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I've been collecting beastmen for a while now, and I'm thinking about starting up a new army.
let's say a 3000 p. diverse army is my goal, preferbly a high armour and/or good shooting opportunities, to try something different from beastmen. Then my question would be, what is considered the 3 most cheapest armies to collect, in that catagory, in the game?

DE are the army i first got in my head altho lizards can do it for ya too.
DE have a rather low overall armor but the CoK are one of the few remaining heavy cav that are good and shooting is just epic with those repeater crossbows, not to mention excellent magic.
LM have the high armor down handily and even though their shooting is short range it's quite devastaing when used right, and again good magic one of the best actually.

Salamanders for lizards are amazing - march and fire, and any wound is a panic check? Yes please!

I managed to get 5 turns of shooting in with them one game, 14 shots (lost one to a mortar, from memory) and not a single misfire....the death and destruction was horrific!

Yea sallies are the stuff nightmares are made of, but then again so are hydras.

Hydras only get their breath attack once a game though, and you can drop the strength of it fairly easily. Sallies marching around your blocks, flaming over them if they roll too high and into combat is just....

well, one turn of shooting killed 20 swordsmen and 19 halberdiers.

Yeah, I thought about Lizardmen as well. dwarfs been on my mind as well, but I've grown too fond of a high movement, to really consider them.
Dark elf could be an option, but I will see if I can fall in love with a neutral or order army first.

Lizardmen - you can take a bsb with the +1M banner, and you then have M5 hard troops with M6 skirmishers.

While our cavalry are...bad...you have some of thie highest moving core around - skirmishers make a mockery of blocks in 8th, especially ones with poison and CB Ld6 to make marching that much easier!

@nosferatu: what do you mean by "skirmishers make a mockery of blocks in 8th"? Not to change the subject, im just new to 8th ed. (havent played since 6th), and dont get the meaning of it? I thought huge infantry blocks where the thing in 8th and that skirmishers lost power?

Besides lizzies and DE have you considered High elves or Empire? Very diverse armies as well. Have both shooting and fast units and well armoured units (not in general though, but have the choices)

1. diverse
2. high armour
3. good shooting
4. cheap

Lizardmen have 1,2,4 I think. I don't believe they are great shooters. They are cheap because you can always buy a few units that suck up a zillion points.

Dwarfs have 2,3 and not sure 4. I consider them kind of vanilla, so not amazingly diverse. And before you moan, they're still stunties with beards, maybe the stats change a bit but it's not like a Steggadon vs. a Skink or a Troll vs. Goblin diverse.

Empire I would say are 2,3 and not sure 4. But I also kind of consider them vanilla. But that's just me.

Warriors of Chaos are mega 1 and 2, not sure 4. And not sure if you want to do another chaos-y race.

Greenskins are 1,2,4 but not the best shooters. And supposedly a new book is coming soon. Their armor is dependent on what units they take, though.

Skaven are 1,3,4. I was just re-reading their book tonight. They really got everything. But you really need to like rats. They also aren't especially hardy.

You'll generally find that high armor and super shooty don't go together often. Even ranged Dwarfs have lighter armor on their ranged units.

You might want to look at oges too, they're edeffinately a change from beastmen, though some of your painting techniques and experience might carry over, plus you can get 2 starter packs and have a fairly solid 2000 point army then add in a few special things, some scraplaunchers and gorger etc, to push it up to 1000.

They're not big on magic or shooting or heavily armored but they're definately cheap and different.

Yes, Ogres are a failry cheap army to get started and, with the new rules, can be quite powerful.


I disagree with blak43 that they don't do magic. Gutmagic is a very subtle lore, but is fairly simple to understand if you can shake all knowledge you know about other magic out the window. it's also quite powerful, Ogres can get up to Str and T10 potentially and have Regen on top of it. not to mention that our casters are some of the toughest in the game to kill.


Ogres are basically running headlong into the enemy with large amounts of fat guys backed up with some magic from casters that can also crump things in CC too. and Scraplaunchers are prehaps the best Warmachine in the game now besides possably Trebuchets(Str3, KB, large blast FTW)

well there's something to think about, thanks guys.