I love the concept personally. A bunch of beefy hard-to-kill bricks surrounded by some tough arse miners. There is still some stuff I'm iffy on. Forge Guard and Huscarls are really expensive, making it hard to fit lists with any more than one of them. So even with a Huscarl and a Basic Forge Guard in the mix, you are still only looking at five dudes on the field once you drop in Brokkr. An Enforcer list rocking a Peacekeeper Captain feels like it can get away with this because it is fairly manoeuvrable, so it will be interesting to see how it works out with a mix of slow and normal units (plus a fast one). They seem to have a good spread of Move cards though, I think those will be fairly essential for them.
However, their Objectives seem really hard to pull off with only 5-6 guts on average. X/Y/Z marks the spot seem like trouble spots. They need to simultaneous capture/control three points and need to scour two. Take one casualty and this basically becomes impossible unless you completely eschew Forge Guard in your list (and that would be a damn shame). They either need to rejigger unit costs to make 6-7 models more possibly if you pack a leader and a Forge Guard suit, rejigger the missions to need less guys on the field, or make scavenger a thing that the Forge Fathers are good at. Or even a mixture of those.
The Valkyr could probably use scavenger, alternatively some kind of pack-mule drone for the Engineer may be neat.
X/Y/Z mark the spot could probably stand to either have Scour replaced with kill (not as characterful, I admit) or to have Scour
VPs bumped up so that you only need to exfiltrate a single model. This would at least mean that a single casualty doesn't immediately end things. Alternatively, perhaps make Survive a more common trait for Forge Father's missions. X/Y/Z Marks the spot could be Survive/Control/Capture/Capture (maybe reduce the
VP on some of them). Stubbornly sitting on you gorram treasure seems like a Forge Father thing to do.
I think Ours Now is a little iffy and hard to pull off unless you can swing total dominance of the field. Assuming X/Y/Z get fixed, this one would be the most skipped mission since making sure all objectives are clear and have nothing around them is kind of tough (unless you are rocking a Brokkr knockback horde I suppose... but as lists wont be tailored to missions, this wont tend to happen often). Next, Look Under Every Rock is hard to pull without Scavenger. By the end you will have a couple of guys left on the board attempting to grab that one last thing back for match point. It needs some way of getting some 1VP objectives in there. Either killing or surviving might be good for this one (with the highest kill
VP being 1's across the board).
Dig In, Prospecting and All They Understand seem to be the ideal for Forge Fathers as they currently stand. They all have multiple, orthagonal methods of winning that don't require you to constantly keep to a full model count. You can play the stubborn bastard in Dig In for several turns and keep them pinned until you can rush in to control an objective or two. Forge Fathers are fairly good at pinning stuff down so board control based missions seem a nice fit. Prospecting is interesting and allows for a variety of approaches and strategies to win it. And All They Understand is, of course, easy enough to swing in most games.
Now, with all that said, the general stats feel pretty close to being right in terms of performance. Forge Guard are tough to kill between good Survive, Armour 2 and Tough (and Life Support). And even though I am not always a fan of dwarfs being slow, I think it fits here. That said, with space for only one Forge Guard in most lists, I can see the basic trooper being less popular compared to the Autocannon variant who is excellent at suppression and can still deliver a kill when it needs to. Giving the Hailstorm Rifle Firestorm might see the basic trooper get trotted out more as a teams uber-armoured SAW guy. The Missile Launcher is also feeling a bit sub-par. Slow and Deliberate are bad combos and it basically requires you to feed movement cards to the
ML guy all game (which tends to preclude giving them +1 Shoot or Head Shot).
Brokkr are actually kind of neat and have grown on me quite a bit. This will be helpful as the list is less Forge Guard focused than I had first though (at least now). They should be fairly good at projecting some control and are even good at capitalizing on it in close quarters. I can see Forge Fathers as the faction that locks you down and them slams you in close combat once you're pinned. Knockback is also handy for keeping stuff off of objectives and should lead to some fun situations. The Brokkr with Heat Rifle actually looks fairly well-rounded for a specialist. A pistol for suppression and a Heat Rifle to deliver kill-shots when needed. These guys will likely be a popular specialist choice.
I'm loving the Engineer+Remote combo. The Mining Laser suffers from similar problems as the
ML Forge Guard, but at ten points that isn't as big a deal. The Boombots look like great point filler that will also cause a fair bit of damage if they go off well.
As for the leader choices, the Chief Brokkr is interesting and surprisingly tough to kill for a dude with no armour. But his cost makes him seem like not a great deal compared to the Huscarl who is only one point more and rocks some nasty stats of his own. If the Chief Brokkr could be a cheapish 14-15 point leader, then that would give us something we could really use. At 19 points, the Huscarl is a big investment but also a bad arse. Currently, it is probably the best commander choice in the list.
At 25 points, the Huscarl in FG armour is finally something that doesn't eat up more points than its nearest competitor (the Peacekeeper Captain). It is a fantastic leader, but probably only workable if you do not touch any other Forge Guard in your list. If you are fielding this thing, you want to probably stick to Brokkr for the rest of it. Though a FG Huscarl,
AC Forge Guard and three Brokkr may be okay in terms of battlefield control.
In the end, I definitely need to test things out. But at first blush, the main sticking point is that a chunk of their objectives seem to work better if you ignore Forge Guard or decline to take a Leader. Oh well, we'll see where testing takes them.
But the concept of armoured hulks flanked by nekkid berserker miners is an awesome one. But then, my favourite WFB units were always Iron Breakers and Slayers, so this force concept is right up my alley.
