night by the way. Okay well we'll do as good as we can. Yep. Hello everybody if it's Wednesday it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly. Joining me is my own navigator through the fog it's Tom what's up buddy. Hello friends. Also joining us this week one of the preeminent admirals in the world are our UK admiral representing out of the island nation there. Who's not currently in first place with KO I've I've heard discussion of that. I don't know needs to get back on the stick there somehow but anyways Gary P welcome back to the show buddy. Yeah. Gary talk for a moment so we can make sure everybody hears you okay. Can everyone hear me. All right there you go hopefully everyone hears Gary all right last time there was some there was some discussion so we'll we'll get it working don't worry but you sound fine to me and your audios tells my audio thing says you're coming through great so gentlemen we're going to talk about fragile overlords tonight I'm excited about it I think we all are this has been a journey it's been an emotional roller coaster with this book one thing we're not going to do is compare it to other books as much as we can I do want to think about this book as it is but some comparisons will be necessary but we'll do what we can uh Tom's already getting his alcohol ready I see you're on point he's got a couple of fingers of scotch ready that's where we want to be uh at any rate uh gentlemen let's start with the news not much this week but there's a little bit uh rumor engine that's exciting that is I've got it up on screen uh looks like a big giant version of a gut plate like even larger given the shield and the skulls versus the size of it so the giant army is real right I like that's what this says to me Gary you ready for all giants you ready for like a like an eight figure giant army or a seven figure giant army we ready for the imperial knights AOS style I got out 40k for a reason well it'd be a lot different I suspect in 40k if the only imperial knights you were allowed to use were the melee equipped ones that have like no actual guns if that's making the assumption these giants don't throw boulders and things it's a good point although every boulder throw we've ever seen on a scroll in history is like one attack on a three and a three at neg two rend for d three damage or something like that it's like okay cool to ignore that that's fine that does nothing uh the once in every three games you hit it will kind of damage somebody uh but no I'm excited to me this looks could be a big shield by the way too like just a re-fashion shield uh for a big giant I'm excited about it uh this is a really weird sudden thing to show up so you know I've wanted to see the giant army forever forever they have my attention absolutely like this is one of the best rumor engines in a long time because clearly got like the iron drake Celtic knot shield or not iron drake sorry um um the other ones iron breaker iron breaker thank you you can never remember regular dwarves names uh and then you know yeah this is cool so I dig it here's to giants uh the other outside call is it's just a piece of terrain and this is like an embattlement upon it that would be the worst that they hyped you up and then in fact it was just some piece of terrain with like a big battleman on it of you know you know like somebody looked at it and realized hey that kind of that thing you use there is the same sort of z-cad for the the gut plate just scaled up and uh they built it in terrain and they were like cool I'll take a picture of that and photoshop out the rest and we'll make them think it's a new ogre force or giants or something and we'll really throw them so you know that would be fun all right what else we got um the the FAQ drop this week for uh slaves to darkness slaves to darkness FAQ yes indeed some stuff we expected some stuff we didn't so let's talk about it gentlemen gary what was your feeling on the slaves to darkness FAQ overall overall it was actually all right right overall kind of what we expected yeah there were some lows and there were some highs that's that's a very accurate way I would agree with that completely uh so like notable changes were they clarified their wording on the yes in fact all these units can only have one type of weapon thing thank god uh as I had been you know espousing and and cheering for since the beginning I understand how it was read both directions so I'm not meaning to say oh ho ho I was right I think it certainly could have been read either way I'm just glad they care they clarified it in the way they did I think that the question with zangor was the thing that kind of legitimized it almost which is why everyone wasn't sure if it was going to be a thing yeah well we can talk about you know the zangor and how they should have been collapsed into a single arboy type weapon profile too but you know here we are that's that's for next week show or two week show depending on when we do zinch um so all that happened uh all the weapon changes cool good fine uh archion change so I guess we just don't use dark prophecy anymore right like that's what that says no all right you'll know yeah you know it's okay it was just a lot more interesting when you could actually still go back to the priority role and leave it to chance when you didn't have to accept the result of the dice but now you must accept the result of the dice right I mean now you just get to play with pregame like you get to play with in-game knowledge that the other player doesn't get to have sure still kind of valuable it's okay like with bellicor and stuff like that still kind of valuable sure sure sure yeah if you can if you know you're gonna force them into it and then you pop bellicor to where they're really stuck for multiple turns that is a you just know the optimal time because yeah you know no matter what like one unit is really gonna you know end up suckin yeah sure sure um the uh the um the uh other changes where they clarified that veringard who are in the host city the ever chosen battalion don't get a second circle they just get to all choose different ones like that matters or who cares like it just got bad right like just this battalion has no purpose please please please replace with ipsum lorem text check got it like that would assume there's more than one of value in that list of eight which I would argue there's like one and a half yeah I would agree that it's kind of good what is flying and damages flying and plus one damage on the charge yep and then everything else you're just like nope none of this is just whatever the red it's it's shocking to me that the that the what is the calculation one in ten million chaos lords become a veringard that's what the number is right tom you know what that tells me yeah that's one in ten million you know what that tells me they're wasting their time they're wasting their time with this program it's just not worth it like just go demon prince you get always strikes first then yeah way better and you can fly and back to mantras yep yeah uh so you know veringard have were always classically disappointing to me but it was like kind of exciting when you could have two traits in that very bad overpriced impossible to win with 11 figure army um but okay fine and then the one we've all been waiting for uh the big one of course was the change to bloated blessings that command ability uh obviously it it was let's call it problematic before uh I want to bro and we can say straight broken I was getting there if we want to be I'm generous in generous no like yeah just it wasn't good like it was it wasn't good for the game let me say it that way now what let me just say uh we have now moved to the darkest of all possible timelines with this with this ability because it's just simply uh like they nerfed it in the worst way so how did they change it let's let's explain how they changed it for everybody okay go ahead they change it used to be you use the command ability you put it on a unit every time somebody rolled a six to hit that unit whether in melee or shooting they took d three mortals for each six and it was stackable so that was like way way way bad because that was just obviously you could make suicide bomb units right they were just shooting as well yeah exactly shooting and melee right shooting melee stackable the worst it was just like you would just throw it on a pack of 40 marauders and rocket them at the enemy because they can basically land a nine-inch charge and 98 of the statistical cases and you just say okay go ahead kill them fight and then and then you watch the enemy army kill itself which is not great right just not a good feeling um so instead now what it does is you put it on a unit and every time that unit's attacked by an enemy unit if there's any sixes rolled they take a d three mortals that's it so it's in melee and it's not it's selected it's selected to activate against yes like that's a very unique wording um but what it means is that like it's actually doubly effective against a double pile in units sure so like you could do two d three mortal wounds against a unit that piles in twice now it's worth it i mean uh so anyways it doesn't have much of a purpose now that's the end of the story right like that's what it boils down to is that it does a tiny kickback of mortal wounds which is like okay on the demon only within 12 of the demon prince the answer now is it's sort of a thing the demon prince does on himself if you have no other options with your command points and he's about to go into melee because it's a little bit of kickback damage potentially right the variance of what you have as to being worth command points is you know can be kind of all over the shop right so sure sure sure um so at any rate yeah i mean and it's fine look this lanesh one was already pretty worthless and the zinch one wasn't very good either unless you're doing something really silly like trying to super stack overpriced plus one's cast um because you could do that but like you know three out of the four are just not good now okay and then and then one is is decent like my question is is is he worth 210 now yes 100 that's the question i would ask is he worth 210 and i i don't know that he is saying specifically just in nergal well because let me tell you what in corn and to spoilers yeah that guy is worth 210 every point of it yeah okay corn into spoilers but in like for all the other elite for all the other marked demon princes is he worth it and that's the question for all of them yeah i i don't know man i don't know what that looks like unless you want to go in and point them out separately like my point is yes that the that corn one's definitely worth that probably still under pointed frankly for what he can do in corn and to spoilers that things are wrecking ball running around the board constantly hiding itself in terrain like i played a game this last saturday with a corn demon prince he ended the game on basically zero wounds because nothing could stop him he would just like sneak in touch terrain that he could only be you know targeted by the thing he was directly fighting in most cases he would murder that thing right right uh because of all the bonuses he was giving himself through the corn aura and and etc right yep and then just fly away to the next target and just like he just worked his way around the battlefield dealing with targets right but like the other gods don't have that much murder in them you know like they're not pulling all the corn bonuses no sure certainly not certainly not yeah i mean it's i i don't know is the short answer i think in some armies yes in some armies no but that's the story of every unit in the game isn't it yeah yeah like just sometimes certain army builds make units more worth it than others there you go that's gristle gore car exactly yeah that's a great example like how much is that how much is the cumquat worth like the ghoul king on terror guys right well in old you know in gristle gore any point in time even now he's probably still undercosted but in most other builds he's probably fine right so it's not like you can that's that's one of the challenges there's always going to be a little swing to it so there you go and yes the alex butler said it sounds like he should have the clan eschen key word doing that the way that he works the way that that corn demon prince worked in the game like zipping around turning terrain invisible like black and then and then fighting people inside of it and killing them and then flying away the next one just like this assassin in the dark is exactly the way i want clan eschen to work like if you ever relaunched eschen it should just be an army that does that that like at the end of their charge they throw up smoke bombs and nobody outside of what they're fighting can see your target them right smoke bombs like that's the way that army should play so i'm just saying you're free to use this gw go ahead and take that that's that's just for you so absolutely that one that one's for free you have my permission to give give all the eschen use their smoke bombs back like these now okay so s2d it was fine i will say ironically absolutely i've played the army now gotten four games in with it since the book came out and not a single thing i was playing other than the uh one time i used host of the ever chosen in dark prophecy not a single thing changed in the way i used the army so cool because the war is on challenge but he was taking more than one water right exactly i don't know nobody would take another one yeah you can't in those points you can't really fit two of them in it's like a cute trick but yeah never had more than one yes the war shrine changed it can't stack properly again and then the other note is chariots uh can only have a champion if you have multiple chariots in the unit i don't know how they can chariots get worse well like this happens every time this is one of those things that mystifies me like this is the third time an FAQ has changed that you can't make a single unit chariot the champion like just make the champions stats the chariot stats and delete the champion entry right that is that we like what we're telling you gw is that with this little bonus that small bonus we actually almost find some of these chariots worth it right so like you yeah as soon as you put them back to their original stats we stop taking them so just take the champion bonus apply it to the base unit that's it now that's the unit delete champion entry completely done and dusted we're good i solved it and i removed text it was easy see so yeah sometimes the simplest solutions are the best ones uh all right so that was everything uh FAQ wise we have one more small piece of news an image got shared around today tom now i don't have it to reference unfortunately because this was this was uh this was breaking news right before the show but an image got shared around of the new uh nirgal warband uh from underworlds uh it's from the white dwarf and it's like a big armored blight king looking dude and uh you know more traditional blight king looking dude and a weird sorcery guy who looks kind of like a new update of a sorcerer sculpt i was like it's just a piece of art it's not the actual minis but like they look pretty awesome in the art which i assume is gonna look mostly like what the the thing looks like so it'll be a three person warband because that usually when they reveal this art it's they show the whole warband right right so it'll be the sorcerer guy a clearly some kind of blight king probably a more heavily armored dude and more and one more traditional blight king so doesn't shade warbands generally herald new books i mean it's it's such a coin flip gary you know like you know sometimes you get stuff like the troll like malag right like okay whatever he i guess he