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Hey mates! To all of my fellow Empire Players, , I recently got a unit of 50X Spearmen from a former Empire player who decided to jump ship and get a High Elf army, and recently I was able to test it out today in a few battles as such:

*(48x) Spearmen: (w/Warrior Priest, BSB)
-w/Full Command, Shields, Razor Banner

Now overall this unit did pretty good for the most part, especially being backed up by the Warrior Priest and the BSB, with the Razor Banner giving them some much needed armor piecring attacks thanks to my Generals Ancient Heirloom special rule. However, after playing a couple of games, though this unit did good, I feel like that this unit could do a lot more then what it is doing at the moment but I just cant think of it. Overall, I'm looking for advice/tactic ideas from other Empire players who had success in running Spearmen and if so, how did you run them. Appreciate the help mates.

Detatchments. Handgunners to stand and shoot for you and/or halberdiers to counter charge.

You could do what I did with my 40 Empire spearmen... Cut off the tips and makes em halberds

Yeah, it's not nice but basically the way get a little more killing out of your spearmen is to make them halberds. In horde formation, against a T3 opponent with no armour save, the halberds kill the same number of enemy as the spearmen, and with any increase in either Toughness or Armour Save in the enemy things start getting more and more lopsided in favour of the halberds.

I use them as filler for extra ranks of swordsmen.

It's possible that spears will become relevant again in 9th edition. But it's unlikely that they'll be useful even when the new Empire army book is released.

Unless they give us pikes, but tha will never happen.... Ever

I walk them : D

Being sensible now I would suggest making them Halberds. From personal experiance of running something similar to what you posted Halberds have always worked out better for me.

Unless you are running 50 and a lvl4 shadow.....

biccat wrote:I use them as filler for extra ranks of swordsmen.

It's possible that spears will become relevant again in 9th edition. But it's unlikely that they'll be useful even when the new Empire army book is released.

Given that the difference in wounding is slight between spearmen and halberdiers, a slight increase would make all the difference.

For instance, if both halberdiers and spearmen were given shields for free, then the spearmen would have a 5+ save in close combat while the halberiders would only get the benefit against ranged fire, and this might be enough to give the spearmen enough of a unique advantage to at least be considered.