Which hordes faction are you

They don't have the same flashy infantry equipment as their arch enemy Cygnar, relying instead on their conscripts' number and nationalism, canny assassins of their merchant lords and hulking steam-armored troops. Khador is easy to hit, but hard to hurt, their low basic speed may fool you to consider them slow.

However, Khador is neither slow, nor a melee-only army. They actually do a decent job at range - predominantly in the form of AOE attacks. Living in the cold north, many of their spells are themed around cold damage and freezing enemies in place. Khador players also have access to 2 "extra" theme forces, although very few Khador warcasters are allowed in these themes:.

A robed, religious and inquisitorial theocracy who seceded from Cygnar after a major sectarian conflict. They are knights templar in word and deed. Warjacks are technically blasphemous under the Menite religion, so the Protectorate has nowhere near as much expertise as the other factions -- something which translates to a generally sub-par stat line. However, they make up for this blasphemy by sanctifying every square inch of their warjacks, something which shows in their fine range of support units and buffs.

Put the right buffs on a Menite warjack in the right order and it can brawl with the best of them. There are also numerous fire-based attacks and they have ways to bring back dead warriors or put their souls to good use. The Protectorate also has ways to field zealous infantry in every size and shape: be it an unstoppable tide of fanatics massed together, a group of swift assassins, or a cadre of a few elite knights ready to defend their faith unto death and beyond.

Protectorate players also have access to 1 "extra" theme force, although very few Protectorate warcasters are allowed in this themes:. Cryx is a faction of necromancers ruled over by Toruk the Dragonfather: the oldest and most powerful dragon in the world. Rather than creating warjacks from steel and animating them with coal they instead create Bonejacks and Helljacks from steel and bone, animating them with stolen souls.

Cryx is something of a horde army; bonejacks and helljacks are fast, strong, cheap, and good in melee, but fairly easy to destroy. To back up their 'jacks, Cryx fields some of the nastiest warcasters in the game who love to cast spells that debuff the enemy's pants off and absolutely ruin their day.

As well as reaving the souls and corpses of their fallen enemies. They really like applying corrosion to enemies. Their infantry is mostly undead that is designed to mess with the enemy: half-mechanical wretches stitched together from corpses, ghostly Bane knights, corrupted Ogruns, and lethal pirates sailing the black waves of the Cryxian shorelines.

The Retribution does not represent a national army, but rather a militant religious sect within the elf-kingdom of Ios. Central to the Retribution's dogma is that humanity's use of magic is responsible for the dying state of the elven gods and that all non-elves who use magic should be destroyed. Officially the rulers of Ios do not endorse the Retribution, but the sect still manages to recruit troops and warjacks from the major noble houses in sufficient numbers to be a serious military power.

Their choices of warcasters, infantry and solos reflect this duality; either tough combined-arms units, or squishy assassins. They are good at both melee and ranged combat, shoving the enemy around the battlefield and locking down their movement options. Their Myrmidons the Elven equivalent of warjacks further strengthen the combined-arms approach by bearing both ranged and melee weapons on themselves.

Many of them also sport force fields, a signature trait in this faction. Mercenaries are auxiliary troops that most Warmachine factions have access to.

But you can also create a Pure mercenary army if you add a mercenary warcaster and his warjacks. It is hard to talk about Mercenaries in general, they are an extremely diverse faction. The psychically powerful Cephalyx who use mind-control to enthrall their opponents, the Dwarven nation of Rhul with their Ogrun auxiliary forces, and the reckless raiding parties of the Privateers. As well as the remnants of the Llaelese Resistance fond of guerrilla-warfare, or the run-of-the-mill sell-swords of the Steelhead regiments all fall under this category.

Various mercenary solo models are often highly sought-after, as they provide efficient ways to fill gaps in your army composition. Mercenary armies have the largest selection of solos to choose from. Mercenary players also have access to 2 "extra" theme forces, with fewer traditional Mercenary models and more non-Mercenary models. The Trollbloods are probably the least morally objectionable army in the game.

They are a people fighting the spread of hostile human civilization. Trolls are depicted as extremely Scottish, with kilts, sporrans, kegs of ale, and a guy named "Grim Angus". You don't want to get into a wargame and find that you are playing the jobbers, with an army that goes down to every other army at high level. Whether you play to win or enjoy the aesthetics, losing consistently gets boring. And as a guidance for new players Battle College would be missing something if we did not try and at least produce some information on how the factions were balanced.