showed up in the gloom spike yet spoke but he's just he's just kind of there sometimes you get like rip rip fang snarl snarl fang whatever that gop the three goblins on the wall like it's taken us when they when they have heralded a book it's taken us a year yeah that's what mean that it's not it's not a quick thing it's just uh it's generally within the year as you say there is a book that i've been very slot into usually like k.o. are coming uh like eight months after yeah so it's and more it's not it's not a short term herald it's usually a it's a really early warning system like really early warning like the alarm goes off five days before the tidal wave gets here it's a real early warning yes uh maybe it'd be cool um it'd be cool to see it'd be cool to see i mean nergal will eventually get a rerelease book because they were like right at the beginning now the oldest book if you know sarapan right like assuming sarapan get their book yes it will be the because it it was sort of the very much an in-between book i think legions was technically before it right uh no no no no no no no nergal came out uh mid january legions came out at the beginning uh mid february okay i couldn't remember the order of those two back in because maly importance came out uh begin as the in-between release between uh legions and uh that yeah there you go so yeah and then and then daughters came out like three weeks later there you go yeah i mean my answer is eventually it will because there's clearly some opportunity there right so uh they already have a funny piece of terrain they were they were on the cutting edge of that right yeah maybe summoning will be better now could be that they could they could rerelease them with some endless spells that would be a good excuse to get it re out there right nergal would have really fun endless spells i imagine the designers would go nuts making weird gross stuff they're like by the way swarm of nerglings needs to be like an endless spell right there's just like a little like a like a tidal wave of them cresting forward that's just like all their little happy faces coming for you yeah there's just so many there that you can't actually kill them like so you can't like it's a spell it's like yeah that's neat uh so somebody asked in the chat likelihood of a seraphon book this year i would place that likelihood as near to a hundred percent as i could because they have said they're committed to having all the books updated by the end of this year so so hence that tells me it's near a hundred and we've also had tons of strong rumors that they're going to be a book coming in the first half of the year so and yeah unless of course they discontinue them completely which i don't anticipate no i don't i i see just very little chance of that i mean like i've been wrong before but that would be super shocking so i don't get rid of the toad dream kind of background thing i want to see the other mortal races have no knowledge of it and like i want to see them literally offer four different conflicting explanations in the book one where all the things are like a dream one where they're real lizards and spawning pools one where they're and they just use like gates to get around the realms like a more traditional kind of lizard man take and one where they're like riding spaceships throughout just like who just like riding spaceships throughout the mortal realms using their pyramids and then just teleporting down onto the battlefield i want to see all of those be the explanation somehow all at once disinformation yeah yeah they're running a disinformation campaign harder for chaos to get ahold of them right uh so if they if nobody knows i like stuff like that when they don't give you a real answer for it when they let you like when they let you choose the sort of narrative that's most appealing to you right or no my army does work according to this explanation they did that a lot in the beast of chaos book and i thought it was really well framed in there right when they're talking about like the origins of the beasts are we ready to do this we're not doing it yet tom we have other segments first pick of the week that's the end of news pick of the week gary have you got anything you would like to share with everybody uh yeah darren watson um people may know him uh he has done a youtube video with pinesville banner uh about uh deployment yes tactical kind of thing so i'd suggest go check it out because everything baron does is is basically on point nice nope that's a solid solid pick it was a great vid it's up on the honest wargamer channel i will uh i will link it down below all right tom what's your pick i don't have a pick you have you have nothing there's nothing nothing to share with anybody you got nothing to talk about nope okay all right fair enough tom you can you can you can be you can be uh you can be pouty uh my pick is going to be uh actually is is going to be a bit of self sprucing uh and i will say that um the i was i did one of my interview uh with an artist's shows this last weekend and i was lucky enough to have richard gray come on the show and it was great to sit down and talk to him for about an hour and a half about art he's one of the artists that's inspired me most in the whole world he is truly one of my favorite artists painting miniatures he's an absolutely fantastic inspiring nice guy it just couldn't be more friendly and he has a great journey and story and i uh i would encourage everybody if you've ever liked his work to go check that out because he shares a lot about his sort of journey through there so there you go and i will also set up in this that we have another one coming very soon i've got another interview coming out it'll it'll go up shortly after i get back uh from uh from australia and there's that one will be prerecorded but it had to be prerecorded for a reason so i will let you all think about that but it's gonna be a great one done done done done uh okay let's talk about some hobby time gary you've been flying through the hobby man what i saw you post up an image just right before the show uh what are you uh what are you working on man what's been on your hobby table i'm doing some in the spells there it is okay and i'm doing some doing some gun haulers i love your gun hauler conversions dude i really do they're great what is the base model there it is actually a gun hauler oh it's just that's the body but you just use the tank treads nice yeah it looks so completely different with the tank treads on it it's ridiculous it's fantastic it's just add mech stuff just wax onto it gun haul it looks good uh yes josh i will be in australia next week i'm coming down for cancon so uh and i'll be helping out rob and the honest wargamer with his coverage of cancon so it's gonna be a good time uh okay uh tom you're painting something what are you working on man fire slayers yeah right on no i'm not working on any ko you are you just hit by that yeah exactly that's as we'll discuss that's that can easily be part of a ko army you're just working toward a ko army here tom by painting fire slayers you're just painting ko just like when i'm painting ko i'm just working toward my city's a sigma army see it's all i mean i guess you're right i am painting some of the best ko there is all right uh for myself i finished up a fun project for golden demon that i'm gonna share out uh here probably in the next couple days uh another part of a larger golden demon situation and i actually recorded a whole video of like not every minute of me painting because that would have been insane and impossible and drove me mad but i did try to do a whole video of like this is how i paint every component of an entry i'm doing for golden demon so look for that sometime next month is when it'll come out it's gonna be a longer video surprisingly uh and um the um uh and that'll be a that'll be a fun one so i finished that up and now i'm working on some tempi sci stuff which means uh it's time for motorcycle boys whoo whoo i've got my pistol ears on uh on a motorcycle here uh these are obviously the motorcycles from the atlan jackals and i used uh some of the pistol ear bodies and switched some heads around and stuff and these boys are ready to go we're gonna be popping some wheelies shooting some fools some of them have you on the sides 44 more yeah exactly no this is a small unit i only need like a couple units of these guys so and i'm good for my list because my list isn't like you unlike you gary i'm uh i'm not going all in on the pistol ear play uh that's not my style i am on the uh buy two iron clads and that's a thousand points uh in my tempest army style that's where i'm at eight units two of them there are a thousand points thumbs up that's my play i'm gonna be buying some ko's so don't worry was it a old um two iron clad build in tempest iron yeah exactly yep yep you got it i i mean i just love the idea of just dropping those bad boys on and just firing all the guns like i just i love it it's just it's one of my favorite things as we'll talk about here now all right let's get into it Corridor and overlords so gentlemen hold on oh okay sorry here we go get your drink down so here so this originated when gary and i were um uh interacting on the book uh when the book first dropped and one of the one of the uh one of the things that developed was a an observation that was made about the lack of synergy the intentional breaking of synergy in this book and it became a rallying cry in the ko chat in the whatsapp chat for every time somebody would make an observation and it'd be like oh i guess that doesn't work and somebody'd be like anti synergy and then everybody to do cheers and so that's what we're doing tonight folks you got a drink every time we we the every time the anti synergy button gets pushed you take a drink uh i encourage you to please only drink if you're of legal age and to drink responsibly uh if you are an adult you are an adult and you may of course enjoy please don't do anything dangerous with yourself be responsible uh i'm i'm breaking open my kanamara that someone brought me from the uk and uh it's going to be a blast so let's do this sure uh every i would also say that if if people were for low we're looking for supplementary like in any good drinking games you've got to have you know like sips drinks chugs right obviously yeah and like i would say if people were looking for more small sip ones you then every time we say re-roll ones to hit or or you can only use this once per battle oh yeah no that's what it is that's what it is once once per game yeah is is a sip yeah if we made people actually take a drink every time we said once per game or re-roll ones to hit everybody would our audience would die by the end of this show of alcohol poisoning that's true all right so let's let's get into this charade or an overlord so i we're gonna start at the 40 000 foot view okay yep uh and here's my overview of the book i'll start i think i'm probably the most positive right now you're the most impartial yes i am also the most impartial can i also make a judgment here though yes or like make a comment um you're also the one that after reading it had like a 20 point list of feedback and only like three of them were positive 100 half neutral i stand behind that too yeah yeah that's and by the way most of those points i didn't soften on like i think most of those original challenges that i made and i'll i have my list like i'll talk about them something because they're gonna come up i hope so it's just i as i okay again let me get into this real quick do you do your yeah do you do your feed do your i think i am the most positive on the book i like it okay but even on liking it it's like i'm just over the 50 mark on liking it because this is one of the more challenging books that's come out to read it is full of anti synergies it's full of things that when you it's full of things that when you look at it you say oh you know a would be cool with b and then you read and you're like oh i can't do a with b right it's just it's full of a lot of those situations i think it's another drink the it you look at like the bonuses you accrue they're very frustrating they're very incremental they're very specific like everything you're having to do you i've never seen a book work harder for less right um design wise one of the things that really gets in my craw this isn't anything to do with the power of the book or anything like that this is just truly like a a design uh issue i have being somebody who's you know design books this book references a lot of things that aren't in the book right and you might say well like everything does well sure like everybody references to hit and there's no re-explanation of what that is right but this references we all understand what to hit is this is making references to all sorts of complex interactions the most common of which being garrisoning right a thing that most players have probably never even done and just like puts it out there and says this is a thing that can happen doesn't really explain it in detail when like the simplest thing to do would have been put in a call-out box how garrisoning works from the base rules like i've talked about this before and they they do this and stuff like um what book was it recently where they said oh you know if you have oh uh or work lands right where they said if you have multiple sixes things that trigger on sixes then you get to trigger all the different hits and they kind of re-explained that and it was great that was so good because it were like you would read it you'd be confused you look down the page and you're like oh okay cool i understand now how this works whereas when i read this i was like okay i don't remember how garrisoning works because honestly who does right uh do you do you know how it works now i do but it's still but but but so what is garrisoning still doesn't actually work for how they want it in the book and that's my point like it's frustrating when they should have re-explained it well we'll get into the details of it yeah because i know what you're gonna put a finger on and i agree yeah okay now the things i truly love just quickly at a high level yep i do love most of the boats i think they nailed it with the boats the boats are redesigned well i feel like their points are pretty accurate maybe it like a few of them are maybe a tad high but when i say a tad i mean like 10 to 20 points not we're not talking like original recipe turtle here or idol on or something right they're pretty close the boats are fun they do neat stuff they feel like boats the ironclad feels like a gunship like you know like something that when it rolls on the battlefield is going to unleash some fire it can do a lot of cool stuff in the game it's a big useful piece it's it is effectively a big monster right just a monster because it doesn't have a hero keyword right and we classically bag on things like this you know gorgons and stuff like this that they're just they're just big monsters without a hero on them because most of the time in the game they don't do anything this actually does something yeah and you put heroes in it which only helps right exactly like this has a purpose i think it's fantastic for something that costs 500 points basically right i look at it and go yeah i use that that's pretty sweet you know like that's a cool that's a cool piece same with the frigates different purposes with the frigates and same with the gun haulers and by the way they all have different purposes the engine works are fun and good and there's interesting things you can do there although again they could be better but there at least there's options i like that they added the engine works um and you know so things like that high level it does shooting it's good it's a tough army it's going to be very skirmishy uh but