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I've played Khador, Trolls and I'm currently playing CoC, how does Cygnar play?

I like CoC, but I'm liking the look of the Cygnar models and their blue colour scheme.

Any pointers on how they play please?

Very well.

I haven't seen a Cygnar army in the flesh since the beginning of Mark II, but they are very diverse. Depending on some casters (eHaley) they can completely control the battlefield and do all sorts of mischief.

They are mostly a shooting based army, with excellent units such as Long gunners. But they are no where near as tough as Khador and Trolls, at least armour wise.

Cgynar is kind of weird to play. They're extremely powerful, have the most consistently good casters in the game, hands down the most powerful Colossal, and more options than anyone else.

Here's where it gets odd. All of those amazing options? Very few of them get used regularly. For example the Stormblade Captain which recently came out is a 2 point P+S 13 weapon master with reach, a rng 8 pow 14 gun, quick work(can shoot after killing a model in melee) relentless Charge, gives friendly Stormnouns relentless charge and the ability to draw LoS through other Stormnouns and advance through them. Pretty freaking amazing right? He's not a character so you'd expect to see him in pretty much every list with Stormnouns and quite a few lists without them. But you don't. The general consensus is there are better ways to spend those two points and you rarely see him on the table.

You run into this all of the time.

New Stormguard unit pretty good at holding objectives as they can't be charged in their front arc, Boomhowlers are better so you don't see them.

Stormcallers: Triangulation allows a three 1 point solos to stand in a triangle and put out 9 pow 10 shots that ignore DEF. Yes you read that right, your entire unit of Kayazee can be wiped out with the equivalent of a 3 point unit. For some reason I've never seen them played outside of Nemo2's tier list

Sentinels: a 4-point shield guard jack that can put out 1d6 shots per turn. I've never seen a Cygnar player other than myself put one on the table.

Chargers: 4- point ROF2 POW 12 gun with powerful attack. I never see them outside of battlebox games.

Longgunners; Previous post talks about how good these are and they are. I've never seen them on the table.

Here's the best pointers I can give you. If you're thinking of picking up Cygnar DO NOT go to Cygnar forums and ask for advice. Cygnar players are spoiled for options and tend to take only the "best" models and ignore perfectly good models that any other faction would love to have. Read the book, play what looks interesting, ignore everyone who tells you to play eHaley 2x Stormwall, and never, ever, under any circumstances, unless your opponent specifically asks you to do so, and even then think twice play pHaley in a friendly game.

Cygnar is a very weird faction to play. The general idea is to wear down opposing forces with ranged power and close in for the kill/scenario after you have ruined their fighting power. It can be hard to contest scenario zones with them and nearly impossible to grind out a prolonged combat and come out on top. Without scenarios Cygnar hangs way back and goes for a late assassination. They have great jacks but little support for them outside of warcasters directly intervening. They have infantry that have high offense and carry nice secondary effects but no way to deliver such glass cannons who die very easily.

The main strength of the army is in generally high accuracy and strange targeting mechanisms. This extends to cool tricks like lightning leaping from one model to the next and autohitting to a minuteman jumping into a group of infantry and activating it's flak field. (which also autohits) Combine this with a very good ranged presence and easy access to guns for an army that can easily scalpel out high-priority threats.

Cygnar also makes great use of many mercenaries, giving access to over a dozen extra power solos and several good character units.

One of the weaknesses of the army is that very little is more evasive than a one ton hunk of steel and that they seem to make armor from paper mache. Everything dies very easily so any time they can shoot back or charge very far it is bad news. This is amplified by the lack of a durable front line unit. Boomhowler's mercs are just about the only thing you can have run out front and expect to still be there next turn.

A second weakness is generally high points costs for both good and bad choices. Cygnar infantry has a lot of dead weight from units that are too pricy to shine at their given role.

Right now the faction is supposed to be at the top of the competitive scene but I haven't won a game with them in a long time. Like I said, very weird to play.

Cygnar generally lacks infantry clearing capabilities. Those stormsmith callers? They really only function very very well if certain conditions are met, such as them being up to 20" away from each other and being able to see their targets. Which is going to be hard to do against any skilled opponent.

