Greetings fellow bunker dwellers! ‘Tis I, Jeff, with a
slightly different offering for you all. Today, I want to talk to you about how
size matters to me. See for me, I always prefer as big as I can cram in.
Huh? No, I’m talking about hordes in Warhammer. What else
would I be... oh.
Seriously though, I love large units in Warhammer, always
have. Even in the dark days of the early nineties when a warhammer unit could
be five Chaos Warriors and a “block” of fifteen Orcs looked sizeable I was
never happy. These piddly small units never looked like regiments to me. They
were five blokes out for a fight with a flag. The spectacle just wasn’t there.
I remember, actually, the first time I saw Andy Chamber’s ancient Skaven army,
all the bases done as cavern flooring rather than green sawdust, all the units
dense blocks of ratmen. That, that right there, that was an army thought 10
year old me. Fast forward 24 years and I still think this. I still consider a
unit of 15 to be mere skirmishers and 24-30 to be my natural size of unit. I
even do it with “elite” armies (I.E. high points cost, high skill and thus low
numbers). My Dwarfs are full of decent, crunchy block units and I’m thinking of
adding a horde of greataxe wielding warriors if I can ever find models to do it
justice (c’mon GW, give us a new Dwarf core box, please?).
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Is this not better? Is this not your natural state of being? |
These days though, we have a new and beautiful thing for
lovers of large units to play with: the Horde. 10 Models wide – unheard of in
previous editions, even I thought 7 was a lot – deep ranked and with rules to
reward it. Hordes fight with an extra rank compared to other normal units so
with spears deal a punishing four ranks of stabbing. Not to be sneezed at. If
you are a “horde” army to begin with (low points, low skill, high numbers) then
you can fit loads of these into an army. Consider exhibit ‘A’, my 2.5k Goblin
list:
Yeah baby! That’s three 50 strong Night Gobbo hordes with spears. Now
Goblins, Undead and Skaven are probably the only armies that can field quite
such ridiculous numbers of troops. But at a sensible points value 2-3k almost
all armies can consider having a decent horde sized unit amongst their ranks.
But why do you want them? Well, there are a couple of really solid tactical
options when you have a horde: [continues after the jump]
1)
The Tar
Pit
The first, and least imaginative use of the horde
is as The Combat That Wouldn’t End. Essentially neutralising at least one enemy
unit by trapping them in a combat that they can’t quickly win. They have to
pretty much kill everyone. This is actually one of the more useful options for
undead as their ability to replace casualties makes huge “Tar Pit” units,
especially of zombies, excellent in this role. It does have the disadvantage of
being one of those tactics that sacrifices some fun for your opponent so be
good natured and jovial if you use it! Tar Pits need to be units that can take
it, either through ridiculous size (Gobbos and Skaven), high toughness and/or
armour saves (Dwarfs, Chaos Warriors, Ogres) or by replenishment (Undead). They ideally need to be made stubborn or even
unbreakable through magic, steadfast or natural abilities. Otherwise they will
eventually run. You want a Tar Pit to be something that the enemy avoids like
the plague so that they will be driven to other areas of the battlefield and into
the jaws of your plan, buah ha hahaaa! (You do have a plan right?)
2)
The Anvil
In an army where you have a mix
of “horde” and “elite” units you can make a horribly effective combination. One
problem “elite” units tend to have is that they are generally small and so have
to kill a bunch of the enemy just to even the combat resolution before they
ever start. Hordes do not have that problem. Theirs tends to be their low skill
meaning that they struggle to kill huge amounts even with their favourable
rules. So combine the two, have your large units engage the enemy and then
sweep in the elites (or a big monster or something), the horde neutralises the
combat resolution of the enemy, their wounds add to the resolution, THEN your
elites scythe in and add another 5-6 to the tally. Hopefully your opponent is
now on double ones or flee. At this point pursue with your horde and restrain
your elites, hopefully, if your army is anything like mine, there will be
another large unit engaged and waiting for the hammer to come and finish off
the job.
[Charlie Note: One
thing to be wary of with hammer and anvil: this tactic only works if your horde
unit is fairly evenly matched against the enemy unit. If your goblin Anvil is
about to get mashed by Chaos Warriors, don’t send in your Hammer unit – in all
probability, the goblins will lose the combat by so much that your elite unit
will end up taking a really tough break test.]
3)
The
Assassin
Urg, I don’t like this one much
folks. I prefer not to direct attacks onto characters as it feels… wrong
somehow. Where challenges exist as a mechanism it feels weird to be able to say
“a bunch of my lads beat this guy to death” but… Consider this, with corner to
corner fighting and the way ranks work. One hero can be facing 12 of my
goblins. Twelve of ‘em. There is a decent likelihood that they might be able to
scratch him, do it again next round and he’s in some trouble. Like I say, urg,
but legit.