it's got challenges and book design wise it is the hardest book i've ever read to understand exactly even what this book is doing what what did you say to me after you read that the first time do you remember i think i said something like i hate this this is indecipherable right and i don't remember the most painful experience i've ever had yeah yeah there you go yes and i stand behind that like it's not if somebody asked me i'm looking to get into a os and those those that those sweet boat having gun dwarves flying around are what i really like i'd be like i don't know man this is not a starter friendly army in any way shape or form you know what i would say to them there's this book cities of sigmar and you can use a couple of those yeah yeah i mean it's a challenge this is a very high complexity opaque book okay yep and you know like the difference by the way in reading something like the slaves to darkness book versus reading this is night and day like when you read slaves to darkness you go okay cool i got a a seems cool can i use a with b oh yeah that works together neat i can do this thing c can work with a that'll be fun you know i can like it's it's it reads organically your lists happen organically right mm-hmm do i think the book is good competitively yeah i think so yeah the answer is yes i mean it's it's a big shooting army and the army the meta is weak to shooting yes it will be plenty strong can i can i make a comment like let me clarify what like when you say that is it good you know is it competitive or is it good i think that i think that you will occasionally see kao lists crop up and do well just like you have occasionally seen seraphon do the same i think it's more common than that but okay big gulf between a good kao player and a medium mediocre that i definitely agree with yeah yeah this is like a this this book so so here's what i'm gonna say this book has a very shallow learning curve okay and yes i am using that term correctly okay like just so we're all that is a frequently incorrectly used term i'm not gonna get called out in the comments for this it has an extremely shallow learning curve it takes a long time to figure out how to use this book properly but that being said you'll still do damage with it like even in casual games you'll still do damage with it because because the fact that so much of your stuff can can actually go active it projects power really well that's the nature of shooting right yes so you'll feel like you're doing something in a lot of games yep yep you'll feel like you're doing something in a lot of games that is a true statement i i don't mean that in any negative way there are books where you will play the game and feel like you're not doing anything and that's a bad experience right right right you definitely get to roll your dots with the book yeah yeah yeah absolutely all right i just talked for way too long unless and less unless it was something like change host goes first and then you may not get your bully dice we'll see again i don't want to i don't i really want it here's one thing i'll say i really want to leave zinch out of this discussion okay okay because zinch is so sideways i don't even know how to address it and we'll talk about that on the show when we do zinch and it's not fair to suddenly take this this weird probably broken boogeyman and just because of the fluke of history that they came out at the same time right like if you erase zinch and just hold the meta standard other than that i think this book actually stacks up pretty interestingly and well right it just had the it's a fluke of history that it happened over you know come out at the same time and so comparison get natural it's egregious that it came out at the same time let me say it that way sure all right uh gary i've talked long enough you you've been a ko supporter for a long time you've been a stan for the ko for the adopted yep absolutely so so tell me your your feelings get into it i mean a lot of it will echo what you said um it's not a okay it doesn't produce bad lists it just takes a long time to do that it's a book that's made up it feels like it's made up of colisex um almost like you know evolutionary dead ends like you just get enough kind of good idea and like it seems cool this seems cool this seems cool and right the last moment you're like and i can't do it would you say that that's anti synergy is anti synergy drink oh but um the thing that you said uh about doing a lot of work for sometimes not very much kind of outcome it sometimes does feel like indiana jones and the book donald's happy meal it's like you spend so long doing like uh like a list and then you just realize that there is maybe core problems in bill into the kind of the yeah the strata of the of the book which actually the you down very a very narrow bill bath that's my biggest problem with the book is the fact that once you have worked out with what you're doing with it your choices are actually from a competitive point of view quite limited yeah i mean so to add on like i want to build on what you're saying gary because we experience this very like viscerally because like we got access to the book and we were building about the same time and we kept coming up with basically the same list yeah like every time it doesn't matter like which ultimately it doesn't matter which of the three battalions you choose you always end up funneled into like one to three boats most likely to with a balloon hero one to two other foot heroes and rig and then units of six underneggers or units of six balloon boys and then like maybe one unit of arco like no matter what you do that's where you end yeah there's there's like if you think of like this building is basically a decision tree there are very e decisions that you make which the book's got loads of cool stuff in it like especially the names i mean as an aside yeah some of them the fluff names are brilliant and you want to use some of those things but you end up not using them not because they're bad but because of a decision that you made very early on in the list building process completely puts you down a path which doesn't go anywhere near those choices right so again there's there's the books might have a quite a lot of good stuff but you just can't utilize them because of fundamental bedrock issues you know like i mean we'll go into it i suppose more but the biggest decision in any kind of list is usually what's my battle line going to be and i'm not suck so you basically end up with a list that is basically skewed around trying to make your other battle line ifs work and they're not that prevalent so you end up kind of spinning down this kind of trouser of time kind of path where a lot of the other options don't kind of open up for you right so they will look the same as we said yeah yep i think that's fair tom anything else you want to add in our 40 000 foot overview yeah i mean my takeaway is that they had a very particular vision for what they wanted to see on the table and they hard coded that into the book and so like very early design design decisions were made as to what this book is and what the consequence of that has been is that it is really shaped what it produces and i just decided that i just don't like what it produces which i don't like i like i realize that i have an entire army that i just don't like so let me let me ask you this question i think that's totally fair right because and by the way that's not necessarily even a negative judgment on the book we've all been there right like gary just experienced that today you know or not today exactly but like gary i know you got rid of your slaves to darkness not because of like the FAQ or you're mad about some broken thing you just got some games in and said you know what actually this isn't playing the way i really enjoy to play the game right i'm like i'm down and i needed to get rid of one army and it was the one i enjoyed the least right exactly so i think we've all been there like that's not an uncommon thing where we've thought an army would be cool we play it and then it just doesn't suit us right that's okay i think that the so that's not a necessarily a negative judgment on the book i think then i think the if i if i would put a fine point on it would be two things i would say one i think this is a one of the more unidimensional play style books that they've made right yes there's one way to play this book they've had some discussions in the past about you know wanting books to have sort of multiple ways it can be played i think sometimes they're more successful at that than others right great right um an observation i actually made and it's not neither been confirmed or denied but i am very adamant it looks like they've written a book and that book was basically going to the printers and then someone else sat down and went through it again with a big red pen going nope nope nope nope nope nope it feels like it was a book that did have different ways to play and it did have a sandbox that you could write that and someone turned around and went no and basically a lot of the thing things like all janky or the antiques energies are feel very inorganic it feels like if you took a drink take your hands out drink as soon as if you took out a few key things the army would feel much more organic and they they glare at me because they are so they feel tacked on if that makes any sense a lot of the stuff that doesn't work with garrisoning it was like they went that always worked with garrisoning and everything was fine and then someone turned around and went no and so they've gone through every single rule that says garrisoning and says does not work with gas right well strike it all out vince when we talked when we talked about this like to build on that gary when we talked about this one of the things that you pointed out is that you said i've never seen so or maybe it was you gary that said i've never seen so many like negations or like like clauses that says you cannot do this right negate the what you just read you can do a thing except negate you know x percentage of the cases you do x except y and that except y is every other ability it happens a lot like there's like on the thunder war scroll every single ability on that war scroll has an exception clause right every single one do a thing apart from when you're in a boat which we pushed you to take because okay and then you can't do that thing right yeah so it's it's a it's a very strange situation overall no i agree let me ask you this question at the top and then we're gonna get into the actual details of the book yep um what's the version of this you wanted that is a difficult question it's it's like seeing a helicopter in a tree isn't it i can't fly a helicopter but i know that's not right okay right on yeah if you stuck me in front of a helicopter i couldn't go and and be perfect but if i see one in the tree i know something something went wrong yeah i mean look here's one fair point i'll make okay like let's let's start this off with some generosity of spirit shall we sure and say the following this is a tough nut to crack and here's why yeah it is a limited range right this isn't like the size of scaven or the a lot of the chaos god armies or stuff like that where it's just you know you've got years and figs upon figs upon figs right so one you've got a limited palette to work with right yep two you've got a a play style here that many people find anathema in a os right like at the root of this many of the play styles are going to be shooty right like some part of this this army is about guns and firing off guns and range attacks and a lot of people find that to be negative three a shooting wound is always more powerful than a melee wound right yes you can only shoot once per battle round as opposed to meleeing twice per battle round totally fair but the power projection of shooting especially once that range goes to let's say beyond 12 inches right like let's say anytime you drift up into 18 24 inch type shooting the power projection of that becomes really strong right especially in the current world a melee army can do like a thousand damage a turn but if somebody just has four units of chaff who gives a hoot right like it doesn't matter you just killed nothing you spent four turns you killed 300 points of my stuff with your with your infinite damage unit and it's irrelevant you didn't necessarily advance the game state at all right but a shooting army that can project power at range and can remove like two heroes and a key small unit in one even in one round has just drastically altered the game state right and that's not a huge number of wounds they just did that could be 20 wounds right and that could dramatically alter the game state so yeah I mean also there is a it's a shooting army it's a 4k army in a finite sense right there's gonna be things that people won't like yeah um and so I mean it was always going to be a tough nut to crack that's that's all I'm saying right like I don't envy the task of having to be the person who sits down and and write this book which by the way to be clear um this was Jervis okay like they they were very clear on the stream that Jervis wrote this so if this book does nothing else well one thing that it does do is myth busts yeah sure I've always hated that anyways but I want to say is like that's just simply not true right like the myth about Jervis the myth that like of power creep of books sure like this is a testament against all of those things sure was it sam that did the same book yeah sam did the city's book yeah yeah just give it a win he was yeah like yeah I love that I love the city's book sure city's book does shooting and it does range and yes there's probably some bits that are maybe a little better than they should be but they're not so insurmountedly good that you've got people ranging about it yeah I've got a big pool of models to be fair I will give it that sure so yeah exactly they had a lot more a lot more tools than toolbox to work with or something like city's right but sure which can also be a negative of course right because that can also complicate things greatly okay so let's get into it gentlemen let's let's get into some specifics shall we yep okay so let's lay down some of the basics of the army now uh for for those who aren't as as familiar as admirals like yourselves uh okay so first of all they obviously have their various skyports we'll talk about all of them um that's fine and you you can either have your skyports or not this isn't uh it's an optional thing uh they have aether gold so each charadron overlords hero sky vessel and unit with at least 10 or more models starts with one share of aether gold and once per phase you can say that one unit once per phase you can say yeah i don't know this isn't one but it's still a very limited thing you can say that one unit from your army shares will use basically it shares of aether gold and if you do so you subtract one from that unit's bravery characteristic for the rest of the battle again like i get the fluffiness of that rule but why like that's just it's just a penalty that doesn't need to be there so what you're saying is as you use your rules that make you better you actually make yourself worse yeah like right in a way that isn't obviously too impactful because bravery doesn't often matter as we often talk about but like come on i so would you say that that ability is once per game no because there's lots of ways you can push that around it's not it's not once per game we're gonna have plenty of that for everybody no there's not a lot of ways there's one skyport that does it or if you're non-declared in a skyport you can do it otherwise you can only do it once per game period sure that's fair there's a how about this there's a couple ways to get more aether gold around how about