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I have never played Fantasy before but i own some Vampire Counts that are mostly assembled and all unpainted.

Ive wanted to play Fantasy but noone around plays it and my Local hobby store moved location and didnt want us playing there anymore so they destroyed our tables we paid for and designed.

How is fantasy?

I was wondering if i should keep my models in hopes of finding a store to try fantasy in or if i should just put them up in the swap shop?

I'd take it over 40K anyday. It takes a more focused battle plan to win, as opposed to 'I've got better guns' routine I find alot in 40k. I also find it more visually appealing to see a rank and file army lined up on the table over the sporadic units and tanks.

Vampire Counts are a fun army. Easy to start, tough to master. I'd give it a shot, play a couple small games. If its not you, then swap them out. Ya never know...

The only thing i have bad to say about Vamps is that some of the models are hard as hell to assemble. Like the grave guard and the skeletons.

It could just be me because i do have shaky hands, but i could never put together a single skeleton type unit.

I struggled with skeletons for a long time. I spent more time on my hands and knees fishing torsos out of dust bunnies than I did actually assembling. But in the end, here's what worked for me:

You'll need
- Either a Dremel tool with a small drill bit or a pin vise drill doohicky. I'll have to look up the exact bit size.
- Floral wire from Michael's or similar craftin' granny store. The stiff green wires that are bundled in the straight packs are what I use.
- Clippers.

Just drill a small hole in the bottom of the torso and the top of the leg section's spinal column. Clip off a small bit of wire, glue it into the leg hole. Once dry, glue the torso on top! Bingo Bango, the rest is easy once you have a secure base.

I did 15 skeletons in the time it used to take me to assemble 1 with my meat hands.

sounds annoying as hell lol

Is there anywhere i can play 40k online or anything? ive heard of vassal but idk anything about it ( reason why i ask 40K is because idk any of the rules for fantasy )

Im finishing up some gouls at the moment for my vc, other than that i think im done with putting them together, just gotta glue a part of the corpse cart down.

Just stick to ghouls if you want, they are pretty competitive as well.

i have i think 20 ghouls lol.

they are easier to put together too ^_^

except for this morning when i was shaving some of the excess off them after cutting them off the sprue.

I sliced the hell out of my thumb.

Fantasy is currently a mess. Most fantasy players in my area have dropped it and when I do see someone playing they don't look like they are having fun at all. The new terrain rules are stupid and an obvious money grab to get people to buy stuff that will typically have little effect on the game. Actual line of sight results in silly things like wizards shooting giant fireballs harmlessly through three units to hit the enemy; the entire field is effectively empty unless you buy giant buildings capable of entirely blocking sight to stuff. Artillery is stupid and that fancy giant monster with a character on top is now a liability since he will be one shot first turn unless you get lucky with ward saves (you better have given him one).

Victory conditions are terrible: your opponent has a huge 600 point unit that you killed down to one man which fled and can't rally except on snake eyes. Well you get no credit for that unless he escapes the board. The missions are all terrible except for standard "kill other side" and the banner breakpoint one.

The magic system, while at its core is actually pretty good now has ridiculous spells that decimate units and are not nearly as hard to cast as the developers thought they would be. Sitting a wizard in a building then hookshoting templates which kill things on an average 50% chance into combat and not hitting your side is absurd.

Steadfast is poorly thought out and results in boring grindfests where two units sit in the middle of the table until one person just gets unlucky. If it was negated by flank charges it would have been fine but they went overboard. Similarly if units like undead or demons enter a building it is literally impossible to get them out without killing every single one.



In regards to Vampire Counts they are currently a broken army. They can not take advantage of the new movement rules which benefit from leadership values unless they are within general range, a whopping 12 inches because their leadership is so bad across the board. The only decent core they have (ghouls) do not even have command groups so they can't use the new musician rules anyway. Fear has been nerfed to uselessness so that is a nonfactor. Additionally their crumble rule was overridden with the new instability rule which is much worse (no regen or ward saves against it). Dire wolves had their fast cav status removed for no reason I can see and Fel Bats will never move their full flight range since undead can't march outside of general range; even if they could they will never be able to pass a march block test consistently. Basically you are relegated to a few units (Grave Guard are still possibly the best infantry unit in the game) and have to take a bunch of useless core slots you don't want. You can squeak out a functional list but it will probably include mostly ghoul units (which will be outmaneuvered by every other army), a big graveguard block, the crown of command and whatever small amount of stuff you can fit in afterward which is boring as hell.

well idk any of fantasys rules. like i said ive never played a fantasy match ever. i have some wolves 2 boxes of gouls, some zombies, a cart, and a lord.

