How To Build A Competitive Warmahordes Army.

Everyone playing Warmachine and Hordes must build an army. It is extremely important to build your army properly, or you will be playing with a handicap from the get go. Warmachine is an extremely skill based game. For example, if you give two equally skilled people two different lists, one sub-par, and one optimized, the player with the optimized list will win every time (Dice allowing, of course). This being said, why do we not all just end up with the same list? Well, that is because a players army is determined by each players unique playing style. Players minds work differently, and each player looks for different things in the game. Some people play to win, and some people just play for fun. There are also those that have fun by winning. In this article, I plan to discuss how to properly build a tournament army, while still maintaining your own playing style. Indeed, some prefer assassination style army lists, or attrition lists, or scenario lists. But which of these is best? There is no way to tellwith the exception of scenario lists being inappropriate for Hardcore tournaments. Every list has a counter, no list is undefeatable.The first thing we must do when we plan to build a tournament capable army is to pick for which tournament format we would like to build. Do we want to prepare for a Steam Roller tournament? Or are we planning to attend a Hardcore style tournament? Once we know for what we are building, we can then start to pick things for our list. First, we must pick a faction, which is wholly based on ones playing style. In my opinion, armies like Khador, Cygnar, Menoth, Trolls and Mercenaries are better suited for attrition and objective play, while armies like Cryx, Retribution, Everblight, and Circle of Orboros are better for assassination and scenario. Now, obviously, these are wide generalizations, because really we need to pick a warcaster to truly decide what type of army we want to play.So, the next step is to pick a warcaster for the army of our preference. To do so, we need to decide what type of army we want to play. This article is not meant to tell you what army to play, so this is very general here. Nonetheless, different casters have different strengths and weaknesses, which is what we are here to discuss. Certain casters are identified as support, assassination, and control, which roughly coincide with the three types of army (assassination, attrition and scenario). Control and support casters will lend themselves more to scenario and attrition armies whether that be by killing the majority of the opposing army, or by simply stopping them from killing yours and winning by scenario, and obviously assassination is meant to destroy your opponents warcaster while leaving the majority of their army intact. Warcasters that are one man armies (ie: Garyth, Caine, Butcher) are generally lumped together into the assassination category. Casters that are control are generally used in scenario armies (pHaley, eHaley, Deneghra etc). Support casters (pStryker, Irusk, Morvanha) are best in attrition armies. Think about what you want your army to do, and pick from there. Some warcasters will fill multiple roles, meaning you can have a support warcaster playing inside of an assassination army. A very good example of this is Master Necro-tech Mortenebra who is an support caster that runs an assassination style army.So now we should have picked our warcaster based on the information above. Next we move on to picking the units that best compliment our chosen caster. Some people will want to run tier lists but they are seldom worth it, because the restrictions they apply to you are too drastic to really be worthwhile. In order to pick the appropriate units, we first need to discern the strengths of the casters. Assassination casters have a plan, and you have to know what that is. Garyth, Caine, eStryker are all planning to be delivered by their army to the opposing warcaster, and proceed to do what they do best to them. Support casters need a lot of units for them to support. Infantry or warjacks will normally be the focus of support caster lists. Attrition lists will need very tough units with a plan for survival.Assassination lists have their assassination pieces sometimes its the caster or sometimes its a model in the army (Such as Krayes Storm Clad, or the Mage Hunter Assassin with Adeptus Rhan. Or Mortenebras entire army) Units that can clear your route to their caster or do the assassination themselves should be part of our list. House Sheeyl Magister Solos are a very good example of this. They can push and pull things out of the way, or even slam things with combo smite. Gun mages are useful for moving your opponents models. Druids of Orboros are also very good for this. Spells like Force Hammer, Scourge, and spell that grants true sight are also good at clearing assassination paths. Units that can attack and then move like House Guard Halberdiers, Dervishes, and Nyss blighted swordsmen are all excellent examples of lane clearing models/units.When enlisting