Wisdom appeal!!

[Scion of Fangor]

Which army would you like to work with in a team?
Why?

What would you tips and army lists be like when:

Working With..... (in teams)
Working with Horde armies
Working With Elite armies
Working against Cavalry Armies
Working against Infantry armies

Longest and most constructive gets an e-cookie

[Tethlis]

Are you talking about a doubles tournament, where 2 players fight against 2 players on the same board?

Are you talking about in a campaign, where you have an ally who you don't fight against?

Is there a particular point size you have in mind?

Any other restrictions?

[Azaireal]

High Elves.

But seriously,
Strategically speaking it is almost impossible to suggest who a good team is without know a few hundred variables.

If given a line, and I must hold against the oncoming anything, I would try to get a few blocks of Iron Breakers with a combat lord, with decent war machines to back them up. Use the Asrai to protect the machines, and keep out of the way.

If I have to take and hold a point, inside a building, I would want Empire Swords for multiple points, or Phoenix Guards for a single point. White Lions if the point is in a forest, a Dragon Lord if the point is at the top of some impassible barrier.

Can I just have two Bloodthirsters?

Do I need a full force, or a pair of Stanks and a hero to command them/die for them?

Is more Wood Elves an option? 4 Treemen (two plus two ancients with Annoyance) would scare a lot of people, with two battle standards, and two standard alters...

That is excluding who I am fighting, assuming common Empire Trash mobs and Bret peasant allies or something of the sort. This is also excluding any form of composition.

Do I need to have colourful fluff for reasoning why the armies are joined forces? (AKA, My Empire army who are the survivors of a Skaven conquest, who subsequently escaped from enslavement taking a hole slew of Skaven allies along for the ride)

There is a lot to be said about simple things too, like eight cannons nicely lined up in the middle of the battlefield, flanked by two rows of gunners, with large blocks of infantry hiding behind everything to charge into what survives the onslaught.

[Hopeless Hero]

They would never fight side by side... But I'd take an army of dwarfs comprised entirely of artillery and have my ally put them on a hill. I would line up glade guard in front of the hills. All of my Chars would be magic for defensive purposes. The goal? Kill the enemy before they can even get there.
Either that, or chaos men. Chaos men with WE ranged support would cause most to shake in their boots. Again, I would field all casters to crush the opponents magic phase. The main weakness of the elves is that... Well... Their weak... Low toughness and low strength makes for punching bags (With the exception of forest spirits). An army that has entirely melee heavy armored units would have you walking over top of the battle field.

[unicorn]

Which army would you like to work with in a team?
Why?

Dawis.
They are making their opponent wishing to come near to them in order to win. Wood elves are slowing them during their advance, disturbing with flank charges, and hinting whoever will try to hide and hope for draw.

I will combine Dawi (warmashine)gunline with (slightly changed) Asrai Sethayla. I think that will be HORRIBLY nasty.

[ArchMagosAlchemys]

I agree 100% with Unicorn.

I would play Sethayla-style WE supported by Dawi. The enemy cannot stand back and shoot you down, the Dawi provide excellent magic defense, and the whole army can be deployed on a comparatively narrow frontage, making for ferocious combat and shooting density.

Should have a good chance against anything in any circumstance.

[Gladerunner]

Dwarves, hands down. Effectively, all of our strengths are their weaknesses, and all of our weaknesses are their strengths. They offer solid RaF units, insane armor values for minimal points, as well as several siege weapon choices and passive dispel defence. We offer mobility, manouvarability, terrain abuse, as well as insane harassal and marchblocking. Combined, and their are few weaknesses left to probe except for VC and Warriors of Chaos, in which only VC+VC or WC+WC could beat.

All the dwarves would need would be 2 runelords, 2 ironbreaker units, both protecting the rest of the points worth of cannons, all with engineers. In a 1000 point army, thats something like 4 cannons min, or about 7 bolt throwers. Either will destroy effectively when focus fired.

[The Virgin Forest]

My woodies would only ever ally with other woodies.

It would of course be natural to take our Bret/Empire pawns to the field too. Though this is not as much an alliance, but more a matter of parental guidance

Also there is no end to the use of Dogs of War - especially when you mention words like 'faerie, pots o' gold and rainbows'. They usually end up having learnt a good lesson, and we end up with a good laugh, thus we all prosper

The fallen elves have held a few shaky alliances with us before, but both Asur and Druchii have lost sight of our elven purpose, so the alliances usually comes to an end quickly. But we're magnanimous and forgive them their flaws and choose to lead by good example

The rest better stay away from our forests - though I do know a wardancer or two, who gets a bit dreamy, when they see those bulging marauders of the north

..

