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I'm just about to play my first Empire game, and I've made this army. Any thoughts?

Balthasar Gelt 360
Captain(bsb/full plate armour/warhorse/barding/shield) 109
Warrior Priest(warhorse/barding/heavy armour/shield/van hortsmann's specullum) 125

Both in a unit of:
15 Inner circle knights(full command/banner of eternal flame) 415

2x Master Engineers
3x Great Cannons
I'm going to play 2 games, one 1v1 game, and a 2v2 games, in which i'm going to be allied with a high elves army.

Looks good, but you have a lot of points in your deathstar.. Personally I think I'd drop a cannon and 2-3 knights to try squeezing in a unit of 3 demigryph knights for some more assault units.

Let us know how your games go

You dont have any core. Doesn't upgrading the knights to inner circle make them special choices?

@blood lance, No it doesn't

Also for 1500pts its a bit heavy on cannons, why not drop 1 cannon and buy the luminark of planets for the +1 to hit?

Thanks for the advice. Well my games went really good, I won both.
1st game, allies with HE, we confronted WoC and O&G.My ally lost most of his units to their Hellcannon, and a succesful charge from Savage Orcs, so I had to play pretty much alone, plus his Alarielle miscasted and lost a lvl and Soul Quench...
So, my Cannons did outstanding dmg, killing heilcannon and Daemon Prince 3rd round, 3 goblin chariots and numerous models of goblins/chaos warriors, leading them to flee.
Balthasar was constantly flying around spamming Final Transmutation/Searing Doom.Fianlly, my Knights with warrior priest charged a troll unit with Throgg.I casted my flaming attacks spell, they used their dispell scroll, but i had my flaming banner!Then Throgg challenged me, I accepted with warrior priest, used my item, switched stats and won, then easily killed the rest with flaming attacks, plus overunning their 4th and last chariot.


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2nd game I played vs WoC, was much easier thanks to :
a)Balthasar(killed Daemon Prince with spells)
b)their lack of mage
3)Cannons again!Engineers' re-rolls did their job, killed Hellcannon much earlier, 1st round, so I was just waiting back shooting,
I killed Throgg easily again along with the chaos trolls.They tried to avoid confrontation but my M7 and a couple of good rolls I took the advantage,
I know that 490 invested in cannons are too much, but the multiple wounds andrank penetration due to bounch really destroeyed them.


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@arbiter
The army wasn't designed for close combat, the plan was destroying them from distance, then finishing them with Knights, and challenging a very strong hero/lord.


@GrafWattenburg I don't like named overpriced characters, but Balthasar is kinda worth his points, fly/3+ ward vs shooting/+2 to cast metal spells??? I needed to try this gentleman!Plus in the 2 games I charged some fleeing or low on models units with swifstride.

Not surprised you won really, balthasar gelt is a stud VS anything with good armour like WoC which you fought both times, also the main reason i suggested dropping a cannon was that you onlu had 2 engineers so that would take away the risk of that 1 cannon without an engineer exploding.

Only changes that in my mins could help would be a luminark of planets for CC, or the luminark of light for the free ward save to anything including your cannons.

But also maybe a lvl 1 wizard with beats for wild form could be a good investment I normally run 2 lvl1s in my 50man blocks of infantry because nothing is better then S4 T4 cannon fodder that is oh, so cheap and 10 ranks deep.

One last thing is investing in a feed back scroll. some people don't like it because it costs a lot but at my FLGS a normal skaven player runs a grey seer cheap with no gear other then lvl4 and its easy to kill a model with W2 when he goes for a big spell.

You are right overall. but at 1500 points I reached my Lord/Hero limits...Gelt 360, and I desperately neeeded 2 Engineers for cannons, a bsb mounted hero and priest with specullum, all summing to 365 points. And with Gelt it was kinda "all or nothing" strategy. I will consider your advice next time, I liked the Empire for:
1)Gelt(I don't really use named characters)
2)countless choices, especially shooting phase

and for non-gaming reason:
3)lore/history/theme
4)nice models, although I haven't bought anything yet, I play with friends so I used unofficial models from other board games, but with the correct bases(25x25, 25x50 etc)