There are more tactics – probably
dozens – but most of them are finesses of those three. I wanted to move onto a
few tips and pitfalls with hordes.
1)
Win a
combat, not just survive it:
Hordes do a decent amount of
killing all on their own, but a canny opponent will have ways of balancing the
odds, you need that little bit more if you want to be sure of a kill. My favourite – these days – is actually
inspired by Charlie’s Empire. There are captains and warrior priests
every-sodding-where. The extra few wounds caused by these low-level characters
have tipped more than a few combats in his favour. If you have the kind of army
where characters are cheap then add one to each of your big units. Better
leadership, a few extra kills, more chance of winning.
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Plus, they just look so damn cool! |
Hordes have a massive achillies
heel. They corner like Reliant Robins (a bizarre three wheeled car for readers outside
the UK). Most units can use wheeling to redirect their course. Hordes are far,
far too wide for this:
If you need them to be going in a
different direction then they kinda have to be reformed. This always feels like
a wasted turn to an extent. When you make your battle plans and deploy your
forces you have to see the hordes as a speartip, driving into the heart of the
enemy, make their attempts to outmanoeuvre it become part of your plan. Try
sweeping in from the flanks and driving across the table. Ultimately, make it
your plan for the horde to be going “that way” and be ready for what your opponent
will have to do to react. Bottom line, if you are reacting with hordes
something has gone wrong, they are for bold action, not finesse.
3)
Beware
artillery
Large units are just a godsend
for artillery rich armies. This is why, further up in this article, I
recommended the 2-3k points value. If you have only room for one artillery
magnet in the army (be it a horde, a monster, whatever) then that will be the
one and only target for the artillery. You’ll loose it. There is a place for
everything, just be aware that in smaller games, your horde will be the
ultimate boom magnet.
Finally I’d like to share some
specifically goblin tactics for the hordes, I’ve also invited Mark and Maisey
to do the same for Skaven and Undead:
Gobbos and the ‘Orde:
In the “World According to Jeff”,
Goblins belong in hordes, it’s their natural habitat. There are though a couple
of really, really interesting things we can do: First, Netters. I said in an
article ages ago that every army had things that were just plain
rude. Well, Netters are the Goblin version. 45 points may seem like a lot for a
small unit, but in a unit of 50? Bargain, for those who haven’t faced them,
netters have a 5-in-6 chance of dropping your opponents strength by one and a
1-in-6 chance of doing it to yourself. This is just savage and really harms
your opponent’s chances of busting through your ranks. Beware the Animosity
table though, hordes do waaay more damage on the unfriendly results! Use Spider
Riders, Orc Boar Boyz or monsters/trolls as your hammers to the anvil. Oh, and
for goodness sake: A Battle Standard Bearer.
Skaven:
Rats,
rats and more rats.
I’m sure
that we all read the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” when we were young. Doubtless the
piper is now subject to investigation by Operation Yewtree.
Anyway, the
image I have of this poem is of him piping a vast horde of scurrying vermin to
their doom in the river Weser. This image is what I think a Skaven army should
look like - a seething horde of filthy shod advancing towards the enemy like a
squeaky, smelly, semi-continent tidal wave of stabby death. Hence, here is my
horde:
1. It
looks good and feels right. (see comments above).
I
deliberately chose to have the spears look as if the front ranks are getting
ready to receive a charge and their spears are lowered for maximum pokeage.
P.S. I
see the spear as a very Skaven weapon. The rat holds one end of it and all the
violence happens some distance away, and the rat gets less upset by the bigger
thing at the other end trying to hit said rat with something hard or sharp.
2. You
get a LOT of attacks.
When not
charging, the rats get 4 ranks worth of attacks in. This is a satisfying number
of attacks and usually results in something (other than rats) dying.
3. I like
to stick Skivvit in the horde.
Skivvit
Backbreaker is my Warlord and he is the angriest rat this side of the Drakwald.
He has to deal with Lucki Sh*twhiskers on a daily basis but isn’t allowed to
kill him, so this anger is understandable. Skivvit likes dirty tricks as much
as any other hyper-violent, constantly frustrated rodent megalomaniac and tends
to issue a tot of the finest Skavenbrew to his horde at the start of each battle.