Yeah I was just getting at that Fantasy is pretty bad right now and not to bother with it until some more army books come out to see where they are going with it. 8th edition is very poor and opened up a lot of problems that are easily exploitable so the game typically degenerates into who found the most ridiculous combo the designers missed. Additionally rather than make quick army lists that work "ok" like they did with Ravening Hordes back when they rolled out 6th edition they just made some quick faqs and let certain armies (notably Wood Elves) flounder until they get around to writing a book in three years (maybe who knows? it's been almost a year since 8th was rolled out and we have an Orc book which is barely an upgrade to the last one).

If you are a 40k player just stick with that since it's a much better designed game which sucks to say as a person that was hardcore into Fantasy even during the low point of 7th edition.

Ixquic wrote:
In regards to Vampire Counts they are currently a broken army. They can not take advantage of the new movement rules which benefit from leadership values unless they are within general range, a whopping 12 inches because their leadership is so bad across the board.

Wrooooooong. They can also march if they're within 6 of any unit with the 'vampire' rule. That includes Blood Knights, Black Coaches and Varghulf, as well as Vampires and Vampire lords.

Ixquic wrote:The only decent core they have (ghouls) do not even have command groups so they can't use the new musician rules anyway.

Sure, except Skeleton Warriors are the best bunker unit you have and zombies can be raised cheaply and numerously. Also they don't count towards core points but you're ignoring the awesome power of Corpse Carts.

Ixquic wrote:Additionally their crumble rule was overridden with the new instability rule which is much worse (no regen or ward saves against it).

Wrong wrong, wrong wrong wrong wroooong. You're thinking of Daemons of Chaos, Demonic Instability. Armour saves aren't allowed, but ward and regeneration is.

sounds like the game is a little out of whack just from what im hearing here.

Squash wrote:

Ixquic wrote:
In regards to Vampire Counts they are currently a broken army. They can not take advantage of the new movement rules which benefit from leadership values unless they are within general range, a whopping 12 inches because their leadership is so bad across the board.

Wrooooooong. They can also march if they're within 6 of any unit with the 'vampire' rule. That includes Blood Knights, Black Coaches and Varghulf, as well as Vampires and Vampire lords.

Ixquic wrote:The only decent core they have (ghouls) do not even have command groups so they can't use the new musician rules anyway.

Sure, except Skeleton Warriors are the best bunker unit you have and zombies can be raised cheaply and numerously. Also they don't count towards core points but you're ignoring the awesome power of Corpse Carts.

Ixquic wrote:Additionally their crumble rule was overridden with the new instability rule which is much worse (no regen or ward saves against it).

Wrong wrong, wrong wrong wrong wroooong. You're thinking of Daemons of Chaos, Demonic Instability. Armour saves aren't allowed, but ward and regeneration is.

Yeah you're pretty much 100% wrong on all counts. First I said new movement rules not their old marching restriction (which was unaffected by leadership), such as swift reforms or changing facing to a unit that flanked you which require a leadership test to pass. With leadership values ranging from 1-6 (with 6 being the elites of the army) you will rarely be able to take advantage of that and never reliably outside of general range or without a Wight King in the unit. Even if you have a hero Vampire in the unit, their leadership is the baseline standard of 7 so that makes them only as good as generic Empire statetroops in that regard.