that drink just that doesn't even count tom but here it is that's okay here is a thing that i will say remember when i said referencing stuff that's off book so subtract one from the bravery characteristic for the rest of the battle but you can pick a triumph it is eligible to use and immediately apply its effect okay cool like ignore any restrictions on triumph to say it can only be used once per battle if you use it with aether gold which is cool like this is honestly a pretty great cool unique thing they added in i'm just sad it's got this weird once per phase limitation on something that's such a limited resource anyways okay like your rigors and and those kind of skyward units have to be at you know max size max well to get a share 400 points 400 points to get a share assuming again you're not in one of the other ways we'll talk about where you could get a couple extra shares and pass them out herb as is your answer that's the only way you're doing it sure well um there's a there's a command trade or whatever that does it as well or no skyboard or no skyboard yes um and you know it's like it's a strong ability what we're but again it references something off book why is there not a foot like a why is there not a call out box on this page that actually shows what the triumphs are because it changes since because if you're playing a game versus match play cool use both put both of them yeah that's there's two tables tom and one of them is three things and one of them is six things but but that's the point that this this this ability actually changes depending upon what kind of game you're playing sure and yes jordan i am imagining three ironclads all re-rolling in one turn and it's awesome because a three ironclad army is going to lose every game more or less because they have three giant things that that can't count towards anything no they can't re-roll he's that's what he's saying he's saying imagine he's he's pointing he's pushing back tom on my thing if i wish this wasn't once per face stay with us okay and my point is it wouldn't matter that's a bad army is what i'm saying yeah that would be a cool trick they could do and they and as far as ruin people goes we'll talk about the average damage an ironclad does ruin people is a bit much three ironclads on full re-rolls would still do less than than some other shooting units which just entered the game and could do that for 500 points less so um at any rate uh but i love ironclads i don't even wrong they they they put out some hot fire i dig them um so i love the aether gold concept it's cool i hate that they like from a design perspective why do we not have the triumphs here the triumphs do cool stuff re-roll saves re-roll hit rolls re-roll wound rolls use a command ability without expending a command point like that's cool stuff i wish i had something to spend that command point on it's just like well yeah we'll talk about that later but i mean obviously re-roll hits re-roll wounds and and the re-roll saves those are all three good things let's not be let's not be silly here like could this be better yes i think it could but it's a good ability right being able to pop this on a 20 block of thunders or one of your boats and getting your re-roll wounds or hits or whatever you want or a big block of arco that needs to survive and you pop the re-roll saves like it can do some work okay it can so right like that's that's not it's not worthless there are much worse abilities in this i completely agree it is a great once per game ability unless you're in uh unless you're in herb as sure okay or on a line sure and you spent on the thunders at least 200 points of thunder on a unit uh you know yeah but it's a 400 points of rigors the honest answer is tom sometimes that once is all you need which is fair sure right sure it's resource management exactly yeah yeah and that's fine like that use for that unit once per game yep absolutely and and sometimes when you're especially when you're trying to hit something and you need to like i need to kill this piece and again you can project power sometimes that making that happen once a game is all you need right so okay great and then we have your articles your amendments and your footnotes you have the code you can build your own code cool idea love this idea one of the best ideas they've had do not like the implementation on this at all um grab your drink grab your drinks folks there's so one of my problems is like the base ones in the book are all like kind of not interesting so like i'll tell this story through the articles there are three articles three amendments three footnotes i would have rather seen six first off of each of these so we actually had like a lot of variants but okay fine we got three cool enough that's just me wish listing um the three articles all basically do the same thing re-roll one to hit but in specific situations re-roll one to hit's already a pretty weak bonus right yeah there's a re-roll one to hit yeah and it's everywhere in the army it's everywhere in the army already there are lots and lots and lots of things in this army that will give you re-roll ones to hit right yep and so like your first one is honors everything you can re-roll hit rolls of one for attacks made by your heroes that target a hero or a monster okay so very specific your heroes would none of whom are super impressive like but just hope that's not an admiral because they already get that correct yeah admirals can do this already get to re-roll ones against other heroes or monsters like okay it's it does something i'm not arguing they do nothing i'm just saying like wow that's very specific right master of the skies you can re-roll hit rolls of one for attacks made by friendly sky vessels i read this one tom and i was like oh that's cool i like that one right because that's cool all my boats get re-roll ones to hit that target a unit that can fly like why why did we need that extra thing couldn't we have just had this like couldn't we have just had good boats right yeah uh geez i mean yeah awesome if i'm fighting night hot i guess because then i'm just hey i'm re-roll ones all around baby no that just means that some of your units are re-roll ones to hit on a lot of their army that's what that means sure sure sure um but like okay and then the last one settle the grudges uh after the armies are set up but before the first battle rounds begins pick one one enemy unit you can re-roll hit rolls of one for attacks made by your army that target that unit which is the one i will take every time in that world sure because you're gonna you're gonna pick like whatever their most valuable thing as you're trying to eliminate so again none of this is worthless it's just all like wow that's all we could come up with for the main article of our code like this is supposed to be the main part of the thing right the most major benefit of of the generic skyport is well and this actually gets to one of the fundamental design challenges with the book okay because everything that's valuable in this book your allegiance abilities and your your your skyport abilities all had to be divided by three right here's what i mean let's let's take a current offender of uh of something that's that's uh that we all agree is probably a bit too good let's take our old buddies petrofex elite right right right so petrofex elite what's their base ability you get for being in petrofex plus one to save plus one to save and then everything else is just the standard stuff right like here's a command ability here's a command trait right here's a magic item cool fine okay because when they went to the skyports all of the abilities that normal thing that would be like you could run in charge with everybody in this army or you know you know everybody gets plus one to save or or everybody gets a five up against spells and then the spells we can take something less controversial like null myriad that's still strong right in obr the universal universal buffs that get distributed the army right instead of being able to have like one good ability that's simple everything has to be divided by three because this whole article amendment footnote carries through all the skyports and you can't have just like the article be plus one to save and then give two more abilities on top of it right because then everything gets too good so everything gets divided by three and what you end up with our three situationally specific weaker things that's one of the reasons this book is so opaque right because nothing is just straightforward simple like you get to re-roll hits even if it was just like you know you're you're all your your uh mounted units get to re-roll hits there you go that could be a thing right like not in this army but you get what i mean right that could be one you'd see in an army that you you can't do just that it's got to be like divided by three and hence because of that everything gets more complex so instead that becomes all your mounted units uh get to get re-roll units of one when they're fighting yeah if they have 10 or more models and so like we've got a stack on this stuff to like make it more specific and what happens is you get all these different weird crossing specificities and that's one of the reasons the army gets really challenging right the other thing um just to kind of throw another thing in is it's the the generic skyport is your allegiance ability which you do not use if you take a sub faction so half of your allegiance ability is not usable if you take a sub faction so your allegiance ability is basically another sub faction it's like going into the obr book and going your allegiance ability is you can take a sub faction which gives you plus one save and blah blah but it's it's not an allegiance ability it's a sub faction right I agree it would be like if in the obr book it said here's the sub factions here's the things you can take replace all of this if you take a sub faction and your whole army's immune to battle shock right like that's the aether gold equivalent in this case yeah right because that's all you're carrying over forget all that rdp stuff that's all gone right yeah it's basically having an obr army that could suddenly turn its command points into what's the obr command point I think it's um tactics what do you call it yeah it's basically having a seventh obr faction that turns its command points into tactic points yeah when it's actually an overarching rule that goes through every single sub faction right yeah it doesn't get it just gets basically something that is almost instantaneously annihilated in their plate plate notes aren't in your in your battle plan right because the reality is I can read you all these articles and amendments and footnotes but it's irrelevant because as soon as we get into the skyports you don't get any of these right and you can't like amend the code of those existing skyports and um and and the reality is is most of I think most of the time I mean okay let's ask this question for you for you two gentlemen how often would you go skyport less I mean I would make an argument that actually as if you talk if you looked at as a another skyport what it's actually a fairly valid one ish because the other sub factions have some kind of egregious uh constraints so you could argue that it's a fine sub faction yeah it's a bad allegiance but it's a fine sub that that's an interesting it's an interesting point um I think that there's it's yeah we'll get into it Tom are you back can you hear us now I'm back yeah I don't know what just happened but it's fine it's all good the question was how often would you go skyport less I um I made a couple lists with it skyport less because there's some exploitable abilities that need to be fixed um but most of them are I mean I don't know I just like basically how you get your foster bonds right that's how you get foster response yeah sure yeah okay so let's get into some let's I'm trying to think of how we want to explore this book and and again it's going to be just as it's difficult to figure your way through because like the command traits this is another this is another thing that did need to happen the command traits and the artifacts are all split by hero type like why did we need this much like lords of the sky fleets admirals only senior endreneers endron masters only reader readers of the guiding winds navigators only alchemical innovators chemists only good lord did we need four command trait tables and then something very similar it's just you use them sure like to a point even uh the ogre book is what I'd reference right because they did the like butcher tyrant right breakdown right what I love about this one is we go even farther when we get to the magic items because they actually split up not just endron master endron master with the harness versus endron master with the dirigible suit he's got to have his own artifact list like I just it like and again oftentimes if you're not using a battalion all of that detail just yeah that's what I was saying earlier it's like you make some key choices and some of the they're not bad some of them are actually quite good some of them are quite fluffy some of them are quite fun yep using them because of the decision you made half an hour ago completely makes all that irrelevant the best the best parts of the most competitive parts of this book are in the items period okay so let's start there let's actually discuss this because because we have to know what we're picking against right because here's the thing right if you take a skyport obviously it's assigning your magic item right yep not all the time but not all the time right there's a little bit of exception there we'll play and we'll talk about it in the skyports but let's just assume by default it's assigning your magic item because that's often the case the first decision I would make when I would build a list is what items do I want yeah that's what I'm saying I actually think that's an interesting way to attack this book because I agree with you that the items have a lot of power but there's a necessary decision there Tom because if you say I want two items or I want an item that's not on the auto generated one right of the ones that are often overriding it then what's going to happen is you have to take a battalion right and the battalions as you said often end up of what's there often end up forcing you into very similar looking builds but battalions require a minimum of 500 points on boats every battalion requires at least 500 points of votes right and that's in the worst battalion requires 500 most of them require more so let's get into so I think that's a good lens right so hence why this army ends up feeling very unidirectional right right okay so so let's start at the beginning because let's start with the thing you literally can't get at unless you're outside of one of the skyports are there any command traits that you guys like amongst the amongst the list no you can actually cheat into those by the like there no there are some skyports that you can make it so that you don't like they're like you don't qualify for their trait if you choose the right general sure this is one of the ironic parts about this is that just like the magic items it's gonna be a situation where like it'll say the first navigator or if a navigator is your general or the first navigator to get an item you know whatever so you can dodge around it but again I'm just gonna talk in absolutes and then we'll but the couple skyports that let us do that we'll raise that as an exception is yeah that's all I'm framing it like that because otherwise we over complicate things Tom yeah no that's her okay so um the uh yeah and the argument by the way isn't that boats are bad and I don't want to be forced into 500 points of boat the argument is I'm always forced into 500 points of