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Cheers folks,
I'm thinking of starting AoS with those handsome sylvaneth models. The only thing that irritates me are those woods. I'm on a limited budget and was aiming for Start collecting plus a unit of kurnoth hunters for a get go. Then i thought i kind of need the woods but that would drain my resources. Long story short can sylvaneth work with no (or at least very few) wyldwoods? Not asking for tournament level cheese, but solid casual capable lists.

You are going to want three woods for general purposes, many players will trace the 'base' of a citadel wood to create their own cutouts rather than buying three boxes.

I've actually started playing with no woods and am having a great time. I was so disheartened when i started playing sylvaneth because i was stomping my opponents, and none of us were having any fun. I stopped playing with the woods in casual and that small handicap gave my opponents enough help to make the games closer, and so much more enjoyable. In casual play, the sylvaneth do fine without woods.

graywater wrote:
I've actually started playing with no woods and am having a great time. I was so disheartened when i started playing sylvaneth because i was stomping my opponents, and none of us were having any fun. I stopped playing with the woods in casual and that small handicap gave my opponents enough help to make the games closer, and so much more enjoyable. In casual play, the sylvaneth do fine without woods.

How many pieces of terrain do you put on a board normally?

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

graywater wrote:
I've actually started playing with no woods and am having a great time. I was so disheartened when i started playing sylvaneth because i was stomping my opponents, and none of us were having any fun. I stopped playing with the woods in casual and that small handicap gave my opponents enough help to make the games closer, and so much more enjoyable. In casual play, the sylvaneth do fine without woods.

How many pieces of terrain do you put on a board normally?

We dont play on sparse boards by any means, maybe 2 pieces of terrain per 2x2 section. Nothing that made placing woods terribly difficult though, more things like hills, little huts, and towers that blocks sight a little and let our games have a feel of a theme.

That was far more positive than i ecpected
Especially the cutout is something i didn't remotely consider Thanks everyone!

Sylvaneth are one of the armies with a battletome that give them extra spells, artifacts, and the like. They have a distinct advantage over armies with no battletome-specific abilities simply for that reason. So against those less-fortunate armies, not taking the woods helps makes the game closer. Against other factions with batletomes that give them bonuses, you may notice the lack of woods more, as any imbalance of power between the tomes will be far less noticeable. So you will likely want to pick some woods up in the future, maybe do the whole tracing of the wood base, but it hasn't been debilitating playing without them in my experience.

When I started with sylvaneth it was to compliment my existing wood elf army (because I had a woodland centaur theme going on and was not keen to get Wanderer battle line units) and the resulting hybrid didn't have any woods at all.

I was quite happy with the way it performed and could logically expand it, but once you start looking at full sylvaneth allegiance for all the benefits that has, the wildwood is simply too good to pass up (especially since it's free.)

But yeah, definitely start with one. See what it's good for, decide if you want more, use alternatives like traced cutouts and such and pick up the woods themselves at whatever pace you're comfortable with.