I have no idea why you think that Skeletons are a great bunker. At 8 points a pop for the statline of a goblin they are pricey and fragile, especially to artillery fire. Zombies are not nearly the tarpit they once were now that two, three and sometimes four ranks of attacks can be directed at them. The new winds of magic makes a strong magic phase much less reliable, even with the Master of the Black Arts (+2 dice) ability and single dice invocations are not a reasonable option when there is a 1/3 chance to fail and that results in that caster being unable to cast for the rest of the turn. With a max of 12 dice per phase you will get 6 reliable casts, a third of which will probably be shut down. So four successful invocates are not going to swamp down most enemies unless they are very basic troopers. A corpse cart is a pricey 100 points and doesn't count for core and after heroes and required special you have very little left to spare so it is costly for one extra model per invocation and with the new way that bound spells work you have to use your precious casting dice to get its ASF spell off reducing its usefulness.

Lastly you need to check out the faqs.
http://www.games-workshop.com/MEDIA_CustomProductCatalog/m1490283a_FAQ_VampireCounts_V1_3.pdf

Page 33 – Break tests
Change to “All Undead units have the Unbreakable and
Unstable special rules.”

New unstable does not allow for saves of any kind.

I must say that Ixquic is one of few people i've met who say 8th edition is terrible. I don't think it's great, but it's far from the mess it's being made out to be.

Artillery is fine. So you lost partials, 40k already has that; and cannons no longer guess, apart from the fact that nearly everyone who used guess-range weapons prior to 8th edition got the hang of being pretty damn accurate most the time, it's a bit of an annoyance.

Victory conditions can be ignored in favour of good old Victory Points, you don't have to play them unless it's in a tournament that says so; the same goes for the random terrain rules, very few people I know like them, even fewer use them.

Magic is quite broken but usually relies on a single lord-level caster like Teclis or a Slann; if you can kill them then they lose a large chunk of points, and a lot of the effectiveness of the opposing army dies with them. They're just sturdier glass cannons (pyrex cannons?). However, since most books have a decent amount of magic/magic defense, this often goes both ways, with two magic-heavy lists (not uncommon in 8th) battling for magical superiority.

Steadfast units are fine. It's a very realistic representation, if you have more guys than the enemy then why would you run? Without steadfast, all you'd have is Killy unit A attacking horde unit B, killing a handful and taking 1 or 2 casualties in return then watching the horde unit panic and get run down. Steadfast might not be amazing, but when it comes down to it, it's the lesser evil.

As for older armies, I heavily doubt woodies will take 3 years. Everyone knows that woodies are next to unplayable in 8th, and an army that is unplayable doesn't make sales. It's in GW's best interests to re-do the army as soon as possible to get people back to their treehuggers.

40k doesn't have units that are in tightly packed formations. A template in fantasy can easily hit 16 models and often more; 30 with the large blast. It's not just the loss of partials, but the loss of guess made catapults 100% accurate one third of the time. I don't care how good people are at guessing, there is no way they are putting down templates to get the absolute maximum amount of models hit from 3-4 feet away. Look at the template example in the 7th edition book; there is no way anyone is placing a template like that on a unit across the board every time; that is what removing guessing allows you to do. Additionally before being an inch or two off with a cannon guess could make a big difference. Now everyone guesses 7.5" from the target (or whatever the statistically best location for the first guess to be is) every time which is stupid.

Saying that you can ignore parts of the the game that suck (victory conditions, terrain) doesn't really speak for the game's quality...

You don't need a super character caster to break the magic system. A level 4 with a few magic items and access to the new college lores is all you need. Magic defense is much more rare than overwhelming magic offense with a few specific examples (like the 2+ magic ward banner the High Elves have).

Like I said, steadfast would be fine if negating ranks canceled it.

I'm also not sure where you are getting this confidence in a speedy release of books. Wood Elves, Tomb Kings and Brettonia went a full edition with no new book. On the 40k side Witch hunters and Necrons are still using books from two editions ago and people are already starting to think about 6th edition. We are almost a year from when Fantasy 8th was released and we have ONE book and it isn't a radical departure from its 7th edition version.

Avatar 720 wrote:I must say that Ixquic is one of few people i've met who say 8th edition is terrible. I don't think it's great, but it's far from the mess it's being made out to be.

This, new 8th rules actually see more people playing fantasy where i am.

There are a few "annoying" things I really dont like about 8th edition, However it fixed a lot more things I absolutely hated about 7th.

Random charges are the best thing ever, no more sitting 7-8 inches outside dwarves and laughing.