boats right that's as soon as I touch the battalion it's not like what if I wanted a different list what if I wanted to play a bunch of like do what if I wanted all the list yeah exactly I wanted all balloons right you don't do a boat then you're not getting a battalion because the battalions here are just underwhelming ish right so right okay let's go through it so command traits anything you happen to like in this list I will accept obviously some of these tend to repeat so for example all of them have the wealthy thing where you can the general can start with two shares of eighth or gold instead of one okay cool and they all have the thing to get you know plus two wounds all pretty standard boring stuff uh anything you like in here do you want to talk about cutting fleet master or do you want me to very well yeah cutting fleet master well I'm also grudge bearer there's a there's a two okay yeah so walk us through one of you walk us through cutting fleet master so I'm not talking all the time I'll do I'll do cutting fleet master so cutting fleet master you have to have an admiral as your general right which is it which is inherently a problem in this in this army ironically because by by choosing an admiral as your general is you have to have boats like he's really only good in boats unsurprising and he doesn't unlock any battle line right so actually like by choosing an admiral as a general you are restricting what what fleets you are going to be in often sure because either then you have to go to one of the the sky ports that unlocks battle line in which case you're not taking cutting fleet master because you took a the sky ports don't overlap right or you're taking arco right right and which is just you know saying that I want 270 points of screens is what you're saying there sure which we can talk about the value of arco and how they look now right and and it's the answer is yes they're okay chaff at best yeah and so what cutting fleet master does is after armies are set up before the first person goes for the first battle round begins you can make a normal move with one friendly with the sky vessel yeah it can fly high unless it's an ironclad so there's that except it can do x unless it's why unless it's the boat you would naturally want to do this with because when you hear like cool I can make a pregame sweet move with my boat you would think neat I want to do this with the big cool boat that's my favorite boat because it's like the best boat yeah and then immediately it gets written out as an option well you can still move you just can't fly fly high yeah which is like actually the thing I would want to do with the big giant shoot everything boat yes but really it is a sentence that is packed on the end it's not inherently part of the rule it is just like someone's going to it and gone that's too powerful okay unless an ironclad you know it's right it doesn't organic when you read the rest of it right like it it just doesn't need to be there right like let the why why have that one specific weird exception I understand well yeah then you can park an ironclad off my line and put all the guns into it so I'm going to bring up on the screen now for everybody just very quickly guess what by the way I can do that anyways sure sure sure there's other ways to get at it yes well I'm gonna bring up a little seat here yeah yeah you just fly high in the actual turn yes uh so here's the here's your numbers so I'll explain to this I this might be kind of small on the screen everybody I apologize see if I can zoom in a little bit we will zoom up there we go okay so we did we did a little math comparison here so here's your ironclad I'm assuming a number of one here's your min and average damage the range you have to be at to make this damage happen and how much points it costs okay uh so the ironclad doesn't a minimum average these are this is the middle 40 percent for those of you statisticians out there okay so I'm assuming the standard 40 percent middle grouping the likely 40 percent on the middle split off the median 20 on each side uh the uh it's minimum of 11 and a max average of 14 I am assuming re-roll ones to hit in all of these calculations because it is such a common thing it can be done through eighth or gold on the boats or sorry that's not true could be they could I'm not assuming you use your eighth or gold um it can be done through various admirals and skyports and abilities and your command ability and just you know yada yada you know so like just assume that you somehow got re-roll ones to hit and what you get is 11 to 14 damage all of this is against a four plus save unit okay so that's the damage we're talking about out of an ironclad it's 11 to 14 yep okay we'll come back to other damages later yep um so yeah but you know cool neat yeah that's fine um also on the admiral it's funny that you can pick an extra footnote but you can't pick a footnote your army already has and if you go look at like the footnote list there's maybe one that's worth any value right and the and it's one you actually could pick twice because it's a once per battle limitation right and in fact of all the footnotes interesting part about the footnotes just as the articles are all only real ones to hit all of the footnotes are once per battle just once per battle you drink a thing drink uh one of them is a replacement for the command for burning a command point one of them is an irrelevant heal and one of them is actually pretty good where you can like run and shoot and charge that's a thing that would be need to be able to do twice but you can't because it says you can't pick the same thing twice right cool beans right okay all right so yeah uh tom you mentioned or there was one other would mention grudge berry we want to talk about grudge berry real quick because that's for the end red master well it's it's it's one of the kind of turns up the it's one of common ones it's one that kind of turns up each or most of them but it's it's really good it's double double damage against a specific character that you pick at the beginning of the game yep and it's just very very good on the engine master in on with suit yes i can't pronounce the word that the flying yes the flying dirigible suit endred master who he basically damage he can do damage yeah so after armies are set up pick one enemy hero double the damage inflicted by weapons used by this general that target that hero just kind of period which is great uh let's re-reference our spreadsheet here because obviously we're going to give that to the guy in the dirigible suit so here we have our endred master with suit his normal damage assuming re-roll ones assuming he can get into a nine inch range is three to five not the most impressive uh damage but if you double all those damage numbers and you've spaced that out over the whole battle that actually does make this guy pretty scary to even well protected heroes um one hero right because he's only going it like that that bonus is only against one hero so against one target he's going to be pretty good yeah but nonetheless sometimes whole battle plans revolve around like there are many enemy armies built right now that revolve around keeping one person alive which is what's good right he's far so you can get to that right that dude's maneuverable he can actually put out some good damage and like that turns him into a little assassin which i actually think is a like i agree i think grudge bearer is actually pretty strong but he is also your general which means that he has like utility in in scenarios and you can't just treat him like an assassin and throw him into their lot like throw him in to take out that target i don't know i mean where what scenario do you really need him for like let me say it this way in the us there are lots of secondary objectives that are general based oh that's fine for like yeah sure that's fair i mean it's not just us there's plenty of in the standard pack that reference generals so like okay that's fine i would also throw in one more but only as an aside as an example of something we were talking about earlier which was uh collector for the chemist yep yeah collector for the chemist is actually quite cool but you never take chemists generals because you're always kind of pushed down a path where you've never got the kind of luxury of having a chemist general to take collector which is quite good it is a really good one yeah so the collector what it does is if you choose this general to have an artifact of power you could choose one extra friendly hero to also have an artifact that's a cool that's a cool item um i should be stated that the chemist also has the grudge bearer thing just like the endermaster but i don't think you would give it to him because he just doesn't do have the damage capability right yep um okay cool uh anything else we like in there uh like i mean plus three movement on the navigator is not terrible sure where you can make you can if he's garrisoning a ship it goes up by three inches and move yeah it's okay but you're gonna be flying high most of the time so like it's synergy that most of the time you just don't need sure um i would also point out uh that the the old um the old like after army or the diviner where you can after armies just set up pick one terrain feature objective do not take battle shock tests for friendly crowd and overlord units while they're holy within 12 inches of that terrain feature objective that has a lot of potential but the problem is is that the way the army tends to build you don't generally have like 40 blocks of arco anymore which is what you would be wanting to use something like that on right you'd want to have them go like arco want to go stand on an objective now if you read the war scroll that seems to be what they want to do right it says put these guys next to an objective right so like when you read it you're like okay cool but the the problem is just most lists aren't going to really tend to have 40 blocks of arco because they just don't actually do anything in that number anymore it's not there's no you're pound for pound you're not getting any value there right so i think you'll see tenors of arco plenty often and that's fine yep those the battalion that you're taking most of the time tends to kind of double up on that kind of ability anyway yep you've got quite a bit of ignore battle shock a shocking amount of ignore battle shock in this army because i think they felt like it was one of the weaker abilities you can hand out right and so it's like situational battle shock it's an army that's already going to have like units of like five to ten troops right yep that you're just not going to have in the irony being on top of all of that it's not like you don't have the command points to spend yeah yep okay no i agree i'm agreeing jordan that like there's no value to 40 arco right now that's what i was saying okay uh all right um let's talk about the artifacts because i agree this is the this is where we've got some we've got some stuff so gentlemen what's that this is where the meat is this is where the meat is i agree these guys have some cool items which makes sense they're rich right like these dudes should have the coolest magic items in the game and what what what gets in my crawl is that like and they used to have a skyport that gave you an extra item which man how amazing would that be here um and it just doesn't anymore yep thank you yeah okay so let's talk about it here we go gary tom what are the items we like there's there's some interesting items here let's go through them do we want to start with the do we want to start with like the item shall we just start with it the decision you have to make is are you spending additional points on endless spells that's the first decision that you make in this army right do you use do you reduce your cap by 100 and just take warp lightning protects or the torus i would also argue the torus could be interesting in some lists no or whatever but the point would you like to explain tom how this army that does not have spellcasters or priests needs to think about taking an endless spell yeah let me i'll talk about how yeah okay so i'm not gonna be snarky with it um so you can choose a spell in the bottle uh as your item on a chemist and what that does is um the chemist now um can once per game cast any endless spell in the game as long as you've paid the points for it right and ignore all restrictions so everyone anybody any any anybody anywhere any endless spells that have ever been written in the game or will ever be written in the game can be purchased and put in the spell in the bottle yep um and once per game you can cast that spell without um without failure and it cannot be to spell correct well it can or it cannot be unbound it cannot be unbound there you go very different um yes it cannot be unbound um and so like you get to put in the spell wherever which means that anything in the ko book that allows pregame moves allows you to drop uh a warp lightning vortex on the enemy team at the top of one old rat trap baby old rat trap is back you loved rat trap before how about un un unbindable rat trap because yes there's plenty of ways you can get this chemist over to the other side of the board where where he's like right up on the enemy army as close he needs to be to like drop this thing in their lines with its 13 inch range now yep and uh and because the the the because the way the spell in a bottle works you can pick horrible things like warp lightning vortex you gotta pay the hundred points yep and you only get to use it once once it's dispelled it's gone it's not like you know it's if you've got a grace here with rat trap and he gets a spell he can just redo it right and you said not to but zines do have an automatic to spell they do right yes so you but basically you can automatically cast it and it cannot be unbound now when it comes to the enemy's turn sure they can try to dispel it as normal of course of course but uh as it is here we are you can roll up on him and hit and drop a rat trap so big because you get it once so you don't want them to dispel it so you've got to make it out so you go big yep right and so what ends up happening is like what this incentivizes the army to do is to buy rat trap get all the guns and then alpha people on the on the table which feels like we're just literally back where we were only now they get rat trap sure a clown car style ish build but now you now you're in a rat trap as well as the clown car right right like like and that's and guess what that's your competitive bill yeah i don't i don't know if it's the only one but sure yes like i think there's probably a much more skirmishy type of thunder based build no you're skirmishy in that because if they hit you you just leave where i'm not wasting the points on rat trap where i'm trying to waste the points in the alpha thing so let me ask this what hundred points can you spend that's going to be do more than 20 mortal wins to the across their arm i don't know possibly possibly what comment oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah a well-placed comment could could do that damage across the army but that's the point is that like when you look at what it's competing with it's that hundred points it's always going to be better spent on other other armies endless spells yeah i mean it's it's an interesting i don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole because again like it is also set up a roundable to a point if you know people have it like it's not rat trap is rat trap and it can be played against in some ways depending on what the army is it will have wild wildly varying effects on different armies in general i have had the position since the very beginning that warp lightning vortex should be uninvented okay so like you know if we don't want