "Ere We Go..." Command Ability, which you will have access to. You will also presumably have a huge number of models on the table, so you should normally rack up a huge number of points in your first turn even without IJ / BS characters. You'll still get D6 for your General, and 1 for charging + 1 for being in combat with Orruk units, so you should hit that key point of 20 very early in the game. You can use Artefacts of the Realms, which are generally better than the Destro ones anyway (e.g. Ignax Scales gives a 4++ mortal save instead of the 5++ Talisman). I'd recommend Ethereal Amulet on the Wyvern, since it can already reroll all saves. It's true that you'll lose out on the Command Trait though. You also get the Big Waaagh Command Ability, which you can double up with the Warboss's Warscroll Waaagh for one huge turn if you need to break through. This army would be significantly better with even a small number of BS or IJ, but if you're determined to run only the Greenskinz you already have, I'd suggest Big Waaagh will be more effective. The +1 to Hit and +1 to Wound alone is way more powerful than the Destro Battle Trait, which is basically roll a 4+ or get nothing. Your third option is to run Stoneklaws Gutstompas (Firestorm Allegiance, which is basically an extra suite of abilities that sits on top of GA Destruction), but I'd recommend Big Waaagh personally.

@Magnus The Blue I know that Ben Savva has had great success with Bonesplitterz against OBR, in fact he's undefeated in the matchup. Ben runs variations on Bonegrinz with either a Rogue Idol or Big Stabbas as his damage unit. Key factors are: Take Kopp Rukk and Brutal Rukk to stack up the CPs and get your drops right down You can cast your spells from back out of unbind range and do the Wardokk dance, so you have 60 wounds of Savage Orruks on a 3+ 6++ You therefore have two options: go first and pin them in their deployment zone, or fight them If you fight them, don't forget that the Bonegrinz CA is not limited to "once per turn" Ben also takes Aetherquartz Brooch, so along with the Battalion CPs (and maybe one you've bought) you can have one huge turn of combat This still requires experience and judgment in terms of knowing when to hold and when to hit the Waaagh button One final tip: take some Savage Boarboys with a view to flying up inside the Crawler's minimum range, and preventing it from firing at all Hope that helps, and let us know how you get on!

Yep, that's the 1-2 combo I'd be looking at too.

Word of warning, my mate does Nighthaunt and he found that the models were too flimsy to pull safely off the trays. Maybe he could have tried smaller magnets, but he found they weren't right for that army.

Huge fan, couldn't play a Gloomspite Gits game without them now!

Haha. It's still a good Battalion imo. Most people seem to prefer Ironfist, which is also excellent, but 120 points seems fair bordering on generous to me.

The closing line seems pretty conclusive to me: "You cannot use this command ability more than once per phase" Only one attempt imo.

The other thing I'm really interested in seeing is for the design studio to move on from a one-to-one mapping of WHFB races to AOS GAs. It's (beyond) time to grow up and leave the Old World behind. Specifically, Phil Kelly has mentioned humans in Ghur who worship Gork and Mork and paint themselves in green warpaint. I think it would be pretty cool to see them in some way, possibly as part of the Gitmob "Savage Tribes" force.

But if I was wishlisting, I'd love to see the Gitmob warband from Underworlds expanded further. Raiders from the steppes, with 6" pile in on their wolves. Meanwhile their warmachines get AOSified, with amazing new Doom Divers causing havoc. When you look at the Black Coach for example as a "before and after", I'd love Grot warmachines to be levelled up in a similar way. So that's where I'd like to see the range expanded, in a fast / movement jank and shooting contraptions army.

Destruction could use more shooting in my opinion. It has historically been up there with Order as the shootinest GA: - Gitmob artillery had a long and proud history in Mixed lists - Thundertusks were rightly feared back in their day, including the legendary, all-conquering Mooclan build - Kunnin Rukk Gitmob artillery was deleted from the range. Thundertusks are now garbage, so between the two of those, that's pretty much all our sniping gone. Kunnin Rukk obviously ain't what it used to be, and some other options (Squig Gobbas, Leadbelchers, Ironblasters) have generally been trash and continue to be so in their current iterations. So yeah, I would say Destruction is missing shooting, and specifically hero sniping. Some people might think that's not thematic for Destruction, and it should just be walk forward and smash stuff. I disagree, because there's no reason why sneaky Grots (for example) shouldn't run war machines (like Skaven do for example, who kept their old metal kits as Destruction was losing plastic ones). Similarly Savage Orruks are hunters, so it totally makes sense to me that they would run around with their bows and arrows (and I still like using them in Big Waaagh). The next army coming out looks like it will be in direct competition with my current Stonehorns army (hyper-elite, monster mash combat army) and I'm not sure I'd have much need for both. We'll see what happens when we know more about Sons.

