Posts tagged Fantasy

With the madness of the ETC over for another year and 8th edition Warhammer just released, now seems to be a good time to review my gaming priorities. For one thing, I’m glad I’m finished with Dwarfs under 7th edition, I am absolutely sick of them, they had gotten very boring to play with. The new rules seem to hold some hope for them however, as you no longer need to be afraid to actually bring the fight to the enemy, rather than sitting tight and watching your flanks.

Now I have some choices to make. I’ve settled on High Elves for my new army which I will be assembling and painting alongside the Road to Glory tournaments (for further information on this try here : http://www.w-ired.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=720). As the tournament organiser I won’t be playing competitively in the events but I’ll need an army on hand in case an uneven number of players show up, as well as being the sort of excuse I need to get a new army finished (every army I’ve ever finished has been to a tournament deadline). However, this leads me to the next question – To Cheese or not to Cheese?

Under sixth and seventh edition rules I’ve played in many tournaments, some with random armies and some with more especially tailored armies. I’ve never done badly no matter what I show up with but it’s only in recent times I’ve been anywhere close to winning and that has required more extreme and competitive army building. As such, my armies have had several units prepared and painted that have been abandoned as less than ideal choices, and plenty of things I’ve bought have gone unused for the same reason.

Looking through the figures I already have for the High Elves, there’s a large number of Silver Helms among them. Now, most people would ask why you would bother with Silver Helms, when you could just take the far superior Dragon Princes instead? Which is a fair point. There may be a niche for Silver Helms under 8th edition, only experience will tell if that’s true. Still, I might build and paint some anyhow, even if they don’t make it into competitive army lists for tournaments.

Therefore, I’ve decided that my goal for 8th edition is to find the middle ground with my armies. I’d like to have a hard enough army to be competitive at tournaments (without venturing into arsehole territory) while also having a wide variety of different units so that I can mix up army composition for friendly games and campaigns and use some of the lesser seen units. This may result in needing to build and paint armies of four to five thousand points overall. This will allow for enough variety to keep games interesting and will look fantastic when viewed en masse, even though at the rate I paint figures, won’t be ready for about six years or so.