The easiest data to find on faction balance can be found from Conflict Chamber's record of team tournaments, most notably the ATC and Discount Games lists of individual tournament winners currently published to the end of November Now using team tournament lists is slightly dangerous because some teams are designed to work together and skew differently from normal because you can both duck and force bad matchups on enemies more easily.

And sometimes you have everyone in a team all play as the same faction just because it's fun. Further information can be found on the WMH Battle Reporter , but these are self-reported and I take them with a pinch of salt.

Ten or more free points and some other freebies is a powerful incentive. The third thing to say is that a few factions are underperforming, and we're going to start with those factions and then break down the performing factions by sub-game and count them in alphabetical order.

The underperforming factions are pretty obvious as of Jan in Mk3. Three very clear ones and one borderline faction. Mercenaries are merely not amazingly popular - although they were in the bottom five at the team tournament they put in two top 3 places in the four tournament top 3s for November , the most recent month on Discount Games.

The Convergence of Cyriss stick out like a sore thumb. Only four players playing Convergence at the ATC, and all four of them pairing Father Lucant, Divinity Architect with another warcaster, both in the Destruction Initiative theme for lots and lots of stompy and very tough robots.

However this is more of an issue about the number of players playing the first of the mini-factions rather than one of the tournament success; Convergence had two top 3s in August, two in September, one in October, and one in November - which is as strong a record of tournament success as most main factions show. Also Destruction Initiative was taken exclusively to the WTC, but the two most recent individual winning lists have paired Destruction Initiative with Clockwork Legions , the Convergence's other theme force - and Clockwork Legions didn't exist before September.

Destruction Initiative is probably the stronger list but the Convergence can play with both their infantry and their warjack lists, and have placed in the top three with all five then existing casters between August and November, with three or four of the Convergence players at the ATC bringing the new caster.

In short although if treated as a main faction the Convergence are underperforming, all their casters are viable as are both their theme lists. The Destruction Initiative list is considered stronger, Lucant the strongest caster, and the Transfinite Emergence Projector is considered one of the best in-faction models while the Clockwork legions use all four legal Enigma Foundries and mostly small based infantry.

The whole faction is strong and viable - there just aren't that many options to it. At the ATC there are sixteen lists, fifteen of them using the five warcasters allowed in The Blindwater Congregation Barnabas2 not being out yet and only one of them being a Farrow warlock - Dr.

This is why I call Minions half a faction; with all five Gator warlocks having at least two players Rask of course being the most popular the Blindwater half is performing - but the Farrow aren't. The individual tournament results show something similar; the successful lists have historically been "Who do we pair with Rask?

Unfortunately with the single exception of Dr. Arkadius the Farrow casters all struggle badly for one reason or another. If they carried their weight and a similar number of players to the Blindwater then Minions would be competitive in both results and number of players with the main factions. In terms of what works within the faction, the Blackhide Wrastler appears in every Gatorman list without a Dracodile , while the Dracodile, the Ironback Spitter , the Blind Walker , the Swamp Horror , and the Bull Snapper all make regular appearances leaving the Boneswarm to sulk alone.

Of the Blindwater units the Gatorman Posse is far the most popular, followed by the Croak Raiders who are definitely back even if not what they were in Mk2. Five out of seven of them were playing Fyanna, Torment of Everblight - but more importantly ten of the fourteen lists were Oracles of Annihilation , the Legion warbeast theme.

Scenarios with two scoring zones one on either side of the table are very punishing at low points levels, I would recommend avoiding those scenarios. For some terminology: Warlock — The lynchpin of the army, a powerful spell caster who controls the warbeasts and siphons the magical power of fury from them in order to cast spells.

This results in an immediate victory. United we stand, Divided we fall. Trollbloods are in many ways the protagonists of Hordes, though Hordes fluff is usually more gory and frightening than non-Cryx Warmachine, because these Factions are not morally grey city dwellers and industrial wizards.

Trollbloods are a beleaguered and fading race, tied to the earth and old clans. They never united like humanity and the hungry furnaces of civilisation are pushing the Trollbloods to obscurity and maybe even extinction. With the blood of Trolls ancient, violent, and hungry monsters running in their veins they are a hearty people and are uniting to fight back against the world and ensure the survival of their race.