support casters it is important to take quality units over utility units. For example, Iron Fang Pikemen are extremely potent infantry and when they are supported by spells like Iron Flesh and Battle Lust from Irusk they become some of the hardest things to deal with in the game. You do not need to take a utility unit that supports them thats what your warcaster is for. With Stryker as our caster, picking Storm Blades and putting Arcane Shield on them and Long Gunners with Snipe on them makes for a very solid start to an attrition army based on a support caster. Mortenebra does not have an assassination run without the warjacks she takes to do it. She needs fast, high MAT warjacks for her support spells to really mean anything.Control casters are a little trickier. We need to take self-sufficient units to properly utilize a control caster, which makes their armies the most difficult to build. Support casters will spend the majority of their focus/fury hampering your opponents abilities to do things. Temporal Barrier, Crippling Grasp, Polarity Shield or some sort of cloud effect spell are focus intensive leaving only a little extra for your army. Units like Mechano-Thralls are very good in armies like this as they are cheap, and can tie up a lot of enemy units for long periods of time if supported by Necro Surgeons. Notice how none of this particular unit combination requires anything from your caster. Units like Bane Thralls are good because they have stealth, which drastically increases survivability while not requiring aid from your warcaster. Units like trenchers will stop shooting armies from picking apart other things in your army while they are very survivable in their trenches This is a very good example of a quality standalone unit. The Great Bears of Gallowswood need no support from anything to be an amazing unit so they fit well into control armies. Generally speaking, control based armies will be more infantry heavy and will have less Warjacks, as they require focus to be used effectively.Now we should have the basics of our army down. Next, we need to add in the things we are missing. If our army is very heavily focused on shooting, how could it be better against close combat heavy armies? Does it need more shooting to stop them from getting to you? Does it need some sort of meat shield to get in the way to buy us time? Is our caster going to be protected against assassination, or will they be hanging in the wind? Do we need more magic? Do we get shut down by magic? Do we get shut down by shooting? This is why balancing the army composition is important. Armies focus on one main thing, but generally speaking, we want to have options to deal with what your army is weak against. For example, if you have a melee based Irusk infantry list with things like eEyriss, Spriggans and a Drakhun added in, these things would be able to help you deal with flanking solos and infantry units without diverting too much of your main force. Eyriss also adds the ability to remove spells/disrupt enemies. These examples are not part of the backbone of an army, but they provide different ways to disrupt the way your opponents plan to win. An example of a poorly diversified army is one centered on House Sheeyl Battle Mages going against a Menoth army full of Knights Exemplar Errants that cannot be targeted by spells. Things would not go well for the Battle Mages. But if that army throws in a unit of House Guard Riflemen or Halberdiers, then now the Riflemen/Halberdiers can deal with the Errant while the Battle Mages do what they do to the second rank of the army. Diversity in armies is key. Do not put all of your eggs in one basket.So, we have now built the majority of our army. The last step is figuring out how we intend to win the game. Do we wish to win by scenario? Do we wish to win by assassination? Do we want to try both? Whats our plan to do these things? It is possible to build many armies, but not all of them will have ways to win the game. They are sound lists they play to the strengths of the warcaster, they are well rounded, and they have a game plan. Their plan has no method to effectively end the game. They have no assassination potential, and no way of clearing opponents off of objectives. Every army needs to have one or both of these things in order to be a good tournament list, and your plan should not be just, Well see how it goes. That attitude will cause you to lose the game.To recap:1. Choose the warcaster/warlock.2. Choose what style of army you wish to build toward and for what tournament we intend to build.3. Put in the units essential to your strategy.4. Fill in any gaps by strengthening your weaknesses.5. Have a plan on how you intend to win.Once we have done all of this, its time to start testing. Play a lot of games with a list before you throw it out, and make sure to play against different styles of armies, and different opponents. Well, thats all Ive got for you for in my first article. My next article will be over how to reduce the chance of dice screwing you over and how to properly look at game statistics.