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Welcome to Warhammer! I'm a WoC fanatic, so hopefully I can help you out! It's a fantastic army, and great for someone starting out due to low model count and relatively straightforward playstyle.

To give you a brief overview of what WoC does, it's an army that excels at brute force and offensive close combat power. We are the KINGS of close combat, and just about any one of our units will take on any other unit in 1v1. The downside is that these awesome units are very expensive in terms of points, so we will have fewer troops on the field than our opponent. It is imperative that you try to keep fights to 1v1 while avoiding getting flanked and overwhelmed by your opponent's superior numbers.

ElfHound wrote:
Hi dakka,
I have never played Warhammer before and have settled on playing Warriors of Chaos, and I have a few questions to ask...
How would I go about making an army list?

Going to start from scratch here as the question is a little open ended. First you'll need the main book and the army book. The main book includes rules on how armies are built. Each battle has a set points value, which is agreed upon by the players before the game. Common point values are 1000, 1500, 2000, 2400, and 2500. They can be anything, really. If you're starting out, 1000 is fine, don't bother going bigger. Anything smaller than that and things get a little weird, but you can even try dropping down to 600-800. I'd recommend 1000 to start though.

Then you'll want to think about what you want your army to do. I'll make it simple for you: do you want scary, tough-as-nails infantry, or more agile chariots as your main focus? This will be your Core, which must comprise of at least 25% of your points. Fortunately, WoC is blessed with amazing core choices in the forms of Warriors of Chaos and Chariots of Chaos. Don't bother with Marauders, Marauder Horsemen, or Forsaken for now. Or ever. The horsemen are usable in some cases, but just focus on the first two I named for now.

So, you've got a core. Now you want to build around that. If you went for the slower, but tougher infantry, you'll want support for it. Maybe a Gorebeast Chariot to help protect your flanks, or maybe you want to try some Chaos Knights or Skullcrushers for a faster unit to help cover your weaknesses. Here it's a lot more flexible, and again, WoC is blessed for choices. These choices come in the form of Special (which are basically elite units), which can make up to 50% of your army in points, and Rare (which are basically legendary awesomeness), which can make up to 25% of your army in points. Rare tends to be a little better than Special in a vacuum, but never feel as if you HAVE to take something that's Rare just for the heck of it.

But before you max out on points, you'll want a general! Not just want, but need. So... here's your next choice. Do you want a combat general that slaughters everything, or do you want a sorceror that helps provide defense against magic and fling out some of your own? If you have warriors, you'll want to give him the same mark as your warriors and stick him in there. If you don't, you'll want to give him Mark of Tzeentch and stick him on a disk. At 1000 points, or even a little above that, you'll likely only want a regular Hero. Don't look at Lords until 1500+.

A note on our sorcerors, we're the only (?) army that has armored spellcasters that can also punch your face in combat. They're still not great at it, though, so just take the extra armor as very awesome protection and be careful with them.

Are there any units I should always include?

WoC is, yet again, blessed for choice. I'll instead give you units to never include:

Marauders
Slaughterbrute
Forsaken
Mark of Slaanesh anything (though I've made a Slaanesh army work before and it was really fun, it's just tricky)

And here are units that are considered 'really really really really good':

Skullcrushers
Chimera
Demon Prince

Oh, and the surprise that most people gloss over the first time: Chaos Warhounds. Get a few units of 5 naked (no upgrades) dogs and learn to throw them under the bus. They will give you more deployment flexibility (I put down dogs, your turn), movement flexibility (dogs in your way angled so you can't charge my flank this turn), screening against shooting (dogs in your way, my main block is -2 to be hit), and general annoyance. If they live at the end of the battle you didn't use them enough, and don't expect them to ever kill anything, but they're great for the movement phase.

