Grimrock

I'm not solid on all the buffs out there, but if you don't have rend it'll take about 48 succesful ranged attacks to kill him. So for hurricane crossbows (4+/4+) you would need 192 shots, or 9 models firing all shots at him for two rounds. That doesn't account for 'look out sir'. Shootas would need 288 shots from large units. Not saying he can't be killed, but the investment for most armies are far from trivial. He could also run the palisade to block LoS, have some healing magic, run with the deepkin to prevent being targeted... Lots of options to keep him safe until he wrecks face.

Not sure exactly what you mean, but yeah screening is going to have to be to go to strategy for most armies. Keep in mind though, with cogs he can still get around small screens and he'll have a whole army behind him too. If he's allied with a shootcast army or free people they can just nuke the screen from range and let him go free. Plus he can kill most screens in one round so you won't be tying him up for long, especially if he gets a double turn.

Yeah I think free people probably have the best shot against him with the high volume of low damage attacks, but that could change in the new battletome too. Most armies can't put down that much fire though. Even tzeentch would have an extremely difficult time bring him down before he started cleaving his way through important units. Plus any army that's willing to dump the resources required to kill him will be giving the rest of his army a free pass for multiple turns.

Yeaaah, ok then. Anyone saying this guy isn't competitive is off their rocker. I appreciate he's expensive, but his only weakness is speed and if you can drop cogs he has a threat range around 17.5" with the reroll charge command ability. Or you can use a command point to run him on an objective and just own that point for the rest of the game. He'll walk through any magic heavy army because it takes 24 successful spells (because each spell can only do 1 damage to him) to kill him on average. He'll walk through any combat focused army. A ranged heavy army miiiight just kill him before he fights, but it'll take 48 successful wounds at rend 0 to kill him. Oh, and he can be healed so those numbers could be even worse . He does an average of 30 wounds to a 4+ save opponent per combat phase. You can play around half the damage by removing the models close to him, preventing the double pile in, but that doesn't help if he's gotten to one of your heroes or monsters. It also ensures he's free to move and charge whatever he wants to in the next turn. I'd expect some serious nerfs for him next year, but for now I think we've entered the Age of Gotrek. Start filling your lists with cheap chaff to stall him as long as possible, you're going to need them.

At the moment they're not a playable faction, but we could definitely see some of them acting as mercenaries in the new book. I'd actually be pretty disappointed if the didn't include maneaters. There's also a chance that GW might add other AoS factions down the road, but they haven't said anything about that yet.

A pdf would probably work well enough, but then less people might buy the book so who knows if GW would actually go that route. Hopefully they do something at least. Yeah tossing in 50 new models seems... Dangerous for balance. 50 new heroes doubly so. Plus with the way points are capped I think balancing powerful heroes will be really tricky. Take a the ironjawz megaboss for example. He'll probably have tons of health, tons of damage, but be really slow. How do you point that? He can't possibly be cheap, definitely more that a flayer if we go by AoS, but too many points and your force will be too small trying to fit him in and you'll lose board presence, so he'll never get taken.

I'm curious to see if we'll be getting a card pack for the book or not. One thing I like about the game so far is rarely ever needing to look at the book, compared to constantly going back and forth with killteam. But unfortunately if we were getting one I think we'd know by now.

Well, I guess the book really is coming out soon. Preorders drop this weekend. On the plus side, it sounds like the FEC start collecting box is bonkers value for warcry. Full FEC faction plus a terrorgheist monster for good measure.

I missed the part about daemons, and I've got some from all of the big 4, so that's pretty exciting. The little ones would be great for thralls, but using greaters as gargantuans would be pretty cool too. An epic co-op battle to take on a bloodthirster or great unclean one would be amazing. I've always wanted to pick up a mutalith or slaughterbrute too, so here's hoping. I wonder how long it'll take to actually come out though. The game is still super new and apparently a similar teaser for Blackstone fortress took about 3 months to release after a convection. It'd be nice if they let the game settle before putting out the first expansion. Maybe get all of the warbands released first haha.

Better for sure but the combos can still be weird. I've been using the matched play ones exclusively and I've had to redraw out of a few auto loss games already.

I think the main problems with the cards are the random nature of how they can combine. I pulled the stand on terrain objective, but each side only had a small piece in each corner that was tall enough, which would create a stalemate. Pull a different terrain card where there was one big piece in the middle and that objective would suddenly become really interesting. I like the way drawing each card makes for a totally different game, but there are quite a few combos that just don't work even if you're only using the 'balanced' cards. I wonder if someone will come up with a recommended combo list or something similar.

I haven't built it, but I read that the small platform should be built without gluing the.. grate? Onto it. That way it can be placed directly against the larger platforms.