Pretty much good guys right? Well, they have a tendency to let their pet monsters, the aforementioned Trolls, eat people. And a few of the characters in the Trollbloods faction are pretty unscrupulous about the methods they will employ to save their race. If you like fighting to the last breath, if you like even your villagers and priests being pushed by a desperate animal need to survive, if you like being the most resilient Faction, with the hardest to kill warlocks, Trollbloods is the Faction for you.

Your warlock in Trolls is as much a leader by example as anything else. They throw out buffs and stand near the frontline being hard to kill while the synergies stack up on your models.

One or two of them favour heavy warbeasts, the enormous Dire Trolls, and they let the Faction run both many heavies and a lot of troops better than maybe any faction. Troll warbeasts are fairly resilient to begin with, but unlike Khadoran warjacks they just get tougher and tougher becoming one of the few groups of models in the whole game that can realistically survive a turn of dedicated abuse.

They also let you play mostly troops with few or no heavies. Troll infantry are big on a medium-sized base and fairly resilient though easy to hit. They can benefit from enormous synergy chains like Khadoran troops and be pushed to dangers levels of speed and destructive power. Troll support is various, often expensive and very potent.

It also tends to be able to hold its own, especially if layered with the buffs in the army already. Playing Trollbloods is all about find the right balance of support. Their solos, especially the combat focused ones tend to be excellent, with more boxes and resilience than solos in any other Faction.

Common Misconceptions: : I am invincible! This is not a game of surviving very much or for long, so many players assume that Trollbloods vaunted resilience is equivalent to cheap easy invulnerability, it is not. You have to place your defences carefully, layer your protections on top, and then you opponent has to try and unravel them.

This is a more delicate game than run forward, survive, kill everything that attacked. The Tough mechanic is unfair! Those are the vagaries of the dice!

Final warning: Trolls are a big physical Faction, and big physical models are more expensive. We are few and they are many, take what you can and never get caught! They want to keep a mad planet from eating the critters on its surface, and turns out that mad planet is the Iron Kingdoms world of Caen.

You will never feel more besieged than when you are playing Circle. Your models are fragile, your plans complex and many-layered, your numbers few. Circle is a Faction of non-linear movement, they can teleport to different places, they can move in ways no-one else can, they hide and strike, then fade away from retaliation.

When you play Circle, and you play it well you feel like the master of the game. They die in droves and you lose nothing, always just out of their reach. However, if you get caught, you lose. You have expensive models, and need them to do more, and they will die easily to most models in the game.

This makes Circle an unforgiving Faction, but the feeling you get when you are in total control of a battle is addictive and keeps bringing you back.

Know this going into Circle, it may take you 30 games compared to the normal 20 to hit your stride, sometimes one mistake will lose you a game faster than anything else, but if you play close to the perfect game, no-one can stop you. Spyder68 Battlefield Professional St. Good news. This is the best time in the hobby. Full of promise. GW lets us down each time and we know it but secretly we're hoping that this is the edition that GW gives us a balanced game that can also be played competitively at tournaments.

I'm loving it. For most of Nagashek's questions, the same faction can answer both halves depending on how you build. For example: "Do you favor manuverability and light armor or heavy armor and low manuverability?

Them being perceived as the slow, heavy armor faction is due purely to aesthetics, but the average list that you see is the very opposite. Totally agree. But I do feel there is an general feel to each of the factions. I play cryx and If you are facing me you can generally expect to see infantry, offensive spells and tricks to negate your stuff.

That's the idea I'm thinking of. Getting further into the faction will then lead to Mortenebra, Asphyxious, or Terminus who are totally different from what I listed. I'd realized the same thing a little bit into my samples, and realized that trying to narrow it down by caster, with questions related to asthetics for faction might be more accurate.

Mortenabra does not make Cryx a 'jack faction any more then Kallus makes Legion an infantry faction and shoehorning casters into bad builds doesn't cut it either. Dais Paingiver. As a Circle player just starting out Id be interested to see a stompy Circle list. Ive got a long history of playing slow, heavily armored, hard hitting armies like khador or Troolblood in all my other wargames, and chose Circle as a bit of something different UsdiThunder Deacon Tipp City.

I'm not really sure there needs to be a question 2 I think this would be a good start and from there question two would be about general playstyle. What about pigs or gators? This is true, but that makes them no less competitive. However speaking as a Searforge player, yes they are often predictable and good at 1 thing pending caster, however they are some of the most resilent lists in the game because you have to really drive 1 aspect of the game to succeed.