No more guess ranges make some armies less of a barrier for new players. Guessing ranges was not "skill" or "tactics" it was carpentry.

Steadfast is a move in the right direction, currently I think its a little to good, but its better then the alternative, which was charge big block with dragon, win combat by 1 or 2, and break the unit, repeat.

Magic is kinda meh. in 7th you took a scroll caddy or two and had nothing to worry about. Now without a level 4 certain armies are going to get decimated in the magic phase. You kind of need that level four to have a shot at dispelling some casters. Course it is kind of nice that you dont have to cast through 2-4 dispell scrolls before finally landing a spell.

Percentile system owns the hell out of the slot system

Overall 8th did some great things for the game, most of the people I have found that hate it are refusing to change up their 7th edition lists or still playing with the 7th edition mentaility.

I definitely agree that the percentage system is much better than the slot system.

If the magic system didn't have the broken spells like Dwellers from Below, Purple Sun and whatever the big Gold spell is it would be awesome.

Guessing wasn't about skill it was stopping perfect placement and increasing randomness. Removing it unbalanced artillery to a huge degree although it seems with the new Orc book they will be rarer. Once Empire comes out it we can see if spamable mortars will still be an issue.

It's a bummer since they took one step forward in a lot of respects and then two back.

Ixquic wrote:I definitely agree that the percentage system is much better than the slot system.

If the magic system didn't have the broken spells like Dwellers from Below, Purple Sun and whatever the big Gold spell is it would be awesome.

Guessing wasn't about skill it was stopping perfect placement and increasing randomness. Removing it unbalanced artillery to a huge degree although it seems with the new Orc book they will be rarer. Once Empire comes out it we can see if spamable mortars will still be an issue.

It's a bummer since they took one step forward in a lot of respects and then two back.

Im thinking GW is trying to phase out gunlines in the new books. Look at the Ardboyz scenarios. They are literally daring you to take a gunline lol.

Im all for gunlines going away tbh. They are neither fun to play, or play against imo.

ShivanAngel wrote:
Im all for gunlines going away tbh. They are neither fun to play, or play against imo.

I am 100% with you on this.

I play fantasy and I think the game is broken in many regards. I play Lizardmen. last game I played (4,000 points) was me versus Orks and Hordes of Chaos allied against me. I ended up actually conceding defeat in turn 7, not because I had lost the game per se, but because I really just wasn't having fun and didn't want to deal with the mess of the terrain and the final battle of my horde unit versus theirs. Every magic phase is completely random and the magic lores are hardly balanced. Chaos apparently has a spell that doesn't allow any unit to use any character leadership values, for the whole army. I am sorry, no spell should ever target a whole army, that is just dumb. I had a slaan, and old blood, and a scar vet in a Saurus horde unit sitting behind a marsh, which was dangerous terrain. Had I not quit I would have just sat there and widdled down the chaos warrior unit down until they were forced to charge me through the marsh. I did not feel like playing 4 more turns of the same old boring stuff. So, I decided to concede. I would say the game was pretty even when I quit playing. I simply quit because I had no desire to finish the game.

The first few turns we played my skinks with their blow guns wiped out tons of gobbos, and even some chaos knights since they got poisoned weapons and get 2 shots per a model. The game was looking in my favor. This is why I conceded the game and this is why I dislike fantasy. I wiped out a whole unit of boar boyz, except for their main character some new Orc speical character. Who then proceeded to wipe out whole units of sauruses. I managed to wipe out over half their army and they had 3 characters wipe out half of mine. That is just dumb. One character should never be that powerful. In 40K if one guy assaults a unit of 30 models, that one guy would die, in fantasy if you cheesed his gear or his rules are cheese enough you survive.

The new terrain rules are dumb, we don't even use them. The new magic system is OK, but on an Army that relies on Magic it can suck since it is random. I also don't like the ultimate power/dispell rules. Then since characters get armor saves, ward saves, and regeneration saves, it just makes them too powerful. I think the casting value for certain spells is also extremely unbalanced, and very much broken.

