Building a New Army Part II

Building a New Army Part II - Designing the High Elf List

Now that I have my armies and basic ideas laid out, I now had to go about assembling the lists for the two armies. Here I started with the High Elves.

First I chose the basics of the characters. This usually helps line up exactly what I want from the rest of the list. After doing a quick check of the important Trojans, here's the list I came up with:

* Hector - An okay fighter and the leader for a lot of the siege, but he was eventually killed by Achilles.
* Paris - Not much of a fighter, but the guy who started the war, and the one who eventually killed Achilles with a poisoned arrow.
* Cassandra - A great seer who had the ability to tell the future, but also the curse that nobody would believe her.

Seeing these characters, I quickly came up with an idea as to who was going to be what. First, Cassandra should definitely be archmage, seeing as she was a very good mage. That really leaves Hector and Paris as Nobles, with Hector the army's general. I also decided that since Paris was such a looker-on, I was going to make him the Battle Standard, so that he'd be better at looking on versus fighting it out with the enemy. The choice to make Hector a Noble instead of a prince also gives the advantage to Achilles (most certainly a Dreadlord) in combat, as it should be.

After figuring out what my characters should be, I sat down to look at the various High Elf gods to see what units should line up with what gods. I chose to include all the High Elf gods listed in their army book, with the exception of Khaine, who obviously will fight with the Dark Elves:

*Asuryan. He's the main god, as well as called the Flame Eternal. Hector should obviously be the stand in for Asuryan, and he should get a bodyguard of Phoenix Guard, who are protectors of Asuryan's shrine.
*Moreg-Hai. The crone goddess and patron of ravens. Archers are also listed as being under her purview. Cassandra is also going to be her avatar.
*Vaul. The forge god, who is said to have blind priests with two handed hammers. Swordmasters converted to have giant hammers and blindfolds would be a good stand-in here, so that's what I'm going with.
*Kurnus. The hunter god. Good unit choices would be white lions, lion chariots, or reavers. With my no-cav theme, the first choice made the most obvious choice, since the chariots are rather fragile and expensive for a chariot that's less hitty than the famous cold one chariots.
*Lileath. The moon goddess. She's mentioned as the last hope of the Shadow Warriors, so those will be her unit.
*Isha. The wife of Asuryan and the patron of the Everqueen's Maidenguard. Obvious choice here, but with no rules for the Maidenguard anymore, I decided to use the Spearmen rules for them. Additionally, Maidenguard chariots would look rather cool, so I also gave Isha two Tiranoc chariots under her influence.
*Loec. Not the most known god in fantasy, he's mostly associated with wardancers. He is known much more well known in 40K under the guise of the Great Harlequin (Who else is it going to be?) Paris was sort of a tricky git, so I decided to put him as the avatar of this god, probably modeled with a great harlequin or a shadowseer figure. Loec's unit would be spearmen again, this time modeled with a more Greek look to them-- hoplite shields, mixed colored uniforms, and possibly Corinthian-style helmets. Yes, I know the figure-8 shield was the one used at the time of Trojan War, but it doesn't look as good and won't be as iconicly recognizable.

******

Given these ideas, I started finalizing the list. As far as equipment and sizes, here's what I came up with:

Hector - Noble w/ Dragon Armour, Shield, Halberd, & Temakador's Gauntlets
20 Phoenix Guard w/ Full Command

Cassandra - Archmage w/ Level 4 & Seerstaff of Saphery
10 Archers

10 Swordmasters

15 White Lions w/ Full Command

6 Shadow Warriors

20 Maiden Guard (Spearmen) w/ Shields & Command
2 Tiranoc Chariots

Paris - Noble w/ Battle Standard, Shield, Dragon Armour, Additional Hand Weapon, Longbow, & Talisman of Loec
20 Spearmen w/ Shields, Command, & Banner of Ellyrion.

*****

At this point, I had a few points left over. Looking at the weaknesses in the list (mainly missile fire) I decided to add a repeater bolt thrower and 4 more archers. This put me at 2240, just under the point limit for the army but not enough to really add anything of value. I could always add a musician to the swordmasters, which would add another cool modeling opportunity and would put me less than 5 points under my limit, which I love to always get very close to. I'll probably play a few test games with this army to see how it ends up working out against a variety of armies.

Next: Test Games for the High Elves, and designing the Dark Elf army list.