I think they're roughly equivalent in gameplay terms, but I prefer the Cleaver because of this sweet 3rd party mini I just ordered: https://www.sciborminiatures.com/en_,shop.php?art=1194 Would you look at the state of him!

@Ciotola could you stretch to 3x Start Collecting BCR? You could run the 1000 point army I wrote about recently on the blog. http://plasticcraic.blog/2020/05/22/matched-play-at-1000-points/ And the cost of a Start Collecting isn't much more than a Stonehorn, so you'd actually end up with a viable 2000 point army too:

Mawtribes is a full army with its own book with a spell lore, tribes, allegiance abilities, the whole 9 yards. Troggoths are a small subset of Gloomspite, with little in the way of rules support beyond their Warscrolls. They are however pretty decent in the sense that their core units are really solid. Neither Battletome has ripped it up competitively. They didn't burst out with the flurry of 5-0s you hope for from a new book. There are a few cases of competitive players doing very, very well...but a whole lot more cases were people haven't done at all well with them. Both armies are definitely cool and a lot of fun. A Stonehorn-heavy Mawtribes list is probably the strongest build from either of these factions and is pretty straightforward to play. They are also a very affordable buy-in, with 3 Start Collectings making a viable army. Mawtribes are a "proper army" in a way that Troggoths aren't really...but with Troggoths, you can always expand into other areas of Gits. On the flipside, you can ally Troggoths into Mawtribes (but not vice versa) so if you did a Mawtribes army, you can have the best of both worlds with a half-dozen Fellwaters or Rockguts in there at 2000 points. If you really can't decide what you like best, I would normally suggest buying 3 Start Collecting Beastclaws and go from there. It's a cheap buy in and a decent army. The fly in the ointment is that the next General's Handbook is not far away, and there's a chance that Stonehorns will get a points hike (entirely unwarranted imo, because it's the rest of the book that needs a lift, but we'll see what happens). So with the caveat of "buyer beware", I would say that Mawtribes, specifically Stonehorn-heavy, is easier to play and will bring a better game to the table. You can add some Troggoths to the army, or expand into the rest of Mawtribes, from there if you choose to. But if you're not in a rush, maybe wait a couple more weeks for the GH first. Hope that helps.

I think the closest thing to a Small Layer brush would be a W&N Size 0 Maybe grab one of them, see how you go and take it from there?

Fair enough, your answer is certainly relevant to the topic of the thread if it's driven your gaming group to other games systems or alternative channels. I hope you guys enjoy BA, my local group played a bit of Antares for a while there and it's a great system. I'm hoping the new 40k moves in that direction (activations rather than turns), like they already did with Killteam. I've always used a mix of sourcing stuff from the UK and local online discounters (e.g. Emerald Games) depending on the timescale I'm working to. I don't really have an FLGS to support, so to answer the question of the thread directly, it is unlikely to change my personal purchasing habits. I'll carry on playing Warhammer, and carry on both working around the geoblock and supporting local online retailers. Biggest concern I have is that it could make growing our local group harder if it puts off new players, but that remains to be seen. I'd only be guessing.

I don't know what GW pays its retail staff, but looking at minimum wages as a benchmark is quite illuminating. So looking at the UK Minimum Wage, it's currently GBP 8.21 per hour for adults. That's 6.7 hours of minimum wage work to cover the sticker price of a Start Collecting BCR. In Australia, the level 1 retail award is $21.41 (more at weekends, more at higher levels). That's 7.0 hours of minimum wage work to cover the sticker price of a Start Collecting BCR. When you look at it like that, the pricing seems pretty well-adapted to local conditions. Not everyone earns minimum wage, and GW may well pay above that, but I think it gives a good feel for the wages that selling prices need to cover for local warehousing and retail staff, what your average person can actually afford, and so on. Given that there are real extra costs to cover (e.g. freight + import tariff) I don't actually think the pricing structure looks that far out of whack?