Sometimes this works beautifully and Skivvit’s horde spends the rest of the
battle acting like rabid squirrels on crystal meth; sometimes the Skavenbrew
just kills a lot of rats. But Skivvit doesn’t seem to care too much, as long as
he’s got a lot of rats around him and something to stab whilst he thinks of
Sh*twhiskers.
4. It
stops the rats from running away.
Rats take
comfort from numbers and the unit has stuck around after losing a lot of truly
brutal, lopsided combats and following horrific casualties from shooting,
magic, my army’s own incompetence and Sh*twhiskers.
Reasons
why I like somebody else’s horde
1. Blevvy and his Doom Rocket
Snkh snkh
snkh!
Problems
with the Horde
1. The
ranking.
Lining up
70 rats on a movement tray takes ages. It really does. And when you’ve got a 3
1/2 hour window to have a game before your fiancée turns into Bridezilla, every
minute of game time counts. Packing the rats away at the end of the game is
equally onerous.
2. They
have a massive effect on smaller battles.
My horde
costs 350 points before Skivvit joins it, so the horde is a major part of my
army.
If the
horde does well, it can crush an opponent’s army. If it does badly, it can drag
me down like a big lead anchor attached to a bag of kittens.
3.
Manoeuvring.
Even with
a 5” movement, the horde can spend a lot of time moving about and getting stuck
behind things.
4. Less
flexible.
Sinking
so many points into one unit can mean that you have fewer options in the
movement phase than your enemy. And the flanks of the unit do become very
exposed.
5.
Finding somewhere to put it
The horde
is a big thing with a large footprint - it measures 22 x 15 cm. Deployment can
be a bit of a challenge and it tends to be obvious where it’s going to go.
Undead:
I think Jeff has covered the
major points on Horde use, and being Undead, the horde is the natural unit size
for, well, everything. There are few sights more satisfying than having
multiple hordes of Zombies and Skeletons lined up. Well, satisfying for you -
your opponent might think otherwise. I’m currently rocking three 50-strong
units of zombies, mostly because of the cinematics of it all rather than the
tactical applications. When the butterfly brings me back to the Undead, I plan to
build a few extra skeletons so I can field my four 25-strong units as hordes
for the extra staying and killing power. Not that I plan on using all 5 at the
same time. Ok, I might be, but as I said, just because it’ll look awesome!
Anyway, to the tactics. Big units
of Zombies, as Jeff says above, are great for locking down areas of the battlefield.
I tend to use them as roadblocks and for area denial. No one wants to try and
push through a flank protected by two hordes of Zombies. As points goes, that’s
300 points to have the kind of unit that deters your opponent from using big
sections of the battle field, allowing you to push her into your killing zone.
This is especially useful against any army that can outmanoeuvre an Undead army
(i.e. All of them). A word of warning, do
not use Zombies as an anvil unit. Any cunning opponent will see your elite,
hard to wound flanking unit and simply weather their assault. The Zombies
however, are soft and will result in a big combat resolution bonus for her.
Which translates into more casualties for you, which will apply to both units.
I’ve lost more Grave Guard to this tactic than to actual wounds dealt to them.
However, feel free to use Skeletons
hordes as anvil units and use either elite units or, and this I do use often,
Ghouls as the hammer unit. Ghouls have a high number of poisoned attacks and
it’ll be tough for your opponent to decide what is the better target, the
armoured, but hard hitting horde, or the smaller but tough unit of Ghouls.
Also, if you stick a Vampire (but not your general, ever!) into either of those
units you’ll be chewing your way through units in good order.
The last horde option for the
undead is one that I personally won’t use as it is quite simply no fun for your
opponent, but as we are covering everything I should probably mention. Taking a
horde of Graving Guard isn’t out of the realms of possibility, an expensive one
both fiscally and in points. Taking 50 Grave Guard with hand weapons and
Shields. So for 600 points you are getting 30 strength 4 attacks with killing
blow. And a 4+ armour save with a parry. Stick a BSB in that unit with the
Banner of the Barrows (a straight +1 to hit) and you’ll be un-killable and
unstoppable.
In summary, Zombies are great for
roadblocks and area denial. Skeletons are good as anvils. Just keep in mind
what combat resolution can do to you when deciding where to deploy your hordes
and which fights you commit them to.
And that’s all folks, hope you’ve
managed to enjoy this wall’o’text pertaining to that most spectacle inducing
thing in Warhammer: Really big units!
TTFN
Not got a WHFB army, but I agree with this aesthetically. An "army" implies a certain size. A low volume collection of handfuls is a low volume of handfuls. An Army is Corps made up of Divisions, made up of Brigades, made up of Regiments and/or Battalions. Hurrah !
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