The great thing about working with others is that we do it really, really well. There are no army that fights like ours, and we are the best at what we do.

Take a look at the humble dryad, a most extraordinairy creature. The best screening unit in the game, T4, skirmished, a ward save and packs a punch too. Now combine with the HE swordmasters, which are some of the best infantry out there but suffer immensely from shooting, and you've got an obvious combination.

Scouting is another thing. With glade guard scouts and waywatchers our allies better leave this to us - though I wouldn't consider scouts, when working with the darkies

I wish, I could say the same of our 'allies', but they are usually reaping more benefits from this than. WE screen, scout, harass, marchblock and do all the hard work to ensure that our allies can strike home and steal the glory. Sure its nice, when a cannon tears the head off a dragon, roast a bunch of knights in their armor, or having static CR to deal with crumbling and instability, but WE always will be the expendable units Therefore we cannot ally with others, only teach them and guide them and hope our noble and humble sacrifice will inspire them

[Scion of Fangor]

Thanks for all the replies. I'm looking for advice and tactic for what sort of army you would like to work with, why and an army list (your fighting with them on a board. So basically doubles without the ally restrictions). I would also like to know your tactics if your were fighting with Horde armies, Elite armies, Cavalry Armies and Infantry armies. You don't need any fluff this is purely tactical. So shove all those "I would never ally with this person for fluff reasons" out of the window and get those tactical brains churning.

[The Virgin Forest]

The fluff is too fun, and the game too poorly designed, to just throw it out the window

I would like to point out the synergy between WE and HE, as it is one of the most successful combinations.

+2 to dispel on re-rollable dice thats cheesy - combined with drain magic and you'll have VC on their knees.

RBTs and glade guards work wonders together in focussing fire.

Dryad screens for swordmasters.

How about a regenerating Star Dragon charging on the first turn?

The greatest list was based on:

Command
Star Dragon and WoWE Spellweaver
Two lvl 2 HE Mages (one w. Staff of Sorcery) and a CoR wraith
Standard Alter
Hard-hitting mobility + magic defense.

Core:
HE spearmen to shield the mages.
Dryad screens, glade guards and glade riders.

Special:
Swordmasters, Lion Chariots and Wardancers

Rare:
RBTs, Waywatchers.

[mabelode]

With the HE withdrawing from from the Elthin-Arvan and basically leaving the rest of the world to rot; providing the WE are given sovereignty over Athel Loren, why not the DE.
Their magic use transcends ours and I have wonderful visions of a Hydra walking into combat alongside a Treeman. We have the movement/shooting phases under control generally, but the DE can help even there, let alone the extra CC ability.

[ArchMagosAlchemys]

General answers are largely useless and consist of standard 'Rules of War' stuff. I/we need more details to provide helpful input,

For example, you mention Horde armies. Goblins, VC, and Skaven, for three (not an exhaustive list), can field Horde armies, but they are very different horde armies and the advice would be different. The objective of an ally is to cover the weakeness and not duplicagte the strenghts of the other army and each of these three armies has different weaknesses and strengths.

[Scion of Fangor]

Then provide your info on all three please . Remember the e-cookie

[mabelode]

Before I go out and buy the DE AB so that I can expand my answer, what the he.. is an e-cookie (I am VERY computer illiterate).... see what I mean, still no luck with smilies [go for "shedding a tear"].

[Naggie]

An e-cookie:



~ Naggie

[The Virgin Forest]

And just try clicking on one of the little smilies out left

Come on you can do it

Naggies made it so easy

[ArchMagosAlchemys]

Without sounding too unfriendly, NO!

You have asked for an enormous amount of information with probably two or three comments for each army book at each point level, say 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2250, and 2500 points. The number of other variables, such as table size, terrain, and scenarios would make much of the advice worthless too.

I see this as a 'tell me everything you know' question. I get a lot of this from my students and respond similarly. I ask them to reframe the question to something more specific so that my advice can be tailored to their actual needs.

Give us a more detailed explanation of what you want and why you want it and you are likely to get better answers.