Chargers generally aren't taken because they're just not worth the point cost. Same for Sentinels. For 4 points, you can get the B13, which gives you Ryan, which gives you a 4" AOE that's just flat POW 12 ALL AROUND. And stays in play as a cloud and damage effect. Plus they eat up focus, which most casters want.

Long gunners are good but basically, they're fairly expensive. And they suffer from basically just being a gunline unit without any real frills.

The Stormblade captain? He's awesome. If you run stormnouns. The more stormnouns you run, the better he becomes. He's very useful if you run stormlances since they don't have natural relentless charge for some reason.

Silverline are pretty good imo, but haven't tried them out yet since I've been playing PoM the best 2+ mths. However, they are still armor 15 so they need some arcane shielding.

I think Cygnar just suffers from too much shootiness and not enough beatiness, which is an issue about gunlines in general.

Sining wrote:

Chargers generally aren't taken because they're just not worth the point cost. Same for Sentinels. For 4 points, you can get the B13, which gives you Ryan, which gives you a 4" AOE that's just flat POW 12 ALL AROUND. And stays in play as a cloud and damage effect. Plus they eat up focus, which most casters want.

That was my exact point. Pretty much any other faction would kill for a Sentinel, I would love a cheap ranged warbeast with shield guard in Skorne, I would gladly pay 4 points for one, depending on the animus(ie Far Strike) I might be willing to pay 5 points.

Except you have to look for in-faction options. Just because certain factions would love some stuff doesn't mean Cygnar would. I could just as easily say Cygnar would love some mortar crews because range 24" (with snipe) 4" AOEs at POW 16? Who wouldn't love that. Or doom reavers. But it wouldn't make sense because Cygnar can't take those anyway.

It should be noted as awesome as Cygnar is at shooting (and I've seen/been on the receiving end of games that end on turn 2 to poor placement), most of that shooting is low POW.

My first game against eHaley was a brutal uphill slog...which ended with my opponent conceding because I killed his heavy hitters, while managing to keep mine (mostly) intact. He literally had nothing left that could do enough damage to my caster/jacks to stop me from culling delicious souls.

That's not always normal of Cygnar overall, but if you're playing a gunline cracking armor (usually) can be tough.

 22cthulu wrote:
Pretty much any other faction would kill for a Sentinel, I would love a cheap ranged warbeast with shield guard in Skorne, I would gladly pay 4 points for one, depending on the animus(ie Far Strike) I might be willing to pay 5 points.

Of course you would take a beast with the same stats and attributes as a Cygnar light jack. So would any Cygnar player. The difference is that a beast with the same capabilities as a jack is going to be much more independent and not drain resources to go above and beyond normal expectations. A rng10 pow10 rat6 sentinel struggles to get results without focus allocation. I don't want to get into the whole focus vs. fury debate here since it is off topic but your example is comparing apples and oranges.

If the faction could operate as if it had fury it would be a super powerful best faction. If it got the kind of jack support that protectorate has from their choir Cygnar would immediately become a jack faction. With nothing but focus and upkeeps to back up those jacks, as they are now, additional jacks are resource hogs that a player can't afford to over-commit to -no matter how much he or she wants to.


I think this thread has become a bit too negative and given the wrong impression to the OP though. Cygnar needs to get an early advantage and control the tempo of the game to win but when they do, they are remarkably effective. Every faction has their strengths and weaknesses and managing these is part of playing any faction well. Some are more difficult to overcome than others. Cygnar has at least two top-level casters who can bring home trophies. The faction has an uncanny valley of effectiveness that I think you can see here. Cygnar works very well at high and low levels of play but they crumble miserably in intermediate levels. This is a feature that seems to be unique to Cygnar and brings in those very strange play experiences and the weirdness that many people have stated here.

Something else to keep in mind is that Cygnar has the largest selection of mercenaries out of all the factions. I think Cygnar was designed with that in mind, highborn mercs are basically part of the faction.

Ok, thanks for the advice.

Just some quick questions...

Is Cygnar a Jack Faction?
What's wrong with pHaley?
What's a good starting point with pNemo?

I basically want to play Cygnar as some of the models kick ass and I want to go Jack heavy without using Darius.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I know PoM are a great Jack force, but I hate the Jack models.

Their infantry and heavy infantry are amongst my favourite models.

Cygnar aren't really a Jack army to be totally honest. This is because they have few casters outside of Darius who are actually able to support their Jacks with spells, rather than giving them focus.

