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The thing that's always drawn me to fantasy has been cavalry. In particular, i've always loved "weird" cavalry like demigryph knights or cold one knights. Largely though (and i'm new to AOS), cavalry seems somewhat "meh" with the absence of any flanking/rear charge bonuses. With the exception of mournfang cav and blood knights, cav seems to have roughly 1 attack, maybe -1 rend and maybe 2 damage on the charge. With the general's handbook, they seem largely expensive all around compared to infantry, and once they charge, are likely to get swamped (since there aren't charge arcs either). My friends and I are still getting stuff to start our armies out, so i don't have any experience yet (so please forgive me if i'm wrong).

specifically, i'm curious about dark elf cav (cold one knights, doomfire warlocks (these guys seem great actually, if really really expensive), dark riders, and chariots). They all seem very unimpressive to me. Can someone tell me if i'm just looking at this wrong?

Ha, great to see a fellow cavalier.

Well, first off, I recommend taking a look at this community article on charge tactics. Really can make you an ace cavalry commander:

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2017/02/14/tactical-toolbox-charging/

Now, I don't know much about dark elves/exiles so I'm going to show you the 1d4chan tactic page's opinion on them.

Drakespawn Knights (aka Cold One Knights)
Tough heavy cavalry. Slower than light cavalry but still pretty fast (10" Move, reroll a dice when charging). They make three decent attacks each, and are more damaging if they charge, nice, but not specially threatening. But the thing that sets them apart is that they get a 4+ Save (at 2 wounds), re-rolling 1s, or 1s and 2s in combat (so a virtual 3+ Save). They have many uses, but they're specially good at winning attrition fights with their great Saves. But most of all, they're elves mounting dinosaurs, and that's reason enough to take them.

https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Age_of_Sigmar/Tactics/Edition_1.0/Exiles

To my knowledge the only "bad" cavalry are Empire knights as they really lack hitting power and better serve as moving walls of iron (so not much change from past editions ).

My Brets are still ace chargers though. Eventually I'll expand my equine arsenal to Vanguard cavalry and Wanderer riders for more trampling goodness.

Generally speaking there are only 2 'competitive tier' cavalry units in the game (depending on what you consider necro-knights to be) and those are blood knights and dracothian guard.

Then there are some reasonably strong cav like demigryphs; then dissappointing cav like bloodcrushers and gore gruntas then terrible cav like anything riding a regular horse or a cold one.

These exclude mounted heroes because they're a whole other animal.

But yeah, most cavalry caps out at 'meh, good enough'

Having played a bunch of games with my Gore-gruntas, I can tell you that they are good at getting across the board quick and forcing my opponent to deal with them. They have a good save, high Bravery, and at 5 Wounds each they can tank a lot of damage. Alas, I fear that this is about all cavalry (and chariots for that matter) can do. You get decent bonuses for having successful charges, but their mobility is their greatest strength, especially in games featuring heavy use of objectives.

That said, the cowboy and Classics fan in me just can't help but want to play a lot of cavalry and chariots, to the point that I don't care about winning, I just really like the models. My next project is a Piggy Charge army using Boar Boys, Boar Chariots, Warbosses on Boars, and Gore-gruntas to bring home the bacon.

After that, I am going to do something with my 3 Gorebeast Chariots and 10 Chaos Knights that are awaiting painting.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And funny enough, I have read enough Facebook and various forum posts talking about how Demigryphs aren't good, Mighty Skullcrushers getting good boosts with the new Khorne book, Empire Knights being unusually great on the charge, and Saurus Knights being scary good with Lances in a particular formation. Just goes to show that you might want to get your info from more than one source.

Empire knights can swap their shield for a hammer, so they would get 1 lance attack, 2 hammer attavks, and 2 horse attacks, right? That seems pretty not bad, especially when you count in their once per game re-rolls to hit.theyre not going to be downing big scary monsters alone, but they would probably wreck normal infantry's day.

Yeah I never leave home without my Brass Stampede battalion made up of a Lord of Khorn on a Juggernaut and 3 units of 3 Skullcrushers. With new buffs from another battalion's Slaughterpriests/Bloodsecrator, they're pretty good hard hitters, especially with the mortal wound output in their charge, and the 5 wounds each make them really good at tar pitting. I also have a soft spot for them, as they look so barn cool

I have black knights, problem is their not very good, kinda bummed, but they are fast and can survive a hit. But they dont dish it out when they charge. Especially because they lack Rend. My only Solice is I only paid 20$ for one kit and the other was a gift
But, My God, are Blood Knights good, im getting some Dragon Princes to turn them into those, painted red, some better skin and no one will be the wiser.

I have found tomb king cavalry to be somewhere around utterly useless, but pretty to look at. Of my last 2 remaining forces, undead and wood elves, neither cavalry are particularly any good.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

But, My God, are Blood Knights good, im getting some Dragon Princes to turn them into those, painted red, some better skin and no one will be the wiser.

I added some vampire heads from puppets war

A large chunk of my 2000pt High Elves are on horseback, (26 models). They are great at seizing objectives quickly and can slam into weak points on enemy lines, holding them in place and doing a lot of harm while ranged gets into position to pincushion them.

wild riders aren't complete crap, but AoS is definitely heavy cavalry over light.

