Dear Plastic,

I’m coming back to AOS4 after spending a few years shooting aliens with spacemen, and I’m not even sure how to build a list now. Please help!

Brodaz

Our friend and Patron Brodaz got in touch as he is too fucking lazy to google it highly values our expertise in such matters – how do you go about writing a list in 4th, when you don’t know where to start? I reckon there’s a few people in the same boat and it has changed a lot, so let’s take a look.

First things first: Listbuilding tools

Warscroll Builder is dead, so you’ve got two options:

1. Pay for the app
2. Use Listbot

There’s another one out there called New Recruit which we reviewed, but the TLDR is that it’s just too fussy:

Vale, Warscroll Builder. So What’s Next?

Theoretically there’s Battlescribe, but if you’re a 40K refugee please just be aware that there are other options that work better in Sigmar. The official app is currently free, so I’ve tried both that and Listbot: I use and recommend the latter. It’s really easy to use, the output is clean and the devs are hyper-responsive on twitter.

You can try the app while it’s free and see if it works for you, but honestly I’d just use Listbot.

https://aoslistbot.herokuapp.com/listbot/

Second things second: Regiments

WarCom covers this, but your list needs 1 to 5 Regiments, each of which is lead by a hero:

Note there’s no Battleline. You just pick Heroes and put units in their Regiments – with some limitiations.

First Exception: Henchmen

You don’t have to put any units in underneath a given hero – Heroes can just sit there in their own Reg, chillin’ like a villain. Obviously it’ll blow up your drops to take more and more Heroes though, meaning some borderline support heroes become a really hard sell when they cost you a drop as well as points.

There’s an exception: some heroes have a special status that allows them to slot in underneath normal heroes. They can still lead a Regiment if you like, but don’t have to – you can save yourself a drop.

So using Kruleboyz as an example:

We can see that the Killaboss with Stab-grot can lead a Regiment that includes any Kruleboyz. Or you can nominate him as a “Mob Wrangler”, in which case he can slide into a Regimental slot under most of the other heroes, as noted in the table.

They all have one of these little nicknames – I’ll let you decide whether they’re flavourful or cringe – and there is no consistency whatsoever. There are winners and losers all over the place – for example I’d argue that the Murknob should have been one of these things all day long, and Ironjawz really suffer from the Warchanter costing you a Regiment, so they’re doomed to be high drop.

Second Exception: Auxilliaries

Each Hero will tell you which units they can take in their Regiment, and some are more liberal than others. There’s a thematic element, which of course means there are winners and losers here too. If you really want a unit, but don’t have any heroes that can take their keywords in their Regiment, you can run those units outside of a Regiment as a standalone – and these are called an Auxilliary.

Let’s look at Ogor Mawtribes. In my list currently I’m using two Slaughtermasters, an Icebrow Hunter and a Butcher as my heroes:

They unlock Gutbuster and BCR units, but I’d like a Gnoblar screen and / or Scraplauncher, which are neither Gutbuster nor BCR keyworded. So if I want to take a Scraplauncher these are my options:

• Put them in an Auxilliary on their own
• Pay the Tyrant tax, because he can take all Ogor Mawtribes in his Regiment
• Drop the idea and take something else instead

Let me tell you this straight: nobody is taking any Auxilliary units, ever. The reason being that the player with the fewest Auxilliary units gets an extra CP every round – and in 4th, CPs are incredibly scarce and valuable, so nobody wants to give that away. Maybe later down the track you can break the mold and show the world how to win a big GT with an Auxilliary, but I’m doing you a disservice if I don’t at least point out that competitive players the world over have issued a collective “Fuck that noise”. Friends don’t let friends take Auxilliaries.

What restrictions are there?

• Forget about Battleline, it’s not a thing. Just take 1-5 Regiments, each lead by a hero, and crack on.
• There are no “Reinforcement Points”. You can reinforce any and all units once each – so you can run loads of units of 40x Clanrats for example, but you’ll never see a unit of 60.
• You cannot reinforce single-model units, so you’ll never see a unit of 2x Dankhold Troggoths or anything like that.
• There’s no rule of three or equivalent – you can spam the shit out of a given unit if you want to.

Uh oh

They’ve actually done a really good job of working around that. Continuing to use Kruleboyz for illustration, check out this ability from the Beast-skewer Killbow:

See that heading? Once Per Turn (Army). So only one unit can go to straight Damage 6 at a time, and there are clear (and rapid) diminishing returns to spamming multiples of these things. There are a lot of rules like that in 4th Ed.