Overall, fantasy is my least favorite game right now. Hopefully new army books will fix some things, but I think so many things in WHFB are heavily broken right now, and I find my lizardmen army very very boring. All my games involve me wiping out over half the other person's army then getting caught in a tar pit unit where characters are so powerful they cancel each other out and you get like 10 thousand rounds of combat. Really there isn't much strategy past your army list in fantasy. You build your army, you march up it, you roll some dice, and that is it. Just make sure you don't get flanked and make sure you pick the right combo of magic items to kill your foe.

Whfb 8th ed is by far the best and most fun whfb edition ever since i started playing the game in 1998 (5th ed). It has revitalized fantasy in my area from the imbalanced mess that was 7th. It IS a different game in many ways from 7th, and many players cannot adjust to it, hence the hate, BUT if you look at several polls the majority who responded like 8th. The silent majority.

If you are a 40k player then i believe you will find 8th ed a good change of pace. The good thing is that you will be starting fresh and unbiased, so try it out.

freddieyu1 wrote:Whfb 8th ed is by far the best and most fun whfb edition ever since i started playing the game in 1998 (5th ed). It has revitalized fantasy in my area from the imbalanced mess that was 7th. It IS a different game in many ways from 7th, and many players cannot adjust to it, hence the hate, BUT if you look at several polls the majority who responded like 8th. The silent majority.

If you are a 40k player then i believe you will find 8th ed a good change of pace. The good thing is that you will be starting fresh and unbiased, so try it out.

I played 3rd and 4th edition, then stopped for years and got back into it right when 8th edition came out. So I have no experience with editions 5 through 7. No bias against them either. I find a lot of imbalance and impracticality in 8th edition. For one, the magic lores and the spell casting values are far from balanced. Since I play lizardmen and have Initiative 1 on so many of my troops, any initiative based magic is pretty much instant death. I think the miscast table is also dumb, but I usually play a life Slaan with a cupped hands, so it isn't a huge deal for me.

Heroes and Lords are still heavily broke, just a bit more toned down from 4th edition. They now have point limits on items, and have restrictions on what items they can take. However, a hero charter should never be able to wipe out a whole unit of 30 well armed core troops or elites. I guess they are special and rare in WHFB, but you get my drift. I also hate the victory conditions and the turn limitations. So many times I wipe out over half an army and take minimal losses, plus with life magic they rise from their graves. A character who is leading a unit into battle and that whole unit but the character gets wiped, that character should suffer some penalty from losing that weight, and losing that many comrades.

Also, multiple combats combined into one combat can be a freaking mess, then you have conflicting rules. It just seems to always take 5 times as long to play a fantasy game. Then there are certain things that just don't sit right with me. The always strike first rule + higher initiative means you get to reroll misses? So, you are giving basically high initiative armies like elves, a free magic item or ability to allow reroll misses.

Multiple saves are also dumb. Last game there were two units on the other side that had 2+ magic ward saves. Yeah that is really balanced to a horde of Chaos warriors with halberds and frenzy. I think GW just made fantasy too convoluted, and there are too many rules which overlap and there are too many things that cause imbalance.

I like the way GW went with 40K from 2nd to 5th. They took out a lot of the cheese from characters. You think characters in 40K now are tough, go back and read RT or 2nd Edition. Where you could give a hero character a 2+ invulnerable save and terminator armor, so they had a 2+ armor save on 2D6, and could take both saves.

My biggest beef with 8th edition is the army list structure and the magic system. I think a lot of spells are extremely imbalanced of cost to cast versus what you get, and that the randomness is really not all that great. Out of the couple dozen games I have played since 8th edition came out, I cannot really recall ever having a single good magic phase where I was like that was awesome.

The only Lord level characters I see going against a single unit and coming out victorious are the greater deamons.

Most other lord level characters fall under the shear number of attacks.

Course, greater daemons at over 600 points should be able to take out a 300 point unit of core. Course a 90 point cannon can also one shot them.

I agree, Warhammer is a complete mess. There are some good ideas put forth by the most recent ruleset, but they've been implemented very poorly. Strategy is at an absolute minimum, and the game is decided heavily by list building (even more than it was in 7th Edition, where it was already a problem) and dumb luck. My gaming group used to host between 5-10 games of Warhammer each week. Now we're struggling to support more than 2. Most of our players played 8th Edition for about a month, realized that they weren't having any fun with it, and started playing HordeMachine, Malifaux, Infinity or 40k.