I went the light Cav route with Shadowblades. Not top tier by any means, but the tactics have been a blast to play. The mobility allows me to isolate out a part of my opponents army, while completely avoiding a different side. It's also difficult for my opponents to avoid any assassination attempts. Not playing them currently because I'm committed to 40k for the next few weeks and waiting for one more rules issue to be resolved.

Based on that, Ellyrian Reavers would also be fun to play because of their additional movement to further frustrate opponents.

one of the real issues with light cav is that its not really faster than heavy cav. it gets run down or destroyed too easily, I run into the local big blob of troops in the center and was virtually impossible for tomb king cavalry to do anything about it...except chuck a warsphinx in there and hope something happens

I went full on crazy and run 60 Dark Riders, so my perspective and experienced is skewed. So take anything I contribute to the conversation with that in mind. I have NO experience in running any kind of Cav as part of a normal list. From what I've seen, my thoughts are that Heavy Cav is designed to work as a support element to a more varied force, so you can get away with a small unit. I haven't seen very many Heavy Cav spam lists work terribly well. Unfortunately, I don't have anything to really back this up, just observations from watching others play their Cav lists.

The Dark Riders (and probably Ellyrian Reavers) are more shooting support, so their mobility is used to either get somewhere fast and soften up a target, act as a block to something you want to protect, or skip around to frustrate your opponent in some other way. You're absolutely right about them not being much faster than Heavy Cav, but I believe it's unfair to compare them on a 1-1 basis. The Heavy Cav has a different role, and I believe it's balanced toward that end. With a full Light Cav list, I'm able to bring more shots to bear on the Heavy Cav which a normal army might not be able to deal with. I literally have 180 shots that I can reliably deliver wherever I need them to be.

The issues with my particular list is that I have no counters to magic, not a single weapon with any Rend, or any way to deal Mortal Wounds. So I'm almost entirely dependent on those 180 shots weakening each threat to the point where I can handle them in Assault. Some games are good, some are bad, but I'm doing alright winning about 1/2 my games. While I haven't run Ellyrian Reavers, based on how I wish my Dark Riders would play, I wish I had gone that route instead, as they'll get the same number of shots, but can move an additional 2d6 before or after shooting. This gives them the mobility to avoid even the Heavy Cav.

It occurs to me (Order Draconis main) that cavalry may be a useful litmus test for AoS in general, no?

Between End Times WH and now the entire scale of the game has changed drastically and the predestined roles of each cavalry unit in the game have changed both visibly and not, so perhaps we can examine how people use cavalry in general.
- Are people favoring the tankiness and burst damage afforded by heavy cav, in addition to being a faster then footslogger platform?
- Are people keeping their distance when using cavalry units that have ranged weapons, or are they being using a move/shoot/charge system? when and to what effect?
- Is there anyone doing any funny magic cup shuffles based on the higher speed of these units (ranged cav up front until they enter charge range, then have heavier units overtake them at the last minute)?
- In general, what crazy uses are cav users finding to play their units, which may or may not be beyond their intended uses?
[insert usual "how closely are people clinging to the netlists" question here]

To me at least it seems horsemen are a small scale example of tactical creativity among AoS players: for all we know there are a billion competitive uses for cav units in this game, it's just that we haven't discovered all of them yet.

Also on that front about the new scale of the game, having a mostly cav force may/may not save you loads of time and money to get to 2500 points (based on model count). By extension it can also lead to quicker set up and pack up of games, which leads to more games, which leads to more RNG and fun, which leads to good times . Kind of depends on whether OP wants to have fun, be competitive, or be somewhere in between (please be that last one, PLEASE)

Mraj__Undefined wrote:
It occurs to me (Order Draconis main) that cavalry may be a useful litmus test for AoS in general, no?

Between End Times WH and now the entire scale of the game has changed drastically and the predestined roles of each cavalry unit in the game have changed both visibly and not, so perhaps we can examine how people use cavalry in general.
- Are people favoring the tankiness and burst damage afforded by heavy cav, in addition to being a faster then footslogger platform?
- Are people keeping their distance when using cavalry units that have ranged weapons, or are they being using a move/shoot/charge system? when and to what effect?
- Is there anyone doing any funny magic cup shuffles based on the higher speed of these units (ranged cav up front until they enter charge range, then have heavier units overtake them at the last minute)?
- In general, what crazy uses are cav users finding to play their units, which may or may not be beyond their intended uses?
[insert usual "how closely are people clinging to the netlists" question here]

To me at least it seems horsemen are a small scale example of tactical creativity among AoS players: for all we know there are a billion competitive uses for cav units in this game, it's just that we haven't discovered all of them yet.

Also on that front about the new scale of the game, having a mostly cav force may/may not save you loads of time and money to get to 2500 points (based on model count). By extension it can also lead to quicker set up and pack up of games, which leads to more games, which leads to more RNG and fun, which leads to good times . Kind of depends on whether OP wants to have fun, be competitive, or be somewhere in between (please be that last one, PLEASE)

I am trying different tactics with my remaining two armies than how they fought in warhammer 8th. The tactics certainly have changed as much with the way forces take up space. Generally I bring the same forces in both games. I have found with the much looser and much larger formations in AoS (at least locally) there is very little breathing room for light cavalry.