[Beithir Seun]

I don't mean to be rude, but you could at least try to give some information. Rather than berate Scion for not being specific enough, why don't you just attempt to answer the question as best you can with the information you already have. Of course there will be specific details missing, but everybody should have a general idea of what they would want in an allied army. I understand that there are a vast number of variables, but there's no need to overcomplicate the question by attempting to address them all (I'm looking at you AMA).


Before I start my own comments, I am working on the assumption that the usual alliance rules apply i.e. Wood Elves can't ally with "Evil" armies (which means no Druchii, Chaos, Vampires, Skaven or Greenskins).

In general, the average Wood Elf army list suffers from two major weaknesses: a lack of high static CR ranked units and a lack of high strength attacks, both combat and shooting. To address those two things, the armies that immediately spring to mind are Empire and Dwarves. Out of those two, both have their strengths and weaknesses. Empire are relatively cheap and offer a lot of variety in terms of ranked units and artillery, so you can field lots of both. On the flip side, they are mediocre troops at best and their artillery is only semi-reliable. Dwarfs have very capable artillery and ranked units and can be relied upon 99% of the time, but they are more expensive than Empire and suffer weaknesses in manoeuvrability that may leave a Wood Elf army doing all the movement.

That would be my starting point for an all-comers list when the opponent is unknown. If you know what you are facing then you are better able to build an army that can exploit the enemy weaknesses whilst covering your own, and that can capitalise on your own strengths while nullifying the enemy's.


Working from the bottom up...

Against Infantry Armies: The major weakness of infantry armies is that they are generally slow. To capitalise on that, you can utilise two things: fast hard-hitters and lots of shooting. As such, I would build a strong gunline-esque section and a hard-hitting fast flanking section, plus march-blockers. To me, that says High Elves. Dragon Princes are amongst the best fast hard-hitters; they can be fielded in relatively small numbers and still be effective, their small numbers also means they are more manoeuvrable than heavy cavalry of other races (which would usually need to be larger - think Bretonnian lances) and High Elves have additional Special slots which means you can take more Dragon Princes than the Specials of any other army. Repeater Bolt Throwers, with their invaluable volley fire, can work wonders against all Infantry units, they are amongst the cheapest decent war machines available and you can take double the usual amount thanks to High Elves having extra Rare slots. Combine that with a Wood Elf force of Glade Guard (the best archer unit available), Eagles (the best marchblockers available), Glade Riders (the best bait unit available) and Dryads (the best skirmishers available).

Against Cavalry Armies: The major weakness of cavalry armies is that they generally rely on breaking units on the charge. They have as severe a lack of static CR as most Wood Elf armies do, and unless they can keep their momentum cavalry units will get bogged down and eventually their usually small unit size will work against them. In order to stop cavalry armies, you have to stop their momentum and then trap them - classic Hammer and Anvil. Large units of tough and/or heavily armoured infantry with lots of static CR and possibly Unbreakable or Stubborn, combined with heavy hitters of your own to counter-charge once the cavalry are bogged down. For me, that means Dwarfs again - units of Iron Breakers, Hammerers and Slayers backed up by Bolt Throwers and Thunderers. Combine that with a Wood Elf army of Wild Riders (for the counter-charges), Eagles (for march-blocking) and Dryads (also for counter-charging), plus Glade Guard for picking off the various light cavalry units that accompany the heavy cavalry.

Against Elite Armies: I am afraid you will have to clarify here; the word "elite" can cover all sorts of things, and I'm not sure what exactly you mean by it in this context.

Against Horde Armies: Generally speaking, the "horde" section of a Horde army is made up of the dregs of the army list - usually, these have poor fighting skills and even poorer Leadership. The oldest trick for dealing with Horde armies is to deal with only a small section at a time, whilst delaying and distracting the rest until you are ready for it. To that end, you require three things - distractions, delays and killers (preferably fast ones). For that I would choose either High Elves or Bretonnians.

Bretonnians have several heavy-hitting cavalry units that are more than a match for most Horde infantry. Not only can they rack up an impressive number of attacks but they also usually contribute a satisfactory amount of static CR through ranks and banners (more so than most heavy cavalry). They have access to Pegasus Knights which can not only act as temporary marchblockers but can contribute their decent killing power in any area of the battlefield, thanks to their ability to fly. Bretonnians also have access to amazingly cheap Bowmen, who are surprisingly effective in large numbers, and Trebuchets. Against Horde armies, stone throwers in general can be lethal but Trebuchets have the added advantage of extra range and extra strength.

