Thursday 22 May 2014

For the Lady! Part 1

It's been about 6 weeks since I actually posted anything on here, I've been rather busy!

From a gaming standpoint, I have been fortunate enough to represent Team England at the Warhammer 6 Nations event in Dublin, using my Lizardmen. This was the first time I've travelled abroad to play in a Warhammer event, and I had a great time over the weekend. Due to the nature of the event, I can't really discuss my list or the games for fear of giving something away that the Teams involved would rather I didn't. However, from a personal perspective I ended the weekend with 3 draws, an 9-11 loss and a 7-13 loss. I feel that I did a decent job for the team, but we were unlucky to lose the final round to France and finish third overall.

The 6 Nations put a little bit of stress on my gaming though. I was playing a very particular build of Lizards, and the games were rather tight affairs. I was also playing for England, and whilst a lot of people felt that we were the "B" Team, as a member of the team I felt a great deal of pride in being asked to play for them. All of this meant that I was worried about my gaming - not a position that I wanted to repeat after the event.

I was scanning around for a new army project, and I was partially tempted to try an Elf army of some description. They are very popular on the circuit at the moment, have some great models and I think that the variety of builds could give me what I was missing from the three armies that I use regularly at present. The one downside was a severe lack of funds to buy the models! I then remembered an acquisition I had made some time previously - a Bretonnian army.

For the Lady!

Another Warhammer blogger (with a much larger readership than mine!) has also recently posted an article on army choice - the link is here, I suggest you check it out if you haven't already. I have decided to take a different approach and do a review of the army as a whole. As these are mostly first impressions, a lot of them may be wrong and I invite other Bretonnian players to put me straight! I will start off with a look at the units in Core, Special and Rare, then I shall focus on the Characters, Magic and Items in the book, and finally I shall post a couple of lists I am looking at running in the near future.

Core

Like most things in a Bretonnian army, this section can be boiled down to 2 things: Knights and Peasants. The Knights come in two flavours - the slightly better, slightly more expensive Knights of the Realm and the slightly worse but slightly cheaper Knights Errant. The differences between the two are almost cosmetic. Realm Knights have the advantage of an additional point of Weapon Skill, putting them at the always desirable WS4, and they are Ld8 as standard (though in the age of the BSB this isn't as crucial as t used to be). Knights Errant though, despite having WS3 and a rule which is essentially all the downsides of Frenzy without the extra Attack, are cheaper and still have the wonderful 2+ Save that so frustrates Str3 opponents.

I think both are worth taking for different reasons. Realm Knights are the staple of the army - in fact at least a single unit is mandatory - and small units still pack quite a punch for their cost. Bretonnians are helped out here by a couple of their Special Rules, the first being that all Knight units have a Champion as standard (extra Attacks are always good) and the fickle yet fabulous Blessing of the Lady. If you've not encountered this before, the Bretonnian player can choose to automatically lose the roll to go first to enable all his Knights to have a Ward save. Combined with their armour, and the fact the Ward gets better against higher strength, these Knights are very survivable.

The Peasants, like in reality, are only there to make up the numbers. They are dirt cheap (and generally dirty too) and could only fight their way out of a wet paper bag if someone else was holding it down and encouraging them. Each variety of Peasant in this section has their redeeming features though. For the Archers - the unit you're more likely to see - it's the lovely Longbow they come with. They also have a couple of wonderfully cheap unit upgrades in that they can make their arrows Flaming for only 5 points, and you can have a Skirmishing unit for 1 point per model (taking them up to a massive 7 pts each... ;-) ) Even if you don't choose to Skirmish, you get the Defensive Stakes for free, meaning you're more likely to hang around if something charges you.

The other Peasant unit, the Men at Arms, are more interesting. Very cheap, they boast things a lot of mounted armies lack - Static Combat Res and numbers. A unit of 40 is only about 200 points, and whilst they are individually rubbish, they do have Halbards so can strike at Strength 4. This seems to keep Empire players using infantry, so it can't be all bad! Their real downside is being WS2 and Ld5, but for the role that they are built for (standing in front of something hard for several turns until the Knights come to the rescue) they are very good.

The main thing to say about Bretonnian Core units is that you won't often see a Bret army with the minimum points spent in Core. All these choices are good at their job, and with Special and Rare being so specialised (as we will see) they provide an excellent backbone for the army.

It's all about the Pegs!