Ahhhh so rather than have the buffs over a control area that Karchev, Butcher and Syntherion have, Cygnar lacks this?

Isn't there a way to run Cygnar Jacks efficiently aside from Darius?

I don´t know how it looks like in very competetive environments but Cygnar has lots of Jack Marshals, some with very nice drives.
Compared to Khador you can play Cygnar very Jack heavy. You often can play like 2 heavys and 2 lights without problems.

Puscifer wrote:
Ahhhh so rather than have the buffs over a control area that Karchev, Butcher and Syntherion have, Cygnar lacks this?

Isn't there a way to run Cygnar Jacks efficiently aside from Darius?

How competitive is your region?

This by itself will be a significant determinant of the success of 'other builds.' In a relatively less-competitive meta, then you have much greater flexibility in what you run. The more competitive it is, the less flexibility you will have.

Generally speaking, Cygnar does not run jack heavy. That's one of the reasons Stormwall has become so popular- he gives /much/ greater focus efficiency than other options.

Puscifer wrote:
Ok, thanks for the advice.

Just some quick questions...

Is Cygnar a Jack Faction?
What's wrong with pHaley?
What's a good starting point with pNemo?

Not really, there are some casters who can do some interesting things with jacks, like Kraye, Nemo, Darius, and you can maybe count Kara Sloan. I took a Kraye list to a 35 point tournament recently and ran 32 points of jacks and won both games that I dropped him.

pHaley is probably the most boring caster to play/play against. She has a spell that prevents your enemy from running or charging in her control, so basically her army sits in her control area and shoots, and your opponent has the choice of walking his guys forward and attacking(probably going to get charged) or sitting back and shooting.

pNemo, pick up Jr. Warcaster, Strangeways the squire and for higher point games Aiyanna and Holdt, Tactical Arcanist Corps, or Alexia so you're sitting at 10+ focus per turn. Then get an Arc Node( I think Thorne is worth the extra points here), a beat stick like the Thunderhead, Stormclad or Ol Rowdy, hell if you're feeling frisky grab two heavies, and maybe a charger. After that go to town.

Wow. There is a lot of misinformation so far...

OP please take this entire thread with a grain of salt and check up on other resources. While the PP forums are far from perfect there is a lot of good information there. Battlecollege tends to have a lot of errors, but it has been getting much better and will give you another viewpoint. You can even look over some of the older threads here at Dakka and get some differing viewpoints. Hopefully you will then be able to take that information along with the rules and mechanics of the game and put them to use.

Here are my thoughts on Cygnar as someone who has played them since shortly after MK II came out. And my warning above applies to this just as much.

Cygnar are primarily a shooting faction. But they usually cannot win by shooting alone when playing scenarios. Combined arms is pretty important with them. Other than shooting Cygnar tends to be well rounded. This is good and bad. They are not the best at most things, but not the worst. So you need to pay a lot of attention to their matchups. Target Priority and planning ahead make them a faction that I feel is a bit tougher to learn than many others.

Cygnar does have some decent options of going jack heavy, melee beatstick force, infantry clearing, armor clearing or whatever. Like I said they are fairly well rounded and tend to have an ability to deal with just about everything. They just don't tend to excel at any one thing. And for newer people it often helps to be able to do one thing and do it very well. But once you learn your tools and learn the game Cygnar can do very well. Cygnar is like a toolbox. You just need to bring the right tools for the job.

There are definitely some hit and miss units in Cygnar. But most of them can be effective if used properly. It's just sometimes you feel certain units get more bang for your buck. This is not a Cygnar issue. Every faction has this. But if you like long gunners or sentinels then by all means play them!

Cygnar has more access to mercenaries than any other faction. This helps a lot in making them even more well-rounded and have even more options. Sometimes the merc options tend to overshadow the in faction ones. And some people only want to play "pure" cygnar. That's fine if you want to play it fluffy and that is what you want. But mechanics and balance wise they were designed with access to mercs in mind. Neither side is wrong. Just two different ways to play the game.

There are some great warcasters. eHaley is arguably the best caster in the game. And we have casters of almost every type. But again it comes down a lot to personal style and preference. Play what you like and build a good army around them and you can do just fine. Player skill is more important in this game than your list.

