4th Edition: Building Armies

By Matt Gilbert

Building an army for any wargame can be an incredibly fun process. For many people it’s absolutely key to the whole hobby experience – especially when you are combining it with purchase planning! I fondly remember pouring over miniatures catalogues and army books as a kid (...and adult), imagining the lists and armies I could make and highlighting and ticking and circling all the things I wanted to buy. I still have a lot of those old catalogues, and they now make my eyes funny from looking at all the colours and scribbles all over them!

Army building in Mantic’s other games, especially in the Warpath Universe, has found a great place, and we wanted to look again at Kings of War to make it more intuitive.

Taking what we've learned, we began work to make the list building experience cleaner, clearer (especially for a new player) and to help balance armies better. Not an easy task by any means, but we think we’ve managed it.

Units are now categorised as one of the following: Core, Auxiliary, Specialists, Support or Commanders.

Commanders are either Champions or Warlords.

Building Battalions

You build armies as Battalions, and each Battalion has a minimum and maximum arrangement of units it can have. Simple!

Okay, so what does that actually mean in practice?

In each Battalion, you must start by taking two Core units and one Commander unit. Core and Auxiliary are unlimited within a Battalion, but all the rest follow the rule of four.

You can take a maximum of four Specialist, four Support and four Commanders (one in each Battalion can be a Warlord). Depending on your game size, you may want another Battalion. Not a problem…but you must take at least four Core units in each Battalion before you can start a new one.

Some units “unlock” others. Each Core unit allows you to take one Auxiliary and one Specialist unit. Each pair of Core and/or Specialist units unlocks a Support unit and another Commander.

And that’s pretty much it!

To add flavour, some Commanders might change things around, for example by making a certain unit Core instead of Specialist. This adds another exciting factor when choosing your Commanders and how you want to shape your army.

The same principal applies to army themes. For example, taking Golekh Skinflayer in the Abyssal Dwarf list unlocks some ratkin options.

In the previous version of the game, some units were “Irregular” and didn’t unlock other units. “Irregular” is not a category any longer, but the principal of restricting units is tackled in two additional ways, outside the core structure. Auxiliary units are often the Troop size of Core units, or “chaff” (cheaper units often used as distraction and cannon fodder!).

For example, a Basilean Men-At-Arms Regiment or Horde would be a Core choice, whereas a Troop would be Auxiliary. Something like the Heavy Arbalest would be a Support choice.

This typically leaves Regiments and Hordes to be the Core units that can “unlock”. Some units may also have a [n] limit. This is a limit per Battalion. It’s reserved for particularly powerful or thematically rare units, or ones people shouldn’t be spamming and creating really nasty armies from! We’ve tried to minimise this as much as possible, because the Battalion structure and unlocking system should do most of the heavy lifting in this regard.

Anything that is unique to an army, such as a named Hero, gets the [U] suffix to show you can only select it once in your list, regardless of how many Battalions you might have.

Allies and Alignments

The alignment system was only ever used with allies, something most events did not allow. Including allies in any kind of competitive setting always creates a problem for balance and the horrible combinations people will find!

In this edition, we’ve decided to remove alignments, and any rules for allies. These are much better suited to more narrative games at home or in clubs, and in these circumstances, players are free to make up whatever rules they want for their own games. We shouldn’t be creating instructions for that!

Army Lists

So the next mammoth task was moving everything into the right categories, alongside the consolidation of armies and adjusting everything to also fit the rules changes. Of course this started before the rules were finalised, and the whole process is very fluid as things change around. I initially started with just the classic units from each army so I could see the wood for the trees, and moved things into potential categories to show what the system was capable of and how things would start to take shape. I also poured through stacks of lists from tournaments, making sure they still (mostly) fitted into the new structure.

However, I quickly discovered that I'd not communicated to the playtest team that these pre-alpha lists were our starting point to begin fleshing things out, not the final thing, and of course received some appropriately colourful feedback!

Thanks to all the comments, ideas, playtesting, and a monumental effort and commitment to many late evenings and Sundays from a small team of dedicated “list champions”, the army lists are now in a very good place. I think we’ve found a great balance in supporting existing armies and collections, consolidating armies, and retaining flavour and theme.

The rulebook contains the standard lists for most armies. These still have tons of options, and have the same points formula applied so are still balanced and competitive,  have no fear! As we roll out the expansion books, lists will start to get some more combos, Command Orders and even a few faction spells, giving them a few more options.

We also have the chance now going forwards to make some armies more “Mantic” and less generic, so our usual advice still applies: if we haven't released a plastic model range for a faction yet - when we come to do it, it could look very different (think about what happened with the Twilight Kin).

The first expansion book, Invasion, has the lists for Salamanders, Halflings, the Trident Realm and of course, the mystery new faction. These are not in the main rulebook as well, but of course everything will be available in the Companion so nobody misses out.

At the same time as overhauling all the lists, we’ve developed a new points formula, adjusted for years of game experience and games played, and for improved internal development of new units and unit changes. This same formula is applied across everything, so everyone can feel comfortable that all armies and units have been treated the same way.

Artefacts

Early on in the process, we reviewed the current range of magical artefacts available. Some artefacts were not taken, had the wrong points (generally, or reflecting new rules changes) or had become auto-includes (and so a boring crutch!). With the introduction of Command Orders and some faction specific spells too, having too many artefacts on top could prove to be overwhelming and cause design space, and player choice, clashes.

Artefacts have had a refresh as a result and we’ve got rid of the split points value for unit size to simplify things. Of course, new artefacts might appear in the future as the game develops, and we added a couple of new ones already…

How Updates Happen

Books go out of print and out of date. We all know that. We may take the opportunity to publish some unit updates in expansion books as they roll out, but all changes will certainly be in the Companion, which will be updated on a published schedule and will be the master source for the current unit profiles and points.

There will no longer be an annual Clash of Kings book of updates - they are replaced with the expansion books and Companion updates.

The big focus of the expansion books is Pannithor's evolving narrative, and then the armies within that book will be getting some adjustments: some new Command Orders, and maybe a new spell – but don’t worry, other armies will still get any required balance updates via the Companion as we go along.

A Huge Thank You

Finally, I’d like to express my sincere thanks for all the time Jon Quayle, Mike Smith and Simon Brand have put in with me to shape the lists.

They’ve dedicated a lot of their evenings and weekends to helping go through everything to make sure it’s all in fantastic shape. Please give them a round of community applause, and a standing ovation - they certainly deserve it!

So that’s a run through of the Army building changes in 4th edition. I hope you are all looking forward to experimenting and planning new armies, learning new combinations and of course, planning how to spend your hobby money on some new toys!

New blogs, videos and stories will be dropping regularly between now and the launch of 4th Edition in December 2025.

Make sure to bookmark the launch hub, HERE, and check back regularly.