Similarly in Kruleboyz, you will note that you can reinforce Gutrippaz but not Monsta-killaz:

Pound for pound they cost basically the same (8.5 points per wound). But Gutrippaz have -1 to hit and can reinforce to make an anvil unit, whereas Monsta-killaz have the anti-Monster tech and make a great MSU skirmishing unit. There’s room for both, and I’m putting both in every competitive KB list I write.

There are issues with early 4th, but spam ain’t one of them. The devs have honestly done an excellent job of making you want to run diverse units, and I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t mean it. We don’t shill for freebies here.

No Battleline, ay? So I can basically run anything?

As long as you’ve got Regiments lead by Heroes, then yes. It’s very liberating.

Now there’s an asterisk of course that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Four Maw Krushas would be a tournament-legal list for example, but it wouldn’t be any good (at all). Still, if you’re not stressed about being cutting-edge competitive, the Mortal Realms are your oyster. Go nuts.

What about Allies?

Gone the same way as Carlton’s AFL Premiership hopes. We have Regiments of Renown now instead – they slot into your army as their own Regiment, and that includes the Mega-gargant Mercenaries. They vary wildly in quality (of course) but the Mega-gargants specifically get the elevated Objective Control right there on their warscroll now. I think they’re a little bit slept on at the moment and if you own a loose Mega, you can still put them on the table and they’re worth a look.

What about Spells and stuff?

You pick one Spell Lore, and every wizard in your whole army knows that whole Lore. Pretty sweet. This will always be your own army’s Lore – there is no universal Spell Lore, and the likes of Mystic Shield are gone.

You also pick a Manifestation Lore – these are free, zero points cost. They’re quite problematic currently and sure to be looked at in an update, but that’s a whole different topic. You can either take your own army’s Mani Lore (most of which are decent), or one of the universal options, most of which also have something to recommend them. But the reality is that currently, most people are taking Morbid Conjuration. If everything else is an 9/10 and one of them is a 9.5/10, and there’s no points cost involved, everyone will naturally gravitate to the 9.5/10. It doesn’t mean the others are crap but that’s just the way it is. So you would be pretty safe to just start out with Morbid Conjuration or Krondspine.

List considerations

Let’s wrap up with a couple of things to consider when putting your list together:

Manifestations (Endless Spells and Endless Prayers) are extremely impactful – and free to take. They probably need looking at in multiple ways, but for now, you don’t really want to be frozen out of access to casting and Banishing them. So you probably want a Wizard.

2-3 drops is most common. 1 drop is rare, because most lists lose out on too much utility if they try to make 1 drop work. If you want to have choice regularly, you’ll need to aim for 2 drops. Once you hit 3 drops you’re pretty much just riding the waves, and 4+ is “Don’t care” territory.

Enhancements still can’t go on unique heroes, but your Heroic Trait is no longer tethered to your General (unlike the old Command Traits). So as long as you’ve got at least one non-unique hero in your list, they can take your HT and artefact.

The GHB Honour Guard rules pull you in a couple of directions at once, and I think it’s an area for a lot of people to improve their list finesse right now. Specifically:

• There’s a Battle Tactic (Slay the Entourage) for killing a unit in your opponent’s General’s regiment. So if you can avoid putting soft units in there, you’ll deny them a cheap kill and an easy Battle Tactic.
• You can also get Priority Target bonuses against those units (+1 to hit and wound) to help you get there. So again, be careful what you put in here because it places them in the firing line. Note that this affects shooting attacks too!
• On the flipside: You can only dish out your own Honour Guard bonuses to units that are in that Regiment. So it’s probably not as simple as just putting nothing in there at all. A good starting point is to put only tough units in there that can benefit from Honour Guard, without giving up a cheap kill.

So that’s your starting point: you’ll probably want at least one non-unique Hero to take your Emhancements; and exercise caution and judgment over what goes into your General’s Regiment. After that, you’re looking to minimise the number of Regiments (and therefore drops) that your army has, and avoiding Auxiliaries like the plague. That’s your starting point in early 4th.

And I’ll leave you with one last tip, which is that you can split up your Regiments at deployment – so if you’re going to be out-dropped anyway, you might as well cat-and-mouse it, just drop a single unit and let your opponent show their hand.

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So I hope that helps a few of you starting out in 4th! Thanks to Brodaz for the ATA and we’ll be back on Friday with a detailed look at a tournament-winning Ogors list. Catch you then.

Credit for cover image to GW

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