Between 40k and Fantasy, I would choose 40k in a heartbeat. As much as I love the concept of WHFB, the game is in a bad place right now. It has an identity crisis, unsure of what it wants to be, and it needs a new designer to come in and rework things from the ground up (much as what we saw between 5th and 6th edition). As it stands, WHFB isn't fit for competitive play, and it isn't fun enough to be a casual game. It's just kind of...there. Functional, but only just.

I dunno about you folks, but over here we have had already 2 mini tourneys, and am about to start a gladiator league (7 game eliminations over 7 weeks, top players from each sector will duel it out in a knock out finals)...

So far 8th has revitalized whfb, and those involved are having fun, and we are getting more players starting whfb (although majority of guys are 40k players).

This is much better than 7th, which was basically dead dead dead....5th and 6th was the peak of whfb over here, but now it's getting back with 8th ed.

So I guess it depends on your playing areas. We are luckier over here then.

freddieyu1 wrote:Whfb 8th ed is by far the best and most fun whfb edition ever since i started playing the game in 1998 (5th ed). It has revitalized fantasy in my area from the imbalanced mess that was 7th. It IS a different game in many ways from 7th, and many players cannot adjust to it, hence the hate, BUT if you look at several polls the majority who responded like 8th. The silent majority.

If you are a 40k player then i believe you will find 8th ed a good change of pace. The good thing is that you will be starting fresh and unbiased, so try it out.

I've played since 4th edition, skipped 6th, got back in at the start of 7th and watched the game degrade after Demons came out. 8th is fun if you like making a list revolving around an overpowered aspect of the game, then shoving models straight ahead into the meat grinder and placing templates since strategy is irrelevant when everything that matters is stubborn and terrain is meaningless.

Say what you will about certain armies being broken in 7th (they totally were) it's an overall better game.

SkaerKrow wrote:I agree, Warhammer is a complete mess. There are some good ideas put forth by the most recent ruleset, but they've been implemented very poorly. Strategy is at an absolute minimum, and the game is decided heavily by list building (even more than it was in 7th Edition, where it was already a problem) and dumb luck. My gaming group used to host between 5-10 games of Warhammer each week. Now we're struggling to support more than 2. Most of our players played 8th Edition for about a month, realized that they weren't having any fun with it, and started playing HordeMachine, Malifaux, Infinity or 40k.

Between 40k and Fantasy, I would choose 40k in a heartbeat. As much as I love the concept of WHFB, the game is in a bad place right now. It has an identity crisis, unsure of what it wants to be, and it needs a new designer to come in and rework things from the ground up (much as what we saw between 5th and 6th edition). As it stands, WHFB isn't fit for competitive play, and it isn't fun enough to be a casual game. It's just kind of...there. Functional, but only just.

This is pretty much how I feel. There used to be a huge Fantasy community in my area but it started to die off during the second half of 7th edition when the game got stupid. People came back for 8th but quickly learned it was full of even more unbalanced problems and now you can't find a game.

thats the one thing about fantasy that i dont think would effect me since ive never played, i dont have any biases on previous editions. the only sad part is everyone else does so they will either rage, or destroy me.

Also my gaming store closed down so i have nowhere to go to play.

Slipknotsomeone wrote:thats the one thing about fantasy that i dont think would effect me since ive never played, i dont have any biases on previous editions. the only sad part is everyone else does so they will either rage, or destroy me.

Also my gaming store closed down so i have nowhere to go to play.

Too bad....then it's a moot point then....

Ixquic wrote:40k doesn't have units that are in tightly packed formations. A template in fantasy can easily hit 16 models and often more; 30 with the large blast. It's not just the loss of partials, but the loss of guess made catapults 100% accurate one third of the time. I don't care how good people are at guessing, there is no way they are putting down templates to get the absolute maximum amount of models hit from 3-4 feet away. Look at the template example in the 7th edition book; there is no way anyone is placing a template like that on a unit across the board every time; that is what removing guessing allows you to do. Additionally before being an inch or two off with a cannon guess could make a big difference. Now everyone guesses 7.5" from the target (or whatever the statistically best location for the first guess to be is) every time which is stupid.

