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Hello everyone,

I'm looking forward to competing in this year's Ard Boyz qualifier. I've been playing 40k for the past five years, and only started playing Fantasy last year. I tried crossing over since I found out that the Chaos Daemons are playable in both games and now I have a Wood Elf army as well. My usual game comes in somewhere between 2000 and 2250 points per side.

My question is: How does Fantasy scale up at the 3k level. One thing that I've seen with the 40k Ard Boyz is that playing in an unusually large game tends to open up new avenue for certain lists. Other lists that were rock hard at 2k become stretch too think and become significantly weaker. I'm sure that something similar happens with Fantasy at 3k, but I don't think I have enough experience with the different types of lists each army can churn out.

My FLGS has a fairly diverse number of armies. I think the only one I've never seen is the Bretonians. Not to mention people will travel outside of my area so I might see the Brets too. What kind of lists should I expect to see? What become stronger and what becomes weaker? I'll be playing Chaos Daemons because I can only muster 2500 with my Wood Elves. What do people expect to face at the Ard Boyz and how are they planning to deal with those lists?

Everyone takes more characters at the 3000 point tourneys here in Oz. A level 4 sorcerer takes a sizeable chunk of the 750 point gap between the normal 2250 tourney army and 3000 points.

If I was playing daemons I'd take Ld bomb KOS army... with a bloodthirster and 3 units of flamers as well and piss everyone off.
It is Ard boyz after all.... If I did that at a regular tourney or in a friendly game I'd ask my opponent to kick me in the nuts pre-game, just so I could feel how they will at the end of each game.

When I get home i'll do up a list.

Agreed- pretty much everyone's going to throw in an extra lord, rare and whatever else they can squeeze in. 750 isn't that much when it comes to characters.

As was said the main thing 3k-lists bring up is the extra lord slot (and to a lesser extent an additional hero, special and rare slot). As lords can be expensive they often take out sizable chunk of the added points, but oftentimes the investment is certainly worth it. Regarding the "who wins/who loses in 3k", I'd dare to say that the balance of power stays about the same. The top 3 (VC,DE,DoC) armies of uncomped fb certainly stay at the same level and the bottom guys (O&G,BoC,Ogres) still have mostly the same problems they had in lower points levels.

Expect to see lots of magic, multiple large beasties per army (ie 2xdragons etc) and gunlines (dwarves and empire in particular).

I'd imagine a cookie-cutter build for daemons would be something like this:
(a mix of siren+ld-bomb and the other nasty stuff)
Chars:
Thirster /w armor,scroll,rerolls,+1str&flaming
-540
KoS /w siren,allure,torment blade,soul hunger
-530
I'm thinking the siren will be very usable as there's bound to be multiple good targets to catch
Tzeentch herald BSB /w flying,scroll,-2ld banner
-260
Masque
-90
Core:
2x5 Furies
-120
4x10 Horrors
-480
Special
3x6 Flesh Hounds
-630
Rare:
2x5 Flamers
-350
=3000
I'd like the army to have another siren somewhere, but you'd have to take a herald of slaneesh for that or swap the thrister for another KoS

I like the idea of going the daemon bomb route. I've never played with a keeper of secrets before but I know someone I could borrow one from.


I'll be kitting out my thirster with O armor, the firestorm blade and immortal fury.

I don't have any furies but I do have a unit of screamers I could try to use for the same strategy.

I only have 20 horrors so I'll most likely use plaguebears to hold objectives and maybe a unit of bloodletters of daemonettes.

I only have five flamers so I could include something to buff up a core slot. Most likely a herald for the plague bears. I figure they will
be good for holding objectives.

What is better for the flesh hound: 4 units of 5 or 3 units of 6?

Thanks,

If you think about it, the metagame really doesn't change.... Because for most armies, the difference between 2250 and 3000 is one lord choice, and a unit or two.

Unless you're making drastic "small units" type choices, or are playing a horde army, most people will tend to want to fill those points in with super hard units that fill the gap very quickly.

I think this is a tendency to design a 2250 army, and add the 750 as an afterthought, to shore up the weaknesses of the 2250 army, instead of approaching the 3k army like it is its own beast.

Take the lord choice caster for example, completely balanced and points geared and makes sense at 2kish, but the dicepool is such a limiting factor that at 3k he's overcosted unless he has some mechanism that adds to his dicepool or doesn't use the traditional dicepool mechanic.

With this understanding, it's more points effective to stack 2 or 3 hero mage characters, and buy 2 relatively cheap lord fighter characters.

So an Empire Army with 5 Great Cannons, 3 Steam Tanks, and 4 Hochland Long Rifles won't get me many friends?

Sounds great!

Uriels_Flame wrote:So an Empire Army with 5 Great Cannons, 3 Steam Tanks, and 4 Hochland Long Rifles won't get me many friends?

Sounds great!

I think that people may be actually expecting that stuff to ard boyz, so I wouldn't know about friendmaking.

Yeah, I took my bretonnians out against a buddies Ardboy list yesterday. 5 stegadons, Mazamundi was on one of them, a carnasaur riding lord, two salamandr units and min/max skinks. He stomped me flat!

One of the advantages of ‘Ard Boyz is that everyone is expecting to face the worst, so you should never hear complaints. Anyone playing should know what they’re in for.

Agreed.

I haven't seen anything posted concerning the scenarios. What types of scenarios do people expect? Was there a Ard Boyz for Fantasy, and if so, what kinds of scenarios did they have last year?

Corax69 wrote:I haven't seen anything posted concerning the scenarios. What types of scenarios do people expect? Was there a Ard Boyz for Fantasy, and if so, what kinds of scenarios did they have last year?

Last year's scenarios don't appear to be available anymore, but the discussion about them is here. Not a lot of discussion - you might also try some of the BatReps from the event. (Mission #1 had some wacky magic rules, with miscasts on double 1's, 2's, and 3's, and Irresistible Force on double 4's, 5's, and 6's.)

Last year was played at 3500 pts. I don't believe last year included open lists, either - that's a non-trivial change.

Another interesting point is that most lists can't double down on certain Lord choices very well.

That is, if I want a fighting Ork boss, a posse of fighting Ork heroes, and a gobbo with scrolls I'm set at 2250. But when I try and move up and grab another 2 characters, that's another 150 points of fighting items, and they just aren't in the book. Lots of books can't expand their character selection another Lord + Hero (if they are fighters) at the same quality at the initial.

Daemons get around this, obviously, as they can double down.

For most other races, the solution is special characters. A # of special characters that commonly get skipped for the cookie cutter Lord choice become highly viable at 3k.