to use that example we could go to something like comet which is fine or if you want to be more wacky you could throw like you can just say purple sun or something or i don't care pick a thing this is there's a few good ones that that actually quite a good one in the chaos the new uh slight darkness yeah the dark fire demon rift or whatever yep the demon is really good yeah you could you can spin that boy out if they have a big line of wizards because it can drop out nine away and then fly 12 and bomb hard and like it would do a significant amount of damage because it hits every unit plus right i mean what so what i would say is this like my big concern is what they did was in this one creation which is an awesome neat ingenious creation what they've done is they have incentivized bad play experience somebody asked the question with allies can't you take the vortex and comet yes the answer is yes you can because storecast are an ally i have a bill i gary do you remember uh so i have a bill that drops the vortex comet and then has two and it has two walls so it walls them in behind it yeah what was this this is the one where you took the mercenary uh the aberrant gulking which has like the half move cadaverus wall like the cadaverus barrier that halves move within three inches um and so like you wall them like you set up the two rat traps like long ways and then put the wall behind it and so they can't actually pass and it actually extends the line of like unpassable and then you drop like a comet in the middle and it it does a lot of damage i feel like one of the worst kind of examples of 40k list building detachments yeah right yeah yeah yep because it has a chaos on the spell you're going to take stormcast eternals and you're going to take a aberrant you're going to take a death unit as well in a ko list as one would expect yeah all right so that's that spell in a bottle it's something that's worth talking about it should be noted that all of the chemists artifacts are once per battle items all of them every chemist item is once per battle take a drink take a drink there it is yep um so uh what but let's talk about some other items because there are there are some other fun items in here too uh somebody want to talk about the phosphorite bomblets they're cool and they are cool they are cool for the reason why you take um unportable you know the the non-name skyports yep uh because you end up having because you're always going to take the um dirigil master the dirigil master you're always going to take a chemist with the with the party popper so as most of the other barracks then dictate your item you need to not be in those barracks to then take another unrestricted item which will always probably be the blossom bombs it's basically a shooting attack but an ability isn't it so once per game drink there you go yep once per game once per battle you can basically in the shooting phase pick a unit within six and keep rolling dice and you do a mortal wound every time you roll a two plus as long as you don't roll a one it keeps going yep it's basically ko plus a year yeah once per game that's fun it's a cool it's a cool item and yeah if you get if you get a hot streak on that rolling boy can you do some mortals that's it again it's incentivizing a certain style of play because it kind of has to go on the uh injury master which you're always going to take but now you're definitely going to always take it because he's the one that can take that high yeah so it's it's a shame by the way that it like that it's there almost to a point because I also love the concept of like the aether injection boosters where when he retreats right he can use the disengage and fly high rules right so the suit guy can bounce around in the same way but of course it's hard to pick that against the phosphite bomb let's well there's an interesting incentive structure there by the way because if you do that because of the way that the the hitchers rule works he actually drags in an injury rigors with him when he does that sure which is quite interesting interaction I will give that credit yeah that's cool I will point out that like the Endron master with dirigible suit the special hero from the aether war box set yep he came out real decent in this he turns on two of your best battle lines he himself is a great hero who's fast and mobile and does good damage and he has three decent magic items because his third one the one we haven't mentioned is a three plus ignore spells and spell effects like the best ignore spells and spell effects item in the game currently yep right you can actually make him like he's nine he's gotten one one shot nine inch shot one of these three young nine inches and one shot you can actually make it 18 inches and make it three shots yeah which is you can make him a little gumbo if you're you know if you if you take us from that way well and only that you're incentivized to take him always in a boat list because when boats jump they can take seven models seven hitcher models right so you're so balloon boys you're going to take in sixes you're always going to be able to take an extra one if you want to or like you can always take an extra one so you're always incentivized to have at least one of of the Endron masters yeah and you have a take so yeah and Brock is the worst like let me just say this oh I'm going to say this we're not going to mention Brock again in the show yeah because there's no reason to but I didn't think it was possible for them to make a war scroll worse moving into this book and yet somehow with Brock they managed to do that because what they did was they changed him to Brock gnar keyworded which you would expect um he used to have a a semi usable ability that gave you run in charge in a bubble around him and so if that had been Brock gnar only that might have been a really interesting incentive structure I don't know like they brought in our unlocks um warden so you couldn't use it with the not sorry Brock gnar unlocks thunder so you couldn't use it with them but maybe you could put some inner rigors or whatever but they even changed that so now it's a bubble that you spend at the beginning of the charge phase of re-roll charge right which is just not as good as rolling your charge and spending a command point afterwards if anybody actually fails yeah and the one to two units you were probably charging within his radius and it's restricted to Brock gnar units only right yeah he's just so hyper focused in a very bad way I would actually make a prediction right now and say I'm wondering if the new handbook somehow does away with rolling re-rolling charges after you roll the charge command point oh you mean the general sandbox like GHB 2020 yeah that's nicking switch I keep seeing it so many times it's like it can't be that bad in comparison to that command ability and then not know that right you know right well there's a lot of those types of abilities the re-roll charge in an aura thing it's not an uncommon thing that happens right right so I'd be fine with that frankly um okay so yeah he has like the entered master with original suit has three honestly sweet items like he has he got all the good stuff and I just want to point out uh I want to talk about the navigators real quick okay sure the navigator items real quick um because I think that there's it's it's an interesting exploration of the book okay right which by the way we're talking about all these sweet items know that you get one of these in your army sure or well I mean often I mean most in most constructions of this army you will only ever get one of these items period right because you're going to be dictated by your skyport for the other item yep okay so the navigators interesting let's start with I want to kind of go in this order here we go I'm gonna go in reverse order void stone orb right so once for battle when you attempt to basically you know unbind or whatever or dispel you can just do it automatically all right cool find it up because he's your dispeller guy then you've got this illuminator flare pistol now we've talked forever about how they need a marker light ammo right yep and uh and the um people will see that tom when you type in the chat because it comes up on my screen that's fine Gary and I'll keep talking yep um so we talked about they need the marker light ammo but instead it's the first time in a battle in other words once per battle yep when you score a hit on an enemy unit you can re-roll hit rolls for attacks made by other friend recurrent overlord units that target the same at same enemy hit like what a chance for a cool item to give this guy a marker light pistol so he can like focus fire and light people up right yeah give people re-roll ones and not only that like well it's all it's all it's no it's the first time that you hit with that item yes I understand that I'm saying he grants re-roll all hit rolls not re-roll ones he does no what I'm saying though is that he only has two attacks on that gun and he has to hit yes and he has to hit and then on top of that um it's only once per game yeah I understand it's so sad like it would be so cool if it was just a thing like now when he does this if he hits your allies get to do this thing wouldn't that be cool nope uh or even if it was your allies within a range or whatever fine okay uh and then finally the cyclonic 8th meter when you use the bearer's aetherstorm ability add one to the dice roll that determines this effect probably actually the most boring but useful one he has yep because it actually makes his storm quite reliable right yep okay because his storm's on three up but his storm's on three up yeah exactly more wins is it six plus or is it unmodified I think it's a six plus it's six on or on a I don't know on a six on a six so that doesn't actually move that yeah at any rate it still does make it so you only fail it on a one which is right what you're actually trying to do uh is have the move characteristics of units which is what the navigator has the ability to do only for flying units but he can still do it well it's a lot of heroes are flying so sure like a lot of the good stuff you can quarter their movement so all right let's talk about let's let's get into battalions I want to talk about the three battalions there are only three battalions in this book we're not talking about the mega battalion it's impossible obviously okay which by the way can I point out something that they removed they you lost a quarter of your battalions right because they used to have four they took out the only uh balloon based not ship based battalion so they have three boat based battalions it'll show back up soon tom in the wrath of the ever chosen or whatever the thing is that's going to have all the battalions in it if that's what it is we'll see we'll see or maybe not yeah or maybe not okay three battalions gentlemen do you like what do we what how do you want to attack these what have you been building your list with let's start there uh almost all my lists are um based on the first one 90 percent of them are iron sky command although escort wings also got uh that is useful yep like yep yeah okay so yeah somebody walk me through iron sky command and what what what you like about it because it's not the it's not the it's not the actual battalion ability which is just like whatever who cares go ahead great um it is well let's start reverse or reverse the ability basically gives you um 18 inch bubble from the iron clad which is not that of means about sure um which by the way if you have a uh admiral he projects his own 12 inch bubble of battle shock and the admiral will most often be in that iron clad so that's anti synergy drink take a drink sure um but at its heart it is basically an iron clad with three characters three little characters one of which can be engineering master in bold so you're you're flying engineering master chemist navigator but any three no no any any three in any combination uh 10 arc company well sorry one unit of arc and arc company so 10 and then one to three units of rigors um and that's basically your arm in a box right it's basically from a gift ratcheting you and going there's your army off you go you've got because if you take the engineering master as your battle as your general the rigors become battle line and so you've got your characters your boat and your battle line yep in a loader it's it's there I think you can get something like quite comfortably 1750 in in unit sizes that you want because of the six being transported by boats so you end up with like 1750 you stick a hundred point vortex in it and you've got 150 points left and that can either go on an admiral if you want to say a genuine one drop or you stick a gun hauler just to open up your boats kind of rigors kind of like right so you're right so you're either playing a one drop army in an iron clad with 18 engine rigors or like 10 arco and 12 engine rigors or something like that yeah sure because you mean you got to have the arco they're chewing up a spot well no but the but the rigors aren't chewing up any spots it's one to three units and the arco so everything's going to be in the boat one drop plus the plus the rigors uh or you add a or you add a gun hauler and lose the admiral but the point being it's the same list that was clown car you had two units of nine previously now you have three units of six sure yeah it's it's right itself once you've picked your way through the book and you know the thing you kind of get a short list of this is good and this is not yep and that battalion kind of it's all the boxes of the things that you have figured out are good yep and it's and there you go off you go yep but I do like so here's one thing I'll say I actually like this battalion a lot the iron sky command okay yep no I agree like it's a it's a good battalion it does direct like it it has the stuff you would probably want it can it does and this actually helps direct you through like army building especially for somebody who doesn't have as good of a handle on the army it does allow you to go very low drops it doesn't really have anything I would hard consider attacks in it because of the way it oh it zero ones your admiral or your or brock right so like as battalions go this is a good battalion well its ability is fairly irrelevant but still like what you wouldn't take one of those heroes so it gets forcing you to take one additional one additional hero that you probably wouldn't normally take even then it's not useless because well because basically you're always taking the navigator you're always taking the end remaster so you're left with what you're going to do or yeah yeah like you're going to take a chemist for the for the spell in the bottle and then like the question is is like you could opt to not want to take the navigator right like that would be the other possibility or if you for some reason want to go with like not like arco battle line you could drop the end remaster but you're still then forced to take a third like either a double navigator or a chemist that you can't use in your boat yeah I mean fair enough but that's like none of that is is crippling this this is just average battalions of what tends to happen right tax wise this is minimal there's plenty of battalions and plenty other books that are way more taxi and whatever right all these heroes have a purpose they do something chemists don't chemists don't do anything in boats chemists do zero things in boats it's not the question of do they do anything in a boat it's a question of do they do anything in the army and and I would argue that like yeah yeah chemists do something in the army right like it's that's not the question they what chemists do is buff skyfarers and you do have three units of six of them but if the chemist is in a boat you can't buff skybearer we'll