High Elves, as already mentioned, have Dragon Princes to provide a fast hard-hitting punch and access to Dragons if points allow. Dragons are worth their weight in gold against horde armies in my experience, because their ability to fly and cause Terror in addition to their excellent combat power means that they can target areas away from the enemy general and thus scare units who don't have access to the General's leadership, before using their impressive movement to charge the vulnerable flanks and rear of exposed units. Combine those with RBTs to provide long range high Strength shooting.

For the Wood Elf section, I would include marchblockers and bait (Glade Riders and Eagles) plus distractions (Dryads and Glade Guard) and more heavy hitters (Wild Riders and Wardancers).


Now before anyone starting berating me as well I know I have generalised and have not addressed even half the variables involved, but I think this is a good starting point.

[The Virgin Forest]

Before AMA and Beithir gets into a fight

I'd advice Scion, who is obviously planning to do the great end-all thesis on 'Woodies - and those WE hang with', to instead do different threads on the subject.

As AMA says, the amount of data you're asking for is a bit on the.. monumental size. So instead of having bits an pieces to jumble together, interupted by the usual amount of sexual innuendo and e-pastry, try and catalogue it, so you get all your info on 'Woodies + Skaven AKA The Cheese Partners' collected in one thread for your convenience.

Oh, and to make sure you get some good advice, don't open all 15 ally threads at once. Instead do them one or two races at a time, so people can embrace it all

BTW: This would make it so much easier for AMA to handle - and he's usually got some good stuff to listen to

[mabelode]

TVF, what do you mean by;

the amount of data you're asking for is a bit on the.. monumental size.

I just tried to read Beithir's last post and had to have a burger break in the middle of it!!
(By the way my smilies are on the right and I have no luck in "clicking and dragging" or using copy/paste).

[The Virgin Forest]

TVF, what do you mean by;

the amount of data you're asking for is a bit on the.. monumental size.

I mean exactly this:

I just tried to read Beithir's last post and had to have a burger break in the middle of it!!

..

(By the way my smilies are on the right and I have no luck in "clicking and dragging" or using copy/paste).

Left, right - feel like I'm in an old John Cleese movie

You're right of course, they're on the right. And just clicking on them should be enough. No dragging involved. Just pay attention to what happens in the text box, when clicking on one of those little happy faces

[mabelode]

Ahh, one very happy forum member

[Beithir Seun]

While I agree that it would be a good idea to address one question at a time, I do not think having several different threads is a good idea.

The purpose of this thread is to provide information for a LEAF article on Team Battles. I agree that the amount of information we are asking for is monumental but that fact won't change if we use multiple topics, it will simply mean all the information is spread out in several different locations rather than gathered together. Yes, my post was long but it should not have been difficult to read and understand.

There is no need to overcomplicate the issue - it is simply not possible to address all the variables AMA brought up, and most of them will have little bearing on the teams until the game is about to start (by which point it's a bit late to be thinking about what you want in your army...). There is no need to address every single variable for the purposes of this article. You wouldn't give advice on an army list or a tactics question and address all the variables, so why do people feel the need to do so here?


All in all I know the amount of information required is monumental but, as my post shows, it's not difficult to answer part of the question with a few basic comments.

[ArchMagosAlchemys]

It would have helped had Scion explained WHY he wanted the information in the first place. It is also likely that Beithir knew why Scion wanted the data, and since I did not, it explains our different attitudes. This is the first that I knew it had anything to do with a LEAF article.

I'm also assuming that Teams games are normally played at conventional sizes, so we don't need to consider all possibilities. In the few teams games I have played, I have known my allies, but nothing about the opponents (usually).

I agree that the information needs to be kept in a single thread. I look forward to the information on the Dawi Cavalry army. Rather than huge responses, I think it would be better if they were focused on more limited topics. Fighting with Hordes, fighting against Cavalry....

I also think that we need to consider High and Low magic armies, both as allies and opponents.

[Beithir Seun]

Sorry for the confusion over the intent of this thread. I assumed you were aware of the Team Battles thread in the LEAF Forum and would recognise this thread as being part of that. Apologies


I would agree with your ideas AMA. My large post was my attempt of providing an 'example', but I would not expect everyone to go to those lengths with their posts (excuse the pun )

Limiting responses to address a single topic at a time would be a good way of focussing our efforts. I would suggest starting with arguably the easiest section first, and addressing what each race offers as an ally and how Wood Elves can benefit from allying with each particular race.