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Well, I happen to play high elves.. so sure.

By the way, a little independent research goes a long way as well.


Melee: 8
Range:7
Magic: 6
Morale: 8
Toughness: 5

The High Elves combat units hit incredibly hard and fast. In Fantasy, ASF also allows rerolls to hit if your initiative is higher (or ties) than your enemies. High Elves are faster than anyone else except other elves, so there's a lot of rerolls happening. Even sweeter is that ASF and Always Strikes Last (think unwieldy from 40k) cancel, so elves with great weapons are hitting at high initiative and good strength.

Their melee units are all great choices, except spearmen which are average for core.

Silver Helms = 2+ armor save and Strength 5 on the charge.

Sword Masters = 2 attacks base at Strength 5 with 2 full ranks of supporting attacks.

White Lions = Strength 6 attacks, Terrain Mastery, and always stubborn. (Test on base leadership instead of modified by combat losses).

Phoenix Guard = Str 5 with rerolls to hit and a 4+ invul. (remember that in fantasy you get armor AND invul saves.)

Then there's good monsters like Dragons, Griffons and Phoenix.

They have good range with 2 core bow units, 1 special bow unit, 1 rare bow unit, and bolt throwers.

Bolt throwers are great and you get extras of them, but without access to catapults and cannons I can't give them higher than a 7. (Still, 6 Str 4 Armor Piercing Ballistic 4 shots are great!)

High Elf Magic gets a 7. They have a few advantages.

1. Their own Lore. It's spells are situational but amazing. How about a spell that destroys enemy magic items? Or a spell that lets you zip across the battlefield 20 inches? There's no knockout mega-murder spell, but they are all good with a wonderful lore attribute. (Every successful spell increases the ward save of the wizard and his unit by 1 up to a 3+ max)

2. Their wizards get a bonus +1 to cast spells from their own lore. Nice freebie.

3. They have access to all the battle lores. Options are always ace.

4. Book of Hoeth and Banner of the World Dragon. Book allows you to pick up a magic or dispel dice and reroll it. Banner allows you freedom from your miscasts by giving you a 2+ ward against the damage you cause.

Morale is good. They have a high base leadership and Ld 9 wizards. And their Ld 10 melee guys are cheap enough that you can afford a Ld10 general and a lvl 4 wizard.

Of course, all this comes at the cost of Toughness. The entire army is T3 except monsters, even the characters. Get used to being wounded on 2's. With the exception of Knights and Phoenix Guard, the army usually has no better than a 5+ armor save, which is easily negated.

Characters of Note:

Teclis allows you to cherrypick 1 spell from each battle magic lore or take all the high elf spells. He is also a rare lvl 5 wizard. This is a good deal because then he has a base +6 to cast from High Magic when adding his racial bonus. Even better, he comes with a dispel scroll that gives you a chance to erase the enemy spell for the whole game.

Sorry and thanks for the help. I am just looking through friends codexes for things that catch my fancy. I really enjoy the named characters of VC and HE. While I really like the idea of the brets shinning knight theme the green knight really leaves me.. disappointed. I hear they may get an update early this coming year I hope so!

Don't believe gmhack there ...
Bretonnians are a very challenging book, that is indeed quite old, but it's a very great army to play
You have to think hard when playing them, and if you do one big blunder, it's all over, but there's quite a few viable builds (more than Daemons for instance ...)
Their shooting is quite good as their archers have very decent longbows and are dirt cheap (they're better than High Elves point for point), Trebuchets are ridiculously good, they will murder any block they fall on and Bretonnians are quite good at taking out monsters, so it compliments the Lances of Knights well

They are tough and fragile at the same time, the army is indeed T3, but you either have:
- very expendable peasants (with a solid block with the ward save of the blessing of the lady)
- 2+ save Knights with a lot of (quite cheap) characters able to take 1+ re-rollable save in the front ranks
So if you mitigate the stuff that can punch through the armour, they can be very tough. Also their wizards come in with innate Magic Resistance, mitigating quite a few of the damaging spells.
But if you can't avoid the attacks that ignore your armour, you're usually hoping to pass that Ward save (which would then be 5+ most of the time), and you don't have the number of bodies to soak up the firepower sent your way


On a secondary note, you shouldn't rely on the notation system that's being used in this thread as it's very subjective.
I would never rate Warriors of Chaos as Toughness 9 for instance, as they simply don't have the numbers to suffer casualties, and High Elves would never be at 5 either (Id' give them 2, only Wood Elves would be at 1)
Toughness should represent the overall resiliency of an army and its ability to proceed despite taking punishment, not just its ability to shrug off single attacks. For instance Skavens and O'Goblins are bad at not taking casualties, they're great at not caring (I mean, a typical 2400 points Skaven army starts with 4*40 Slaves, that's less than 350 points spent to have 160 very expendable wounds)

TanKol...

A 2 would be ridiculous.

Sure they are toughness 3 but you can build an entire army of 2+ and 1+ armor saves for Core, 5+/4++ for special, and T5/T6 with 5 wounds for rare.

Not to mention the WDB.

Elves can be very hard to budge off the table.

 Thunderfrog wrote:
TanKol...

A 2 would be ridiculous.

Sure they are toughness 3 but you can build an entire army of 2+ and 1+ armor saves for Core, 5+/4++ for special, and T5/T6 with 5 wounds for rare.

Not to mention the WDB.

Elves can be very hard to budge off the table.

If you build that army though you will feel each ans ever casualty as they are too expensive to spam, that's what he's saying.
An army of T4, 6+ save that can take 40 casualties and not care is more resilient than an army of 1+ saves that lose attacks after 5 casualties.

Exactly my point
Sure your Silver Helms are more resilient than my SkavenSlaves, but in an attrition battle (of equal points), the slaves will prevail in the end

Toughness is "the overall ability of the army to go on despite taking punishment"
High Elves might not be "that" fragile on an individual basis, but they're expensive if you take (kind of) resilient units, and the "cheap" units are not resilient at all

With Warriors of Chaos you have the jerk-ass Daemon Prince build, who is a flying Nurgle Prince who can use his mobility with the Lore of Death making it much more effective on him than on a Wizard in a unit or bunker.

And in combat, he's generally hit on 6s, hits on a 2+, regains lost wounds and never runs meaning he has to be totally killed to remove.