Special

Whereas the Bretonnian Core choices are all rather good, the same cannot be said about the Special selection. The undoubted stars of this section are the Pegasus Knights. The original Flying Monstrous Cavalry, these guys pack an impressive punch into a very mobile unit. A unit of 3 is surprisingly cheap at 165 points, and for that you get 6 Wounds at Toughness 4 with a 3+ Armour save and the Blessing, along with 4 Attacks from the Knights (with lances) and 6 from the beasts, plus their 3 Stomps. Impressive. The only downside is that you can only have a single unit, unless your General is also mounted on a Pegasus. This is a concept that we will return to!

If these guys are the stars, what makes the rest of the choices so rubbish I hear you cry? Looking at them individually should tell us. Starting with the least poor, we have Mounted Yeomen. Your basic Fast Cavalry unit, able to provide a little bit of shooting and get in the way of anything coming at you too fast. They even come with Spears in case you feel the need to charge something, and are WS3 to boot. So why are they so poor? Mainly because fast moving cavalry is not something a Bretonnian army really needs any more of. Whatever their role in another army would be, the Brets generally will have something that can do it better. Chaffing up a threat? Use a small Realm/Errant unit as they get the Armour and Blessing. Hunting War Machines? The Pegs can get there quicker and can probably do more damage when they do. Harassing flanks? Just use regular bowmen, the range on a longbow negates the need for the movement of the fast cav. By no means a bad unit, just an unnecessary one.

A truly bad unit does exist in this section though, and that is the Grail Reliquae. Apart from being notoriously difficult to spell, the Reliquae again adds very little to the Bretonnian army - however this time being cheap and fast are not amongst its selling points. It's expensive (minimum cost 118 points for a unit of 6 guys plus the filler, and up to 334 for a maximum size of 30) and unweildy thanks to it's strange set of rules. The only real plus side it has is being Stubborn, but with WS2 and Str3 you would probably set them up deep anyway and therefore they'd just be Steadfast instead. I just cannot see any use for this unit, even in a Peasant heavy army. Which is a shame, as the concept is fantastic! Maybe in the new book it will become a decent upgrade a la the Cauldron of Blood, but I won't hold my breath...

The final unit in here are the Questing Knights. Again, as with the Grail Reliquae these are a fantastic concept for a unit. Knights who have lain down their lances to hunt for the Grail, and who have decided the best alternative is a massive Greatsword - this wins cool points straight away. Unfortunately, they also lose the shield associated with the lance, dropping them to a 3+ save in combat. Where they will strike last. I just don't see them working in 8th edition. The only positive I can think of is that they can do some extra damage in the second and subsequent round of combat, but even then they will probably have taken a few casualties and won't be as effective as you would hope. A lot of points for a poor return in my opinion.

The power behind the throne...

Rare

Here is where we see that Brets are an old book - there are only two choices here. But what choices they are! :-)

Firstly, the rightly feared Field Trebuchet. A Str5(10) Stone Thower with 4 Wounds for only 90 points? Yes please I'll take 2! These monsters of an artillery piece can smash apart anything that can really threaten your Knights, and no self respecting Bretonnian general would leave home without a pair of them. They're that good.

The other choice is also really good, but in a less obvious way. Grail Knights are living legends. They always get the Blessing, even if you go first - possibly enabling some sort of strategy to catch your opponent off guard. They have great stats, being WS5 and Str4 with 2 Attacks each means they dish out a lot of damage on the charge. They also can carry a Magic Banner up to 50 points, and can be taken in units of only 3 models. On paper they are fantastic. However, I personally don't rate them. Why, you may ask? Well, they are still only human, and therefore Toughness 3 with 1 wound each. Even with a guaranteed Blessing, they are no harder to take out than any other Bretonnian Knight, and at 38 points a model that starts to hurt fast. Unlike the Questing Knights though, I do see a role for these guys in lists. A smallish unit (5 or 6) can do enough damage to fight on their own without character support, and a large unit as a character bus can do amazing amounts of damage. I think with some practice in order to keep them alive they could make a very effective unit.


Summary

So, to sum up this first stop in the tour of Bretonnia, the army has some pretty solid choices in the book. If you want to be overly critical you can say that they just boil down to Knights and Peasants, but I think that even within that simple distinction there is enough flavour and variety to make any sort of list work.

Next time (hopefully not as long a break as the last one!) I will take a look at the rest of the book - the Characters and Magic Items.

If you have any comments or ideas to share, please feel free to leave a comment here or get in touch on Twitter. I'm always keen to hear feedback!

Until next time!

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