Yep I certainly wouldn't disagree that we are paying over the odds one way or another! I just wouldn't put it all at the door of the government (on this occasion). I had a quick look at the last thing I bought, which was a Beastclaw Raiders Start Collecting. That's GBP 55 in the UK, which is GBP 46.81 of sales revenue + VAT. Add 5% on for tariffs (again I could be wrong), plus 10% GST, at the current Exchange Rate of 1.86 and that gives you a sticker price of AUD 100.56 Current price is AUD 150, which is a markup of 49.2%. There's a few things chipping into that (freight, exchange rate uncertainty, higher wages etc), as well as the tariff which we've already built in. But whatever way you slice it up, that's quite a bit of fat. It would be quite interesting to do a "Burgernomics" analysis: how many hours does a GW retail sales assistant need to work, to buy one SC out of their wages? I'd guess the equation then looks a lot tighter than the actual price at the actual exchange rate would suggest, and is probably a fairer comparison. But bringing it back to the original premise: the experience in Australia suggests that as much as we might not like it as consumers, in practice, when push comes to shove people will continue to find the money even at prices significantly above those currently seen in the UK. Edit: or maybe not, when I did a very sketchy local wage comparison (see below) I'm not sure that we're actually paying that much over the odds relative to what a lot of people earn. Maybe we are actually paying broadly in line with the UK in terms of local market conditions, so Australian prices don't really demonstrate that people in other countries can and will pay that much more in nominal terms.

Standard Australian import tariffs are 5% - I'm not aware of gaming miniatures attracting a special, higher tariff, but if anyone has a source I'm open to being proved wrong. This 5% (?) tariff is only one of many factors in the pricing. There's freight, local wages and probably higher margins for GW in there too. Bearing in mind that VAT represents 17.5% of sticker prices in the UK, yet GST is only 10% in Australia, I don't think it's fair or accurate to pin higher prices on gouging by the Australian government.

Have you tried high-quality, non-GW brushes? I've saved a fortune since I switched to Winsor & Newton. I was constantly churning through GW brushes because they lose their point so quickly. I started buying W&N one brush at a time, and I've never looked back. They are expensive up front, and of course anything will wear out eventually. But I'd never go back to Citadel "throwaways" after using these. The quality is supreme and it works out so, so much cheaper over time. I think if most people even just bought a Size 1 to get started, they'd be converted.

So you've got two true throwaway units in the 20x Shootas (plenty of opportunities for 10 of them to come back), and Zarbag's Gits. The Snufflers don't owe you that much and could also stand in a Gnawhole or something if needed. Another option would be to bust the 60-block down into a 40 and a 20, since you have the spare points? Gives you 40-20-20 plus Squigs, plus Zarbag's Gits, plus whatever you resurrect. What do you think - any other changes you'd make?

I had a crack at writing what I feel would be a competitive Troggoth Hag list: Gameplan would be something like: Skraggy casts Cauldron and put the wounds on the Hag, she heals them back up Zarbag casts Cogs at +2 Hag slows down Cogs so she's rerolling saves and casting 2 spells Skraggy casts Hand of Gork at +2 and throws the Hag across the table Hag chucks out Geminids into the middle of their army, and her Warscroll spell Hag vomits all over them and duffs them up Stabbas run onto the Objectives Profit You have loads of wounds (and more to come through the Loonshrine), loads of negatives to hit, some decent magic, a bit of ranged output (Skraggy, the Hag and chip damage from Geminids, Shootas and the full Spell Lore), and your chaff can fight. There's 30 points to play with and tweak, but as it stands you have a good chance of getting a triumph. There's loads of way you can flex this playbook depending on what you see across the table, so as mentioned above you can speed up Cogs and fling the Squigs into them with their native rerollable charge, you can Hand of Gork Zarbag out there if you really want to get that Geminids off with his +2 to cast, and you can cast Cauldron with the Hag if Skraggy goes down to keep using the spell lore. It's not cutting edge, but I'd personally be quite happy to take it to a competitive event. I think it'll get you further than multiple Hags to be honest - unless Rule of Cool is the big determining factor.

I mean you can go anti meta too, but yeah. If you don't have answers to the questions that top armies pose, then yes, you'll have a rough old time of it.

I think that's where we have a fundamental disagreement, I don't see tournament lists as "some sort of skew". It's what I play against all the time, so for me it's the relevant frame of reference.

I would confidently take a bet on which book racks up more 5-0s. As long as I don't have to bet on Mawtribes.