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Going halves on the island of blood box set with a friend so will end up with a few Sea Guard as my core.
Seems a waste though since they can fight in another rank, to only have two ranks of them. But then they're more expensive than normal spearmen, and their bows aren't that great.
So would I be better off sticking with some other spearmen?
Also seems like griffins are over-priced for what you get, is that accurate?

Sadly you right on every account.

Also the IoB sea guard and normal spearmen do not mix well as the IoB sea guard are much larger /shakes fist at scale creep.

It is easy however to butcher that IoB griffon and turn it into a something that proxies well as a great eagle.

So i'd be better off with just the 10 sea guard from the box set, and buying some spearmen to field separately for my core army?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
as as a very quick question, I was going to undercoat with white since i'll be painting them roughly the "vanilla", i.e. white robes with trimming. But the GW painting guide says undercoat with chaos black, which would making painting white over it "difficult" to say the least.

Yeah maybe just use the seaguard as a bunker for you archmage. It really depends if the size difference bothers you that much. BUt you are going to need atleast a few boxes of the normal spearmen (they come with the stuff to build them as seagaurd btw)

As for painting my advice is to pick a scheme that avoids using white at all. Hence my HEs are blue,silver and pale grey as all the colors paint over a black under coat with only 1 or 2 coats.

Very few folk can really paint white en masse and pull it of and as a result out of all the armies I have ever seen its HEs that tend to look the worst becasue folk fall into the "I gotta paint it like GWs" mentality.

That's actually pretty sound advice dude. I'll have to find a pale colour that paints well over black. Something over Dheneb Stone, maybe.

Fortress grey covers in one coat.

Sea guard are an overpriced unit that has identity issues. You are better off fielding spearmen and archers in their own separate units. This gives you focused roles and more bodies on the field.

IMO seaguard are a bad way to meet the core requirements.

Aerethan wrote:Sea guard are an overpriced unit that has identity issues. You are better off fielding spearmen and archers in their own separate units. This gives you focused roles and more bodies on the field.

IMO seaguard are a bad way to meet the core requirements.

Agreed 100% but might Joey might aswell use them till he gets some more core.

I agree to use them until you have better, but don't waste any money on getting more of them.

I agree 100% with what has been said here already. Honestly its a shame, such a better looking model than Spear Elves and Archer Elves. But the problem is that when you need an anvil Spears are better, and when you need a bunker/ranged unit Archers are better.

For the Cost of 35 LSG you can probably have 25 Spears and 10 archers. Not sure on point costs, but the later is always better IMO. You have longer range with your shooting unit, you don't take negative modifiers for moving and shooting as much on archers as you do with LSG.

Quite a bit of people just run Archers as their core, I always liked having 35-45 Spears as my anvil and the rest into Archer units.

Actually this might sound like a stupid question but i couldn't i assemble them as spearmen or is that not possible?
If not I will proxy them as spearmen in our local friendly games anyway.
Just as an aside, what lore should I use for my mages?
High magic is appealing for Fury of Kaine, and possibly Flames of the Pheanix, but I can't imagine that staying in play long enough to be useful. Sheild of Saphery could also be useful.
Lore of Shadow also looks pretty useful.

Shadow is amazing and just snip and file those bows off and you got basic spearmen!

You could say they are just spearmen, but they are not the same scale as the current HE spearmen set, so there's that.

I primarily use Lore of Life for Dwellers and the buff spells in my High Elves army.

Aerethan wrote:You could say they are just spearmen, but they are not the same scale as the current HE spearmen set, so there's that.

I primarily use Lore of Life for Dwellers and the buff spells in my High Elves army.

I like the look of Life particularly for Throne of Thorns, I hate miscasts. And the buffs are very handy.
I think we have a winner...

The problem that I had with Life, was that aside from Dwellers, it is a very passive and defensive Lore (for my taste). I personally loved playing my Elves with Lore of Light. Makes for very fast Elves and very lethal.

