Serious Talk About Fun Hammers

So, the first step toward ongoing Funhammer is setting course toward actual play. Once I have an idea of the minimum for two balanced armies I can work out what needs painting and then set about doing that, and then playing can happen.

With this in mind I grabbed my trusty 1991 Warhammer Armies and set about working out the minimum fieldable armies for each race in the book; my findings:

- For most, but not all, armies that’s one level 5 hero and whatever minimum troops the list requires
- For versatile armies, this means that they need rank and file that costs 2/3s of the total, with the remaining third being the price of a lvl 5 hero.
- This means that, rules-as-read and all that, some armies have a much higher minimum points value than others.
- In turn that means that, strictly by the book, some armies are excluded from low-points play. As an example, both the Dwarves and the Dark Elves cannot field a 500pt army.
- In a way this reminds me of old D&D, where some to all classes were restricted by stats; if you lacked the abilities you couldn’t be a ranger, and in this world, Dwarves simply don’t come out unless there’s 708 points worth of fighting to be done.
- Alongside this is, as always with these things, the more real-world concern of figure-count. Orcs and Skaven can get an army of less than 500 points on the field, but they can’t leave the house without eighty-odd dudes.

This isn’t ideal for what I’m going for. Even with ebay and Mantic onside it’s still gonna be a pricey time consuming hassle to round up seventy painted Dwarves.

For reference, here’s the breakdown [ race -points -figures ]

Dark Elves -718 -71
Wood Elves -378 -31
High Elves -148 -11
Empire -310 -31
Bretonia -480 -34 (10 mounted)
Skaven -378 -71
Goblins and Orcs -465 -81
Dwarves -708 -61
Slann -177 -16
Chaos -115 -11
Undead -380 -31

The cheapest and smallest army is (bizarrely) Chaos, the most expensive the Dark Elves and the most mandatorily numerous the Orcs and Goblins.

Assuming I wanted each shape of army to be funhammerable, a number of options present themselves:

- Go with 1/3 hero, 2/3rds rank and file for every race; 250 point warbands become a possibility for most races.
- Adjust the minimum troop choices for the races that have them down to the minimum unit size (that’s often 10)
- Do the above but try to keep the distributions intact; so Dark Elves have to have as many crossbowmen as warriors for example
- With Orcs and Goblins, as well as a few other armies that can field multiple races, I think it’s easy to say that a small Goblin army doesn’t have to have a bunch of Orcs or vice versa.

With those band aids in place, the next step is to see what the smallest forces in both points and figures are for the armies I have a fair few figures of; right now that means Chaos, Undead and my beloved wife’s Lizardmen/Slann.