Aaaaaand... that's it. Want a big monstrous army? Get Throgg and go nuts with Chaos Trolls. Want super heavy cavalry of death? Get some chariots as core, then go on a spending spree with Skullcrushers and Chaos Knights. Want infantry that crushes everything beneath big plated boots that are fused to their flesh? Go for more basic Warriors of Chaos. My personal army I tend towards when I'm playing 'hard' is a block of 18 or 24 Mark of Khorne warriors with halberds supported by nurgle gorebeast chariots and nurgle regular chariots, with skullcrushers and a demon prince maxed out with a flying BSB on a disk being annoying.

Speaking of, you'll have a choice of marks for your warriors. Here are the three popular ones:

Mark of Tzeentch with shields (3+ armor save, 5++ parry save since the mark stacks with it)
Mark of Khorne with halberds (3 strength 5 attacks each)
Mark of Nurgle with great weapons (2 strength 6 attacks each, and -1 to be hit)

I'd recommend the latter two. I'm really not a fan of the first, because WoC does not want to play too defensively. If you play defensively you'll get overwhelmed. Remember, RIP AND TEAR!

And since my friend plans to play VC or TK was WoC a good army to choose?

Absolutely! WoC has no shooting, and part of the opposing gameplan is often to shoot up our units before they can reach combat. Since VC has no shooting, yay! You'll just have to watch out for Terrorgeists. And TK has shooting, but will often just dink off your heavy armor.

On top of that, VC in particular relies on raising back dead troops. If you go for an offensive WoC army (and you should, no matter who you're expecting to face!) you'll rip through so many troops that they can't keep up. Both are good matchups in general for us, but not autowin by any means.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wilytank wrote:
This is irrelevant since neither of those armies are objectively better than WOC (though many people do say that TK are in a tough spot with their current book). In the hands of the right player, any army can win a game.

Also, this. I probably shouldn't have even said 'good matchup', any army can win a game against any other army just fine and the balance between armies is arguably the best it's ever been. It really comes down to having a solid list and, much more importantly, knowing how to use it! Generalship is the main factor, which is one reason I love this game.

Don't bother with a hellcannon. That's actually looking pretty good. Spend those extra 100 points on getting your warriors a mark of your choosing. If you go with mark of nurgle, give it to your sorceror as well and stick him in the unit.

Also, don't give your warhounds upgrades. They're too expensive. Use the extra points from that to try and make your warrior block 17 strong (so it's 18 total with the sorceror), and make it 6 wide.

Simple, straightforward, and solid. A great place to start.

 welshhoppo wrote:
You can actually make a half decent 1000 point list using everything in the battle boxs provided you proxy one of the Marauders as a Sorcerer. Sure they are not the best thing, but in a 1000 points they are okay.


Btw, I also disagree on MoS, it can be pretty useful on fast cav.

I made a MoS list with that theme that was very fun. And yes, that's where it's useful. It's just much more of a niche thing, and not really good to start off with. But yes, I'd agree with you on that.

Mister Stalin is pretty spot on, well said.

A few notes. Nurgle versus Tzeentch in close combat, Nurgle is strictly better than the ward save in any gear configuration. Tzeentch gives you a chance to brush aside a few ranged shots, whereas Nurgle does nothing against ranged. That's the trade-off.

Also, there's a bit too much emphasis on that '+1 ward save' that sounds so nice when you 'combo' it. Getting a 5++ parry sounds great... but if you didn't have parry, you'd still have a 6++. Ironcurse would still give you 6++. It sounds a lot better when you bump it up by one, but when you do the math, you're only saving one out of every six guys that would otherwise be dead if you took Tzeentch vs even unmarked. When you only have 18 guys in a unit, you'll probably save one throughout the game unless the unit's gotten obliterated (in which case whoo hoo, three dudes saved wouldn't have made the difference).

For Khorne, if you have a flying BSB plopping himself where he needs to be, you'll rarely miss your leadership checks due to the reroll on leadership 8 or 9. The forced overrun/pursuit is a little trickier, but that's why you always give Khorne units musicians for a quick reform after the fact. Definitely a downside, but it's worth it imo.

Oh for sure on the BSB, but that's because you can get a nice save against ranged attacks, which is super important for a lone model where Nurgle would do nothing for you. Plus the disk. I love me some disk.