It is also not that much of a flop as Life in my experiences since that Lore relies so much on Throne of Vines.

I second using Life, Our elites give us enough killing power its survivability HEs lack and it helps cover the hole.

Agreed. Swordsmasters with 4+ regen AND +4 T? yes please!

While I have your attention...
Tomorrow I'll be battling Brettonia and Skaven at 1200 pts. I have a fair few models and can proxy anything I need to suit me.
I'm thinking some spearmen and some archers (with a mage hiding in them), a couple of units of swordmasters and some silver helms. Some help would be appreciated.

Against Brets swordmasters will do well mostly since Brets have little to no shooting.

Skaven I have no experience with so I'm no help there.

This is my army list (badly laid out):

mage-100
feedback scroll-50
mage-100
level 2-35
staff of channelling-15

10*spearmen-90
command-25

10*spearmen-90
command-25

sword masters of hoeth*10-150
command-30
banner of sorcery-50
dawnstone-25(re-roll failed armour)
total-255

sword masters of hoeth*10-150
command-30
razor standard-45(armour peircing)
total-225
tsf-1020

Silver Helms*6=138
command-40
178
1193

for Bretonia going to give the level 2 mage law of metal for damage goodness, and the level 1 high magic for dispel magic.
Against Skaven my opponant was bragging about bringing 80 slaves to the table so i'm just going to stock up on law of fire for both mages and try to destroy as many of them as I can before engaging with swordsmen/bright lances.

Hmm sword masters don't have a great armor save and with calvalry your probably not going to get one at all. Might want to drop that dawnstone in favor of another 2 models or different magic item.

combine the spearmen into 1 unit of 20, change the silver helms to dragon princes, run Lore of Life and hope for buff spells to put on the swordmasters.

You dont have enough core for to meet the the minimum 25% and you special choices go over the 50% allowance.

Champions are also rarely worth the points and silverhelms are a terrible unit.

I agree with Aerethan however combine what core you take into one unit and proxy the silverhelms as dragon princes.

Right now I realise the 50% special limit is in place I can't have the cavalry anyway.
Going to have to proxy a couple of eagles I guess.
Oh and now I don't have 25% of my army as cores...making an army list in fantasy is a fething effort.

Sadly core choices for HE kinda suck, so you learn to optimize and use as little as possible( in my 2500 list I use 626 points, 1 point over my 25% requirement).

ended up fighting skaven and orcs simultaniously for various reasons, with brettonian allies.
I did alright against the orcs with my swordsmasters, but against the massive skaven units i'm stuck. They're simply too big to kill in combat and they take all break tests at Ld 10 with a re-roll (though i'm taking my opponant's word on this). I will probably be fighting a very similar set-up a fair bit, so how would I go about crushing skaven masses with High Elves/

If you can negate their rank bonus, they lose the Strength In Numbers rule so their Ld will be like 5 instead. I'm not sure how they are getting 10, I don't know if there is a cap on the bonus for Ld.

If your opponent is running a greyseer and bsb Ld 10 rerolls is the norm so no surprises there.

Dealing with the skaven slaves in big blocks is a pain for high elves, every unit in our book can win combat against them easily but they will always be steadfast (my regular skaven opponent runs 2 blocks of 100 each) Your best bet is to redirect them however if he does what my skaven player does and hides all his killy units behind the slaves its of little use.

A unit of 100 makes for a fun Dwellers cast! And at S3 you'll kill 50% of the unit on average. May not make or break the game, but it would be fun to watch.

sadly its a waste of a dwellers 100 down to 50 is fun to do but sadly it does not hurt the units combat effectiveness.

And they worst part is once you get through the "slave wall" you get to fight a couple of HPAs and a big ass furnace unit =( oh and the bastard still has points to take a doomrocket and a couple of plague mortars so he is deleating my units the whole time why this is going on.