Otherwise I think Dais has some very good comments. I tried to debunk (i.e. give my own viewpoint) to some of the others.

Puscifer wrote:
Ok, thanks for the advice.

Just some quick questions...

Is Cygnar a Jack Faction?
What's wrong with pHaley?
What's a good starting point with pNemo?

I basically want to play Cygnar as some of the models kick ass and I want to go Jack heavy without using Darius.

1) Cygnar isn't really a jack faction. Cygnar tends to have a lot of 6 focus warcasters that want to participate in the fight themselves (both caines, siege, sloan, striker, etc.). Which means they often want to use their own focus leaving little for their jacks to use themselves. Cygnar does have the nemo, darius and kraye but even they don't run more than 3-4 jacks a lot of times.

Cygnar does have two of the best jack marshals in the game (IMO) the main one being arcane tempest gun mage officer attachment. He gives the jack marhsal bonus and rune bullets (which gives them the attack types of the gun mage unit as long as the UA is alive). The gun mage officer (often called "the dude" online) runs things like hunters, sentinels (you don't get attack types on the strafe), and cyclones. I love the cyclone personally on this guy the ability to put out covering fire or just walk up and do 2d3 thunderbolt shots to push enemy heavies out of the zones in scenerio play is nice. The other one is the sword knight UA which is both a jack marshal and has a drive for pronto. People don't like sword knights though, especially online since they are more finesse than other basic grunt infantry that you see in other factions.

Also Arlan Strangewayes solo is good for supporting your jacks. Both power booster and evasive spells are solid and he can fix the jacks as well. Evasive is really good to help get cygnar ranged jacks out of sticky situations.

2) Problem with pHaley is that she has a bad reputation really and most people don't get past temporal barrier (which is really good spell I will admit). That said personally I think the caster is rather cool and has a lot of more tricks than just temporal barrier spam. Also you can't hide behind the barrier anymore, it only works if your opponent STARTS his activation in haleys control area.

3) Haven't played pNemo at all so I can't really comment there.

Cygnar jacks have pretty good statlines afaik. A natural mat 7/rat 6 on their ironclad chasis jacks. That's ELITE status in other factions. For example, Beast09, a pure killing machine has mat 7...something which cygnar warjacks have by default it seems, including a defender. Which is a shooting warjack. It's not impossible to play Cygnar jack heavy, just harder to. Kraye I find is pretty good with warjacks.

For pNemo, depends on how you want to play. I like to play him with squire, the Tactical Arcanist corps and other lightning immune stuff. Give him a good beat-face warjack like the Stormclad, load him 5 focus, locomotion him up and add hunters mark to it and then watch things die.

Well there are some must haves.

Gunmages and ua
squire
JWC
blazers

If the caster has a good gun , taking the gobber speculator is a must .

some sort of a tar pit infantry unit is needed , but there are a few good options for those most of which are merc , not that there is anything wrong about mercs .

If someone takes two heavis one shoting and one melee it is offten better to take Stormwall instead , unless your playing Kray .

the SB cpt gives options to ton of combos as long as stormnouns are run .

blazers are more or less the multi wound infantry cygnar always wanted , good def stats , huge range , good dmg , fast with pathfinder.

Rowdy and Stormclad are our melee jacks . Stormclad is a bit less offten used now that the stormwall is there , but Rowdy is awesome ,very focus efficient so he can make it in to list with casters that don't have the focus to support other jacks , like ecain for example.


There is a lot of stuff that is technicly good or that could be good if scenarios were different or meta game was different . Long Gunners , Grendariers etc fall in to that cathegory.

This is the thing that I'm seeing with Cygnar...

The synergies are a lot harder to spot compared to Trolls and CoC.

The entire army seems to have answer to everything and that their main weakness is that they are rather squishy as they have no heavy infantry like MoW, Troll Champs and those PoM monsters that just won't die.

Should I approach Cygnar as a combined forces army? It seems like I should.

I'm making a list of units I like in the army, I'll post them up later once I'm done for the day at work, I would like some feedback on my choices if that's ok?

I'd suggest starting with a caster and then seeing what units work with them. Cygnar even more so than other I feel needs to start at the top.

Well I got the Cygnar Battlebox and Kraye today.

The box I thought was a good starting point, but Kraye is my favourite model in the entire Cygnar range and it was going cheap too.

