Back in White

So it has been some time. In the intervening time I have not actually played or painted or even thought about Warhammer. Now I find myself gearing up for a weekend at AGOM. Still with a largely unpainted army. Still with no list I am totally happy with. Sounds like fun.

Reading my old posts I didn't really lay out what I enjoy building into an army. Having given it some thought here are the principles that seem to lead to an army I enjoy playing with:

1. Not character heavy.

I think back down the army's I've owned and it isn't since the, I think, fourth edition days that I had an army that relied on its characters as more than an augmentation of the units. At that time I had a 100 zombie unit and four vampires...I was young.

The closest I have got in recent times is a lore of light coven with my high elves which I ultimately felt was hit and miss. I've never played with Teclis or the book and though I used to field a battle banner dragon prince unit in the last edition that again was an expensive augmenting character.

2. Prefer models to equipment.

Equipment should specialise a unit for a purpose to me and most units are already specialised enough. Equipment here includes banners and command models but also shields on seaguard and light armor on archers.

This means I get tempted by horde armies. Sometime sorely tempted. I often have large model counts and like very simple specialised unit choices to tooled up elites.

3. Build for reliability.

The reason I don't play hordes, other than my insanely slow painting speed, is I like reliable armies. I played Dwarfs for years and I've played elves of one sort or another for years more and I get used to things doing what I want when I want. Reliability is attractive to me because it means I can take more risks knowing that recovery is more probable because of things like good leadership, high movement and redundant army choices.

In my opinion that rules out a lot of hordes who I see all too often unable to recover from a risk gone wrong or over exposing due to luck factors. I always want to minimise luck unless I need to get lucky then I want to play to get lucky. Reliability helps me play like that.

4. Players units.

Units that are more than what you see on paper attract me. I like the idea of out playing people with 'poor' choices. It is in part an ego thing but also it stops things from being boring in game. I want to make decisions other than run my death star at your death star. A lot of these 'players units' are labelled chaff or redirectors by other people and I don't like those terms however many people agree that between two good players its the 'players units', or chaff, that dictate the game.

5. Movement centric.

I like to both attack and defend. I prefer tactics to strategy. I want to respond to what is happening. Movement is what lets most armies do that. It encourages units to work together and it dictates combat to a great degree, and combat is generally where the dice that will win or lose the game are rolled.

So I need a list. Whatever I come up with you can bet it will live up to those five points - after all every army I've played since fourth edition has...