get there I understand he's got to be on foot to buff but we'll get there my point is that does happen he does have a reason to live and to be there like this is a good battalion I honestly I'm separate I'm calling it good there are many armies that would kill for a battalion like this man sure no I would agree with that I would agree with that is because of its composition is is getting you all the things that you were going to take anyway in an army that really likes being a loader so that that kind of pushes it over the it's good to well I'm what I was going to say yep right okay so then the other one obviously to talk about is the grundstock escort wing or just escort wing shortly so this one is two to three gun haulers one arco ironclad or frigate um so just so we that like if we talk about min boats that's 250 plus 300 so 550 if we went like max boats that is to say ironclad and three gun haulers right then you're talking about uh 960 points of boats that's kind of your boat range there all right and then one thunders unit which is good we'll talk about thunders in a little while but thunders are are good like thunders are a very strong unit in this uh in this army and zero to three skywardens units I don't particularly love skywardens as they came out there are some uses for them um but it's zero to three exactly yep so like this is to me one of those more like good backbone things because I think gun haulers can be quite useful especially with the end and work which we'll talk about in a second that lets them like uh haul haul things around ironclads and frigates both do stuff as you mentioned for just their their standard utility and thunders are a really good unit so this is just kind of your backbone stuff right this this is this basically circulates the other build of the army right both around the battalions and this is the other one where you take a big old unit of thunders in an ironclad yeah and uh it should be noted that obviously gun haulers do have an opportunity in one of the skyports to become battle line so like if you were you know you could theoretically have all of your battle line in this uh battalion I think that's kind of where it kind of ends up kind of boiling or you're parking too you end up having this in urbex because same thing as yeah the same reason and the same thing I said very early which is you kind of go down the build paths and they're generally kind of built around battle line you take urbex and then you take this because it then hits all the markers of you've got your battle line you've got your load rock you've got your extra item yeah and off on off to the races you go it's the it's the same thought process of I don't know yeah I'm gonna take half an oz yeah sure and I'll also say this is actually the battalion that has a decent ability like which it's the the escort wings ability is at the start of your shooting phase you can pick one enemy unit for this for this battalion to focus fire on if you do so you get to re-roll hit rolls of one re-roll hit rolls of one there it is again take a sip uh for of for all attacks made by units from this battalion that target that unit in the phase which is actually pretty cool for like tearing people down this that's quite a wide selection and the fact that you get to like change who you're focusing on every shooting phase I actually quite like yeah and it's decent for NSU kind of builds because as much as you can get re-roll ones everywhere you don't generally give it to everyone at the same time right right yeah so like and then the middle battalion I actually can't I don't really like um the iron sky attack squadron that one is two plus arcana frigates any number of frigates which again could be your battle line in was it Brock gnar has battle lines that right but it doesn't matter because if you take three or yeah I mean I guess and then yes I understand yeah like you mean it yes correct and then one arcana company unit for each arcana frigate the point is if you mined it two and two you anyway you were in gnar you'd still satisfy your battle line or whatever right um at any rate this one has one of those things that seems really cool because arco from this battalion can leave an arcana frigate from the same battalion either before or after it has moved we'll talk about that in a moment because we really need to get to that in addition you roll 3d6 instead of 2d6 when making charge rules for arcana company from this battalion that left an arcana frigate in the same turn the problem with this is is many fold okay so let's just go talk about uh frigates real quick because I feel like that's a conversation we need to have right so because and we need to talk about garrisoning in general so a frigate can hold 15 models yeah of it can garrison 15 people arco come in tens hence the most you can ever of arco you can ever stick in this thing is 10 right pretty simple math unless you're buying other sized units and and you can't do um and you can't there's no engine work that allows you to negate the movement problems with this either so you can't like if you go over 10 the it can't fly high and it's have moved great yep yes you have this model's move characteristic and it cannot fly high if there are 11 or more models and it's garrison okay great so we always just have 10 guys so it's the 10 arco right and let's we're gonna we're gonna put a pause here gentlemen and and we're gonna tom stay as long as you can and then just drop in gary now keep going okay i'm gonna have to go here in a minute it's fine i understand um and we'll uh so we need to talk about garrisoning and how it works okay so you can garrison people in your boats garrisoning tom what are the benefits of garrisoning we'll let you do this before you go yeah it's a plus one to you get cover so you get plus one save and you are minus one to be hit okay which is you know good like that solid cool cool cool thing yep um and so that alone is obviously a nice little buffer unit you can still target the unit of course normally yep um so somebody can shoot you completely normally when you're in the boat other than the neg one to hit they can melee you if they attack the boat all that kind of stuff is still true yep okay so i'm gonna i want to read everybody here the text around this because this matters a lot um units cannot join or leave this models garrison if it has made a move or flown high in the same phase they can join or leave before it does so so normally if the boat moves at all you ain't getting off whether it whether it shoots up and comes down or just scoots forward you ain't getting off that battalion lets you jump that but it only lets you jump that with tenarco to put that in perspective tenarco not company shooting and charging and attacking do on average three damage against a four plus eight against a four plus eight so it's not like you're deploying with three real ones with three real ones to hit yeah actually no i didn't give them the real ones because i wasn't assuming they had real ones that's just that's just their straight math okay okay because i was assuming you weren't buffing a tenar that it's doing this trick it's just not like there's no there's no heat there on being able to like move forward pop out in the arco come in like they're just okay um all right an attack made by a weapon that is in range of this model i either frigate can target either this model or a unit in its garrison if this model i either frigate or ironclad or whatever is destroyed before it is removed from play roll one dice for each model in its garrison on a one that model is slain okay fair enough to be some lorem text uh set up any surviving models wholly within three inches of this model the i either frigate or the ironclad or whatever and more than three inches away from enemy units okay so let's talk about that for a moment what that means folks is that the real chance you have of death if you have a garrison unit and your boat pops has nothing to do with you rolling a bunch of dice and rolling ones right right right right right it's about being surrounded like if they if the enemy gets in touch with 50% of the boat on its horizontal axis right so i don't have a base of an appropriate size here i'm sorry i actually have an image of this somewhere yeah while you're digging for your image i'll talk yeah the point is is then because you have to be wholly within three inches of the uh of the the slain boat and more than three inches away from enemy from enemy models basically then the question becomes what happens to people who can't be set up the normal rules would tell you they're just slain and die yeah it's basically all the game works like that right it's not unusual in in that respect it's nothing that a gamer that plays both systems would be like oh my god but so it's just you're doing it with often like a third of your arm running around in the same day right okay so let me pull this image up real quick i want to show you just some math real quick okay so this is the hypothetical situation of like let's say that you put 20 um thunderers in a boat and the boat dies okay sure so and for 20 you're talking about an ironclad here because only an ironclad for 20 guys the so just let's do some quick math for everybody an ironclad can hold 25 models but if it goes over 16 it's uh its move is halved and it cannot fly high the frigate can hold 15 if it goes over 11 and the gun hauler can hold nobody unless you take the um the thingy the endring work that lets you hold people okay so please continue tom so what happens here these are these are 32 mill bases that are wholly within three of the base which is the rules for setup which means that if they are taking and then uh if they are taking any more space than what i have right here between these two three inch markers you are losing models right okay if you heaven forbid that they get cover half your base here you're going to lose all but about four or five models right so the point is is that the cover benefits for actually being in the boat are meaningless because if you just kill the boat in melee almost everything in it dies right yeah that's that's the problem from the setup from a setup standpoint so like if you can hit half their base which you can you can spread this out with like uh five 32 mill bases you can cover almost this whole saying sure and like five brutes or something of that size would easily cover that and be very dangerous to the boat right like five buff brutes could just flip a boat five buff brutes if they hit the boat they can literally kill half your army because they're going to kill the boat which is which is 510 points and the 480 points of thunderers you're going to lose all but about five of them yeah and just to respond to like doom's comment in the in the chat where he says like you should lose models when your boat gets blown up i don't think anybody disagrees with that your the trick is you're getting double whammy here you're rolling one die for everybody inside and then on a one you're killing everybody and that's kind of irrelevant because the reality is in most cases unless the boat gets shot down in which case everybody just piles out normally and that that slain rule is all the triggers if you're losing the boat in melee uh then very often you will just lose your unit like it will just not get reset up it will all just die right which again this is a very 40k thing right right i think we were talking about earlier is like it's incentivizing you to take boats at the same time going yeah but like the garrison rule which i actually think is the best way to make boats work in the ruleset right i think it is actually genuinely the best mechanic but they someone's done gone in after the event and gone proviso proviso proviso negative negative negative to the point that there is actually very little point putting stuff in a boat anymore yeah like there's a real cross incentive structure here exactly like this is that this is we we've hit the height of the non synergy right drink because what we have is most of Italians want you to take boats the boats have new cool garrisoning rules which can be a neat way to get your slow troops around the battlefield that's cool thing right that's cool no full stop that is cool your dudes can shoot outside okay sweet they everybody gets to fire off the boat neat cool stuff right a bunch of these turn off when they're garrison as well we haven't talked about that right but hold on i'll get there now i'm getting there but then on the flip side it says most abilities that are on war scrolls stop working whenever anything's garrisoned and if you lose this boat in melee basically everybody inside dies that's a heck of a de-incentive to garrisoning people right and that's why i said the skill floor here it makes such a difference in this army because people who are just like who are coming to this army and playing it are relatively new and like trying to use their boats in the way the game seems to want to tell you to do it which is like throw dudes inside and go drive them forward and then have them shoot at like relatively close range because most of the guns fire at like 12 inch range right yep yep then they're gonna do that they're gonna do what the book seems to be telling them to do and then somebody's gonna charge that boat in melee and then they're gonna lose you know a third of their army and be like oh well in a world we live in a world where you can teleport you can teleport charge reliably sure yeah i don't care if it's our boys sure or if it's marauders both of them are teleporting blocks that have reliable nine inch charges which then kind of feeds into the other thing that said 10 times now which is pushes you into a low drop because you can't have a high drop and risk that kind of thing happening to your expensive boat with very little screens so you're because of rules like this suddenly you're like well i have to be an alpha army because you have to be an alpha army otherwise you're gonna get charged yeah otherwise i die i need to do my thing and to do my thing i need to be able to tell them and then my army ends up looking like this every time because it's free time yeah yeah and and so like that that becomes a real challenge the so somebody asked a reasonable question this is worth an answer yep so uh why not just have five thunders in a boat but they won't do anything and so let's do in a boat right yeah let's look at the damage let's let's bring up so first of all an interesting point is that in addition when your when your models are garrisoned so like a boat pulls up with 20 thunders in it let's just let's just do that okay or like 15 15 thunders in an ironclad why not well so it could still move to full speed still can fly high all that kind of stuff okay great super dandy um that counts as one model for taking an objective right like literally an ogre is standing there and will beat you right he he will own that point now that's fine but we i can be more silly if you want to clean models inside models inside a boat do not count for objective hold it right yep right okay so let's look at that let's look at the chart here because i happen to have some thunder at math so five thunderers do an average of three to five damage okay at a 12 inch range for 120 points not terrible 20 thunders do 13 to 16 at a 12 inch range for 480 this is pretty decent range to damage but is that all that taking into account the plus one to hit and all that for not being in the boat because all that damage may go down correct this is this is assuming you're not in the boat yes okay so if you are in the boat this damage goes down all that damage goes down by about 10 to 20 percent right i don't have the numbers in front of me but yes it would be a noticeable drop my get just my back of the napkin numbers is this math would drop to about probably 