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I keep seeing references to something called Battle Lines, but the core rules mention nothing about it. Could someone give me an overview of what these are exactly?

In Matched Play, Battleline units are your compulsory core troops. It's in the Generals's Handbook.

To play Pitched Battles, you have to have a spesific amount of unit categories based on the pointscale bracket you are in.
The categories are: Leader, Battleline, Behemoth, Artillery, Other.

The infomation about a units keyword are at the bottom of the warscrol,l the warscroll is in the Battletome or Grand Alliance books.
The points value, number of models per unit, and category limits are all info that is found in the Generals Handbook. (unless you collect an army that was released after the annual generals handbook was released, then the info is in your battletome. a new edition of the generals handbook is released every summer)

For example in a 2K point game you must have at least

1 Leader
3 Battleline

and you've a limit of
6 leaders
no troop limit
4 behemoths
4 artillery

Keeping in mind some units can be more than one category, for example there's a good few behemoth leaders which would put a tick in both limits.


Note some units are listed as battleline only under certain conditions, eg being part of a sub army group within a battletome. In addition battleline only affects units from the army you are building, not any allied models. So if you build a Daughters of Khaine army and take some liberator stormcast as allies those stormcast do not count toward the battleline requirement even though they are battleline within the stormcast battletome.

Note battleline is normally summarised on the table on the back of the battletome along with their points values. It's also in the generals handbook price updates (though with the 2019 around the corner its likely not worth getting the 2018