What I meant was if warcry releases an expansion that includes hero models, then the AoS rules for them might affect cultist models. So for example, every warband gets a hero model. In AoS, the Iron Golem hero's command ability is '+1 save to all CULTISTS models wholly within 12 inches'.

Could be something that ties into a future warcry release too. Like if they add a Heroes expansion they might have AOS rules that only affect 'cultists' models.

The dwarf actually won the game in my first match. It was lagging behind sure, but that kept it alive long enough to rush forward and scoop up the treasure right at the end of the third round after the ogre carrying it died. He was even alive with 2 health left after an early game harpoon throw so if he had been a legionnaire it would have been game over.

Yeah the terrain feels... Weird. Like there was a big miscommunication somewhere. They obviously want the terrain cards to be used since they're in the core rules for setting up a game, but the size issues and build instructions really don't mesh with that at all. At this point I'm not really sure if there's much they can do to fix it. Maybe publish working instructions online and errata the 3" rules to 2.5"?

Thank you for posting this! I got my copy a little early and I didn't realize how terrible the actual instructions are. I appreciate that they are letting people build them however they want, but when they're including terrain cards they really should show people how to make the terrain for those properly. More than 3/4s of the buildings are either wrong or just missing entirely from the booklet.

Well if you're zoning people out of an area just by standing on terrain then it isn't really a gimmick. You can use the first turn to get into some prime positions near the objectives, and then your opponent has to decide if they want to concede the objective or risk the extra damage. Seems solid to me.

Worked through some backlog by finishing up two underworlds warbands and some kill team models. Also picked up a contrast paint to test out for the iron golems red-metallic scheme. I'll work on finishing up my 2k slaanesh list this week, bit I don't think I'll get everything done there.

Thanks! Fantastic, I was getting about a third for the 2 doubles as well. I love it when math works out like that. So it looks like the majority of the time you'll have a double, which means you can tweak to a triple if needed. Good to keep in mind if you're planning for abilities in the list building stage.

I think abilities are definitely going to be one of the deciding factors for list building, but they're pretty hard to pin down because the dice mechanic is so new. For giggles I tried rolling 6 dice a bunch of times and the majority came out 2 doubles and 2 singles. Triples were about as rare as one double and 4 singles, quads almost nonexistent. Factoring in the wild dice it actually felt pretty likely you'll have access to most abilities every turn with the quads being a once or twice a game thing. Does anyone know if that lines up with the real odds for doubles/triples/quads?

Well they're obviously not great individually, but point for point they're really solid. Compare 2 of them at 110 points to one of the two handed guys at 105. First, they're faster which is a big deal in a game that doesn't seem to have random charge moves. Second, they have 60% more health. It's less valuable because toughness 3, but I think the runners still come out ahead for overall toughness. Third, up to double the number of attacks. Again less valuable, but the Crit damage is almost the same and more dice means more Crits. Quick math against toughness 4 puts the runners ahead or equal on damage. Fourth and finally, it's two bodies instead of one which is huge for objectives. It's still tough to get a feel for how the game will actually play without the full rules or the scenarios, but I think the runners have a lot of potential at least. I'm mostly just excited to get my hands on them and start playing haha.

Comparing the 2 handed weapon guys to the plains runners, I think a pair of runners comes out on top by a far margin. Since I haven't seen any detriment to putting a lot of bodies on the field, my first thought was actually spamming the runners (5-6 of them) and following up with a pair of cats and the beast handler. I want to include a first fang too, but the points get really tricky and I prefer the cats.

I'm really liking the look of the rules so far. Simplifying combat down to a single roll sounds like a great choice, and I really like the movement. Jumping, climbing, and falling all sound really intuitive and easy to grasp. There are still some gaps in the leak, so I'm not totally sure how everything is going to play out but at this point I'm planning on picking it up ASAP.

They both lack rend though, which can be a big deal in some matchups. They also lack the hedonite keyword so can't get a double activation, don't have innate reroll charges and don't generate models on a lucky battleshock roll. I'm not trying to say the beastherd options aren't good, they are, but the comparison isn't that cut and dry. Plus all beastherd come with the extra costs associated with the battalion that you can't simply ignore. Edit: Your math appears to be assuming getting all 30 gors into combat as well, which is a pretty massive stretch. I've used large bases and getting more than 20 in is much more difficult than 30 small based models. Not to mention maneuvering them up the board. But you know what? It's all just my personal experience and intuition. If daemonettes don't work for you, don't use them. If all you own is beastherd then the choice is obvious. If you're struggling with hordes, maybe give them a shot. You might be pleasently surprised.