8 to 11 right right i mean there are wise brands but that's not the conversation right yeah if you're in the boat so let's explain why that is let's go to an example and make this real for folks because i do think thunders are a good unit i really do like i think thunders are really cool so thunders have like 50 million weapons profiles like tom you can go back to your camera now unless we just want to stare at your that image all day back in a second plus two seconds sure sir you're fine so i'm going to talk about thunders um thunders are four inch move four up save two wounds which is cool two wounds now yep i love that they're two wounds now yep so you're you know you get a hunt you get 10 wounds for 120 points pretty good they have a they have a nice decent shooting profile i'm just going to talk about the base rifle for the moment because i'm not going to go through all the rest of this crap these guys have way too many profiles they have eight profiles on their scroll for the love of all that is holy um okay so the rifles are 18 inch range good range nice uh two shots threes and fours neg one one damage okay cool that's it that's a good shooting profile on this unit like no joke that's a solid profile right and to get those two shots you know they don't have to be like outside of three or not have moved or you know some of the other stuff you see in things like the cities right right it's just this is all the time and the champ basically has a double barreled version that's just four shots okay cool same same exact profile just twice as many shots super fun okay they can take there's everybody can replace their weapons with not everybody one guy will remain normal and then four other people can all replace their weapons right force diversity yeah and and so they all have these different weapons and they all do different things so like i i just want to kind of explain the garrisoning thing so like take the the aetheric full migater which is this nine inch range honestly like pretty bad gun it's three attacks on threes and threes neg one one damage but but you subtract one from hit rolls for attacks made by enemy models within three inches of any friendly models armed with a fumigator oh super cool okay that's like neg one to hits are always good he's a netter right he's just effectively a high-tech netter right right this ability cannot be used by a model that's part of a garrison when you think okay well maybe there's reason for that one because you know they're already being neg one to be hit you don't want it to be stacking that could be kind of annoying i mean we already just shown that the right answer is never attack the thing inside the garrison you always just pop the boat and they all die so it's kind of irrelevant anyways but whatever i could see the justification drive them back add one to the attacks characteristics of missile weapons used by this unit while they are with well any enemy units are within three inches of this unit okay cool so what is that telling me it's telling me thunders are like your close comp this i talked about this being what i wanted them to be right they're close combat shotgun troops like drop in and do the dirty business at close range like super cool and i was like oh neat you can put them in the garrison the boat pulls up gets into combat it's high risk because you could lose the whole unit very easy as we just pointed out but at least there's like a reward there of like okay cool now you're making a bunch of shots so you try to level the thing right this ability cannot be used by a model that's part of a garrison right okay like i don't i don't understand the justification for that they have no abilities yeah driving them back doesn't count but driving them off your boat right you wouldn't well yeah exactly which seems like the most important time you'd want to be doing it like when they're protecting their most valuable assets right um and then the pin them shred them finish them dick they don't get the six plus plus only the uh boat gets that okay um the pin them shred them finish them there's three other special weapons they all basically hit on fours but they can hit on threes if you have one of at least one of each of these in the unit so again when you look at how to build the unit and and by the way the way i built that damage is in your head you go okay so i take you know four times five of these guys that means uh four of the units because or four of the things become mortars four become deck sweepers and four become aether cannons or whatever right that's kind of how you would think of it in your head where are you going with this but that's actually the wrong way to do it the right answer is you only want like one of one of those that is the one that's not that's not very good like the next weaver one because it's really bad it's just a very bad weapon because it's like fours and fours neg one one damage and you want a bunch of the other one so again this sort of non-intuitive path you've got to follow to get to optimal right yeah and not like that like somebody had mentioned um you know they're your airborne paratrooper shock force but remember so let's say the boat drops in if the boat drops in the guys can't get off the boat correct so unless you double turn they will melee you if you were in melee you can't get off the boat right and if the boat suffers more than x number of wounds like let's say seven in the case of an ironclad it can't fly high anymore right and if the boat tries a retreat you can't get off the boat right like here is one of the most interesting here is one of the most interesting examples of this okay at tom you're the one who originally gave me this example but i think it really proves some of the challenges with the way this stuff works so the chemist yeah the chemist yes that's exactly where i was going so let's talk about the chemist so yeah can i do this quickly go ahead please yes this was your example originally it's really good so the chemist gives a buff that is reroll ones to hit drink i'm sorry reroll wounds to hit reroll ones to wound reroll ones to wound for a unit within 12 of him in the hero phase okay okay for a skyfair unit so not boats but if he's in the boat he can't use this ability okay so he was in range of the boat buff them put them on the boat and then the boat right and so if you start him in a boat he cannot buff in that boat moves he cannot buff until turn three because if you start him in the boat and he doesn't leave the boat immediately right right but when the boat moves he doesn't get out of the boat until the movement phase of turn two which is past his buffing meaning that he can't actually he can't actually use his ability until turn three of reroll ones to wound right so you don't start with that guy in a boat so the only way to use him is to deploy him outside of the boat with the unit because he can't buff units in the boat either i don't believe no no so neither he nor the unit targeted can be garrisoned so he has to start out of the boat with the unit and then you have to buff them at the top of one and then have them in the move phase go into the boat and then teleport the boat across the table that's the only way to get that buff in turn one and that's just seem challenging to me especially because you're going to set it all up and then pull it all off the table at the top of your hero phase right so again it's just like it shows kind of the the the wacky nature of how some of this stuff interacts like there's there's a lot of complexity here that's really challenging this is one of the reasons that i say like i can't imagine recommending this army to a new person and it's a shame because like honestly this is one of the coolest no let me pause that this is maybe the coolest looking army in aos right now and it's dwarves that's really making a statement from me right i hate dwarves but like that's cool right uh i mean the boats look amazing your thunders look cool as all get out the the even like the rigor dudes at their chainsaws are cool like hey i like chainswords chainswords are sweet right who doesn't love chainswords so so you know this is just kind of the this is the way we get into with this sort of garrisoning thing all right so thunders the drive them back but or the sorry the pin them shred them finish them yet again cannot be used for on a model that's part of a garrison so even that plus one to hit doesn't work when they're in the garrison so like all of these abilities drop away when they're garrisoned so what what has happened now essentially is that they have given you old old um the old embarking disembarking rules where you just like remove those models from play because before like those models were in the boat but they couldn't attack they couldn't use abilities they couldn't do any of the things that you wanted to do right but they were also not targetable right so the irony is that they've given you back the ability to like shoot but all of your abilities still turn off and now you're targetable so it's like the worst of all possible worlds and and they're in a situation of extreme risk right right the boat is always in extreme risk and if you get engaged in melee ever you're always being threatened to lose those models oh yeah like that's somebody said in the in the comments i would recommend the heck out of this for for hobby purposes oh i totally agree with that like if you're an experienced player that's fine you can navigate this stuff it's it's often unintuitive but like if you understand the game you're not saying that i was only restricting to new players and like hobby wise this army is just outrageously cool for what you can do with it i mean like my god it is the sky is the limit with hobby okay uh we should talk about balloon boys a little yeah i need to get going um but i could go on like i trust that you all will represent them appropriately absolutely so gary and i will we'll soldier on for a little while so while we cover the rest of the stuff in here thank you okay very good uh gary let's talk about endring rigors okay because i think endring rigors are another super strong unit in the book right endring rigors are now these skyfarers that's the new keywords of them and skywardens they go battle line with the dirigible suit guy which is cool uh and uh these guys are basically what they were before right like they're they're solid they're solid they don't have the the chemist the chemist buff made them really good right the chemist buff has gone as it was so they are now good but they um they fulfill a bit more role in the army now so it kind of it kind of makes up for it a little bit yeah you'll have some raw damage but um they are now battle line as you say they are now a potential battle line which is very useful um and they also heal really well and as your boats are more expensive they're now more of an investment that you do want to heal especially when they've got break points on their water scroll which say they can't do things unless they are you know of you know a certain amount of wounds taken that you can't fly high you can't disengage which we haven't really talked about yet you can't do these cool rules if you're too wounded and they are your healers so they do have a very solid place in the list yeah i agree like things like the rigors are just really cool they like they do damage let's reference the damage chart again because i do have rigors in my damage chart so here's your endring rigors um and we've got two different versions of these guys uh so one with all the special guns that's this line right here that i'm highlighting is if you switch them out for all the special guns six of them do on average eight to ten damage at a 12 inch range for 200 points if you keep that and this is both assuming shooting and melee by the way this is assuming you shoot somebody and then charge them which is highly likely with endring rigors that's kind of what you're on about um and then if you keep them in the standard guns they all get to keep their big chain swords and so they actually average 11 to 14 damage over both shooting and melee in that turn uh at a 12 inch again starting at a 12 inch within 12 inches uh for 200 points 200 points that's definitely respectful absolutely like that's when you look at this chart they are one of the best like damage punches per you know pound per point punches that you can get right um they're very solid uh little things as well which we haven't really broken into as a whole again and synergies um a lot of the time the boats are coming down nine inches away right a lot of the guns have had their ranges nerfed to nine inches so they can't shoot or kept at nine inches so they can't shoot they're like the difference the big difference between say rigors and wardens is the wardens can't get transported and can't shoot before they do it right because they got nine inch done yep arms are generally considered to be trash now because all their ranges were taken back to a fraction of what they were including the pistols which are now nine inches rigors kept their 12 inch guns so they can do these things still so that they they became better just by sheer fact that they can still do the things that the other army can now no longer do which was cheaper than that yep yeah and i mean this like they do have the option to take some special weapons i don't really want to dig into the the details of all these special weapons but they they do stuff it's fine um like one of them give you plus one to charge it's cool but i think rigors are really good because yes they do repair sky vessels and like in a pretty strong way too basically at the start of your hero phase you can pick one friendly sky vessel within one inch of this unit and roll one die for each model in this unit for each four plus you heal a wound it should be noted with the um with the boss guy uh what's his these their character names andron master is that his name who has the command ability to let them re-roll this that's usually where you come on points go as well right so you have a command ability where you can re-roll those four up so these guys can actually become little healing machines for your boat um they can also hitch a ride as tom mentioned earlier so you can attach up to seven basically skyfarers uh onto a sky vessel whenever it flies high so they can pop up in the air with it pop back down wherever it resets up we'll talk about flying high in more detail in a moment uh they as well have to be set up more than nine inches away which is why i agree the rigors are strong because the andron rigors keep that 12 inch gun so what's important to understand here everybody is when you have to set up it specifically says more than nine inches away from enemy units hence if your gun says nine inches as skywarden's base gun does and arco's base gun does that's you yeah there you go it's like you get to do your things and you get to use your rules and you get to do your stuff right so which other stuff done better by she didn't do that yeah to me these guys are a great win in the army they do exactly they're meant to be a big old hammer and they do hammer they hammer in the morning they hammer in the evening decent shooting good melee good speed you know not too expensive like there there's six wounds for a hundred points which isn't wonderful but it's not terrible and there's a reason why there's three units in my arm right because they're all fixed in that battalion so and again off we go into the same battalion into the same building to the same kind of core army because they they are such a good defense yep um and the like this sort of uh this sort of ability like these guys just fill a necessary roll they can go mix it up in melee they can go remove people off points you know they do these kinds of things you need or they go mop up after