8th Ed. advice needed

[xisor]

hi all, im still very much loving my lizardmen but have decided to start a 2nd army to paint when i want a change from my purple lizards. It would also be nice to play a different army every now and again just for a change of tactics and scenery. I have narrowed it down to a few armies and would really like your guys opinions on them. The armies i am considering are Wood elves, Tomb kings or Vampire counts.

I suppose i should tell you what i want from my new army, i like the models from all the mentioned armies so thats not an issue. What i would like is an army that is not considered to be very powerful i like to earn my wins and get respect when a "lower tier" army beats a higher one. It would also be good to have a change from my combat heavy lizards and maybe relky on other parts of the game much more. although i do see my lizards as very balanced.

Any feedback with how these guys play or any other opinions or suggestions on other armies would be great. I did consider empire and vampire counts also but dicounted empire due to 5 armies in my group already, VC are still a definate possiblity though.

 

[Xul]

I've heard that tomb kings are really different from other armies and you need to do some good thinking while constructing that army and playing it. however - that's only what I've heard. can't judge based on own experience. what is for sure is, that from the 3 you mentioned, the TK are probably the rarest one to encounter, which could be a plus for you.

 

[Larinus]

Well, Wood Elves certainly can provide lots of non-combat orientated armies, but you can also create these with Tomb Kings - I'm not as familiar with Vampire Counts. None of these armies are particularly common, if that's what you want, however, you can't really decide on an army that's more powerful or less powerful than another army, because otherwise everyone would have the most powerful army.



However, if I was playing my Lizardmen and came up against any of these three armies, then they wouldn't initially strike me as being particularly good. However, Wood Elves do strike me as being fairly good when you use them correctly, so you would have to earn your wins with those.

All armies are meant to be as good as the next, so I would go from here depending on looks. All armies are good or bad, and they all offer opportunities to every general. So I don't care about much else when I'm choosing an Army other than looks.

However, you could just ignore this advice if you wanted, because I don't have any experiance with any armies other than Lizardmen. I am purely judging the armies by their covers.

 

[Gojira]

Tomb Kings are the only ones I can really speak on and they are a pretty cool army to collect. Scuttlebutt is that they are the next army to be released too.


You mention you want a less combat heavy army for one of these. TKs signature is their magic phase, but anyway you do it, it's going to be strong. TKs could get the equivalent of 13 power dice per phase and that's before items like hieratic jar and plaques.

The change to bound items and character slots make them more powerful at magic too. TKs still roll on the winds of magic and can use those power dice to throw at their bound item spells. So stocking up on bound items would make for a really over charged magic phase. It would be the maximum of 13 from incantations and casket, plus whatever you roll on the winds of magic. It's hard to stop. Also, as you're not restricted on the amount of characters, it's possible to have more priests for more incantations without using power dice.
Off the top of my head there are 3 bound items in the TK book, one of which will probably never get used. The BRB has the ruby ring too, which I can see being added to alot of TK lists.

In a 2500 game, you have 625 points to spend on heroes and 625 to spend on lords. The only structure restrictions are at least 1 tomb king/prince and at least one kind of priest. I don't know what the ideal amount of characters will be, but if you do TKs get at least 3 priests and a Tomb prince/king. That would be using the old amount of characters, so you would be staying at the old limit where most TK players will probably be trying out more priests than that.

SSCs are pretty good warmachines, but you might want to only consider 1 if you don't want a good phase. Any wounds at all can make your opponent take a panic test at -1 LD, they are also flaming and magical, so you can drop them on a Slann with the ethereal discipline and still wound. With 2 SSCs you can fire up to 4 times per turn, using incantations. People used to use the magic phase firing as a way to find out the range to the opponent, and then fire exactly in the shooting phase. With no more guess range you can fire exactly every time.

Tomb scorpions were a very popular choice before. They took a bit of a hit with the changes to strike order in combat, but they gained a few inches on their charge and got stomp.

That touches on the elements common to every TK list. I think no matter what way you construct your list, it's never gonna be as cheese as some other armies can do, so I wouldn't worry about it. Hope it helps

 

[strewart]

TK probably aren't going to be the next army (that is meant to be O&G now) but they will certainly be soon, I'd definitely expect within the next year depending on if GW steps up their release schedule or not. I hope so after seeing only 1 book so far this year besides the BRB...

VC have no shooting at all, nothing. So you will be relying a lot on combat, but very differently from your LM who are very powerful. VC focus on sheer weight of numbers, and are a lot less powerful this edition than they used to be. They also rely on a rather powerful magic phase, and my favourite thing about them is they are fun! You can convert an undead unit from literally anything in the game by simply adding a few bones here and there, maybe an open wound, and painting them dark.

TK have been well sumarised already, they have quite cool models and can be decent at shooting but again their strength of fear in combat has been deminished in 8th ed.

WE are a unique race which you can play with basically no ranked units if you want. I always found them difficult because everything was somewhat deadly, but there was no focal point for me to target. They were all skirmishing and hiding all over the place. Not sure how they go against the hordes of 8th ed though.