I also have Eiryss and Reinholdt left from my Khador army.

So far my list of kool stuff I want to get is:

Both versions of Caine.
All the Nemo.
eStryker.

All the Jacks, except Gallant.

Gun Mages + UA.
Rangers.
Stormblades plus all the trimmings.
Storm Tower.
Black 13th.
Sword Knights + UA.

Gun Mage Captain.
JWC.
Squire.
Stormblade Captain.
Stormcallers.
Pendrake.
Strangewayes.
Archduke.

Stormstrider.

Devil Dogs + Jonas.
Rutger and Taryn.
Raluk.

Many of those are just choices because I like the models.

As for how competitive the local Meta is... I have no idea as I've just moved back here.

It used to be really competitive. I won a set of Gold bordered cards with my Khador army years ago and that was a very tough tourney.

I played the cygnar battlebox for a 5 week journeyman league and in all honestly it is a really good battlebox if you know what you are doing. One of the key ways cygnar tends to play is always looking for the ranged assassination when you can. A charger with 3 focus shooting a warcaster knocked down by earthquake can end games real quick.

Striker is a good starter caster since he has a good general set of abilities and works well with most cygnar units.

If you are going to get merc units I would really suggest Greygore Boomhowler & Co. over anything else. They are much better front line unit than any in faction option really and have won me games by clogging zones. They are really good once you start buffing them with arcane shield or blur and also deadeye allows them to actually hit something with their guns.

Puscifer wrote:
Well I got the Cygnar Battlebox and Kraye today.

Battlecollege has a decent write up of Kraye
http://battlecollege.wikispaces.com/mkiiKraye

Write up here on Dakka
http://www.dakkadakka.com/wiki/en/Captain_Jeremiah_Kraye

A nice write up on the PP boards. Read down multiple posts.
http://privateerpressforums.com/showthread.php?8647-Cygnaran-Tacticas-Captain-Jeremiah-Kraye

The one thing I'd add that none of the write ups say is a good unit to take might be Tempest blazers. They can keep up and don't need much in the way of support. They are not really mentioned because the tempest blazers are pretty darn new.

There was also someone who did really well with Kraye on the tourney scene a year or two ago I believe. You might be able to do some searches on the PP site to find out his list and some of the tactics he used.

I completely forgot about Boomhowler.

I had a look at the Blazers, they seem ok. Definitely worth a look in with Kraye and Caine.

I'll have a go at writing some lists before venturing forth.

Thanks for the advice peeps.

Cygnar have a huge amount of models that can greatly improve the rest of the army [ATGM officers for example]

Oh and Boomhowler is overrated IMO, Murdoch+ Nyss hunters is better.

 sing your life wrote:
Cygnar have a huge amount of models that can greatly improve the rest of the army [ATGM officers for example]

Oh and Boomhowler is overrated IMO, Murdoch+ Nyss hunters is better.

A relatively cheap unit with 4+ tough that makes for an excellent screen and tarpit is overrated?

Okay then, moving along....

Puscifer wrote:
This is the thing that I'm seeing with Cygnar...

The synergies are a lot harder to spot compared to Trolls and CoC.

I find that Cygnar tends to have lots of good stuff, but often lacks a certain something to unify the choices. For Example, A sentinel would be amazing if strafe wasn't a special attack- because then it could get Rune Shot from the Gunmage Officer (Shield guard to protect the squishy Marshal, Snipe for Aiming, Thunderbolt breaks shield wall). Likewise, a Charger would be great, if the Journeyman Warcaster had Foc 4 (meaning it could upkeep Arcane Shield and fully fuel the Charger).

 Crazy_Carnifex wrote:

Puscifer wrote:
This is the thing that I'm seeing with Cygnar...

The synergies are a lot harder to spot compared to Trolls and CoC.

I find that Cygnar tends to have lots of good stuff, but often lacks a certain something to unify the choices. For Example, A sentinel would be amazing if strafe wasn't a special attack- because then it could get Rune Shot from the Gunmage Officer (Shield guard to protect the squishy Marshal, Snipe for Aiming, Thunderbolt breaks shield wall). Likewise, a Charger would be great, if the Journeyman Warcaster had Foc 4 (meaning it could upkeep Arcane Shield and fully fuel the Charger).

What if I told you both of those things are intentional?[/Morpheus]