Starting Warhammer Fantasy – Dispelling Myths
There’s been a lot of talk lately about why more people don’t play Warhammer and barriers to entry and so on an so forth. As a long time player, let’s set the story straight.
A guest editorial by Wildeybeast
I think there are quite a few misconceptions that put people off and frankly, they’re bunkum. So, this is the first in a (probably short) series aimed to dispel some of the myths that put people off and hopefully encourage a few more people to start playing this most excellent of games. Lets start of with a biggie that quite a few people have mentioned of late:
Warhammer needs too many models
If this is true, it means Warhammer is more daunting from a collecting and modelling perspective (especially for first time wargamers) and should be more expensive. Well, I suppose that all depends on what you are comparing it to. So, lets have a look at 40k, as the colossus of the wargaming world. How does a 500 point starting army from that system compare with one from Warhammer?
40K
Let’s go with Space Marines, the ubiquitous army and fairly model light. We need a HQ and two troop choices. Shadow Captain Shrike (because Raven Guard are the best) and two ten man tactical squads makes it legal and a Rhino rounds us out to 500 points.
No. of models: 22
Cost: £83.50
Warhammer
So, how does a Warhammer army compare? Lets go with Empire, a staple of the game, up-to-date with the current rules and with some cheap troops point wise. So we need a hero and three other units, least 125 points worth of which have to be core.
A captain with shield and full plate armour fills our hero slot. Then we’ll go for 20 halberdiers with shields. We can field them as a block of 20, or two of ten, depending on how many other units we fit in. Either way, at 140 points we’ve filled our core allowance. Now at this point, we can go a number of different ways, as we’ve still got nearly 300 points to play with. If you wantlots of models in your army, keep going with those infantry choices, you can fit plenty of them in still and get several big or plenty of small units. But we don’t need to do that. If I wanted to skew this exercise, I could be sneaky and just chuck a couple of cannons in or one of those fancy wizard chariots. Perfectly legal, keeps my model count low and cost down. However, I’m going for balance. 8 Inner Circle Knights gives me a pretty killy unit and a decent number of models. Three command groups or some magic items rounds me out to 500 points.
No. of models: 29
Cost: £61
Wow! So, my starting Warhammer army comes out over 25% cheaper than my starting 40K one and only has 7 models more. I could have got that figure lower. Are those 7 models really more daunting to assemble and paint than that Rhino we got for 40K? I’d argue not. Furthermore, when I was doing this, I realised I actually had much more flexibility in my army choice with my Empire than my Raven Guard. Yes, I could have fielded those tac squads in units of 5 and taken something else, but I’m still going to have to buy more models. My only other option for my two troops choices were scouts or a bike squad if I took a bike captain, whereas with my Empire, I had 8 different unit types to choose from to make up that core allowance.
The only other question to answer is ‘does Warhammer work with just 500 points’? Well, yes. Or at least, as well as 40K does with 500 points. We’ve got three units in both games and legal armies. Small ones, yes. Both games are really designed to work with larger armies and are better with larger armies, but there is no reason why you can’t play them with smaller ones. Most people who are starting out aren’t going to be able to afford to buy much more than 500 points worth of stuff a month, so it’s a good place to start. The following month you have 1000 points of stuff and so on. In just 5 months you have 2500 points, which seems to be standard game size for Warhammer, but 1000 point games are great fun if you’ve only got a couple of hours. When your armies start getting really big then yes, you do have more models in Warhammer as you tend to go for vehicles in 40K, but that isn’t a barrier to entry as virtually no one has enough money to buy a fully formed army in one go. And that horde of 30 swordsmen may take a bit longer to assemble and paint that that Land Raider, but they both cost the same to buy.
So, Warhammer doesn’t need more models and is actually cheaper* than 40K.
*Depending on what you buy.