At the end of the day, stats are just that; stats, numbers. My fire warriors have killed a lot more stuff in melee than they have shooting over the ourse of 10+ games. Statistically that shouldn't ever happen, but it does.

Saying that you can ignore parts of the the game that suck (victory conditions, terrain) doesn't really speak for the game's quality...

So? At least they're ignorable, which is the point. Don't play them if you don't want to. Lots of people don't like doing all bosses in dungeons on WoW, but a few instances require them to be done, does that make it a better game? I think giving you the ability to ignore them makes it a better game than if you were forced to use them.

[b]You don't need a super character caster to break the magic system. A level 4 with a few magic items and access to the new college lores is all you need. Magic defense is much more rare than overwhelming magic offense with a few specific examples (like the 2+ magic ward banner the High Elves have).[/b]

Bold: Don't remember saying you did. I said it normally relies on a single lord-level caster.

A level 4 with magic items and lore access is what a good number of army books have, Lizards, WoC, Empire all have access to a good number of college lores on their Lords. Can't speak for others though as I don't know their books.

Like I said, steadfast would be fine if negating ranks canceled it.

It's fine as it is to be honest. Might be better if negating ranks killed it, but as the rulebook says, why break ranks and flee if you're outnumbering the enemy?

I'm also not sure where you are getting this confidence in a speedy release of books. Wood Elves, Tomb Kings and Brettonia went a full edition with no new book. On the 40k side Witch hunters and Necrons are still using books from two editions ago and people are already starting to think about 6th edition. We are almost a year from when Fantasy 8th was released and we have ONE book and it isn't a radical departure from its 7th edition version.

Fantasy is better with army books than 40k due to the fact that fantasy doesn't have a flagship race that has to get a new codex every couple of hours or it's doomed. TKs are being re-done as we speak and are close to completion and release. We don't know much about fantasy releases after that, so it's completely open, but logic tells me that woodies, bretts and ogres will be re-done quicker than, Empire or WoC.

ShivanAngel wrote:The only Lord level characters I see going against a single unit and coming out victorious are the greater deamons.

Most other lord level characters fall under the shear number of attacks.

Course, greater daemons at over 600 points should be able to take out a 300 point unit of core. Course a 90 point cannon can also one shot them.

Chaos Lord, on a Juggernaut, with war gear that forces all successful hits against the model to be rerolled, and any roll of a 1 you hit yourself.....can decimate a whole unit. Especially when fighting a low initiative army like Lizards or Dwarves. Orc and Goblin magic that allows them to choose which attribute to test against and it is a stat test or die, and it uses the large template and it remains in play. Cast it with a power scroll, and it will destroy a whole army if done right and you chose the right stuff. So, one level 2 goblin shaman can pretty much wipe out an army. I know the Chaos Lord on the Juggernaut will be some hefty points, so maybe that wasn't the best example. However, there is not much that can kill it.

I think steadfast is great, and I think that the 2D6 charge distance is great. I think movement overall and wheeling with units and the terrain rules make movement dumb. The terrain rules also keep people out of the terrain. In my opinion fantasy is all about cheesing up your Army List and getting good dice rolls, and much less about tactics and the table itself. I mean trying to figure out how a large unit wheels around terrain to charge another unit gets ridiculous.

Overall, fantasy to me seems to have not really evolved, just slightly changed. All the power is in the characters, and with the right combo of magical items you can pretty much just own a whole army. Don't get me wrong I am not saying only certain armies can do that. I have had my fun with an old blood and the blade of realities before. I feel that things like this take out the tactical decisions and strategy and make it feel almost like a role playing game. You are banking on your character models to win. It also seems in almost every game your tarpit unit and the other guy's tarpit unit seems to get stuck in an endless combat. That is just boring, because at that point it is just dice rolls.

I am starting to remember now why I stopped playing GW games for a long time. Though I do like the feel of 5th edition 40K a lot more than 2nd edition 40K. To be honest, in fantasy, I miss the old magic system (spells not the system) because it was way more diverse and made way more sense. The new magic system is just sort of lame.