Under the Hood - Cryx Soulhunters "4 hooves, 2 arms, 1 head, and lots of fail"

Today on "Under the Hood" we are going to take a look at Cryx calvary unit. As you know all ready WM/Hords brings us Magical casters, Strong foot soljures, Power house machines, raging beasts, and the ultimet in military utopea the calvary. Every good mideval or fantasy game should have SOME form of calvary for crying out loud and for Cryx we got the Soulhunters.

Ya....

As you can tell from my super dooper outburst of cheer that this unit is lacking... ok it just is plain sad lacking. I don't like them and today we will give them a look under the hood. As always lets look at the stat line.

Stats:
SPD: 8 (Charge threat range is 8 + 3 + 2 reach = 13")
STR: 7
MAT: 6 (couldn't hit the broad side of a kador jack sadly)
RAT: 4
DEF: 14 (Decent DEF so only things that can boost or have high rats/mats should be hitting them)
ARM: 15 (look they wont die to most blast damage!)

SCYTHE
P/S 13
Reach

SICKLE
P/S 11
Life drink - heals soulhunter for d3 if they kill something with THIS weapon

MOUNT
Pow 10

Undead  (Cool no fear always nice perk for being dead)
Body Count - Gets 1 soul token (max 3) if it destroys a living model with a attack you can only use them to boost attack / damage rolls sadly so no more minni threshing :(



The Good :-)
At a glance and due to the rules this unit looks like a great front end infantry killing machine. You get three attacks + one being reach. You can boost the attack / damage rolls. Whats not to like here? With being a large base lots of targets will be in range when you do the attacks and on top of it you can't trample right past them so they HAVE to deal with your guys. The units fast for a speed 8 and you get to make impact attacks giving you the horse also. If you get up to three souls you can start taking on heavy infantry but I would not go anyhing larget then a 8 would ARM 18 target with out some debuffs / buffs on my side.

Pop and drop trick with tall in the saddle with are Dragoon is awesome. The ability to go incorporeal on the fly and rush some one behind a line of guys and going incomplete is a great way to throw a kink in some ones line plan. I love doing this and seeing my competition go "What just happened to my support / important models safe in the back?!"

The Bad  :-[
This unit want to be awesome hell it even LOOKS AWESOME! That is why I purchased a min unit before even reading there rules or play testing <Bad choice if your strap for cash>

1) There squishy meaning most armys will gun them down before they even get into the prime position you need them into.

2) There light calvary... and light calvary suck sense the errata. Basickly they all get to move 5" after they all finished there activation o you also can't do this on a turn they RAN. So I can run 16" or advance 13"... Which one do you think I will pick? Ok its not all bad what if you want to hit a point and then get out of the way for other guys? Sure this is the ONLY  viable way I can see using them personaly because I promise if you did not KILL that target or put your self in the right spot some ware ells your going to get free striked and die by something sense there fragil as sin.


3) Expensive. Enough said there supposed to be for high mobility but if I wanted that I would just of brought me some Satix Raiders and more survival... There def sucks / there hp is low / there arm is low / soooo why am I paying this much for this unit?

Who works well with them?
Well there a high mobile and with are dragoon scary heavy hitter guys with souls of course. The only trick is to getting ware you want to hit hard like a caster or some vary important UA / Solos. If you can't kill there caster cripple them so bad they wish you did kill there caster I always say.

They need help hitting to work well or getting in the right spot so the following casters I find work well with them:
- pDenny because she makes every one great with debuffs
- Coven has some great movement shenanigans that you can get ware ever you want any time you want
- pSkar solves there need to hit problem so you can use all the souls on just hitting hardware
- pGaspy can make it so they will always hit hard just use the soul to make sure you hit

That's all I got to say on this topic though so you all have a great night/day!

Seethers, Harrowers, and Leviathans O my!

Take it from the post

Theticus asks “I've decided, for purely aesthetic purposes, to get one of these threejacks, Seether, Harrower, or Leviathan. What are their strengths, weaknesses,and roles?”

So Theticus brings up a great question here for when you want to move up the size of your army or purly want to pick out some amazing sculpt from the talented artist at Privateer Press and when a jack can cost you ~$30 (2011) it really can get expensive fast. So the question we got here is what purpose do they serve? So who will you get the most mileage out of? Let’s take a closer look at the models here in question:

Seether:

Sporting the Slayer chassis which is one of are more fragile box lay out only sporting a whopping 28 HP and only ARM 17 means you will break pretty easy but that’s the bad about this model what does it do good?

This bad boy is on the list of top efficient Jacks with Chain attack, run for free, gets a free focus every upkeep phase (can’t still go past 3 focus on him though), and charging for free they can take care of themselves. So if you got a caster who hates giving up there focus like o pDenny then bam this is your guy. Also if you’re sporting the Wither Shadow Combine ALWAYS make this guy.

Harrower:

This guy is sporting a SPD 5 sadly unlike the Seether at a SPD 6 but hey he got path finder, can’t be knocked down, and has 30 HP to boot with ARM 18. He is not getting any ware fast but he is not going down on the way there easily. The role this guy fills is he will kill lots of infantry with thresher and reach to boot he gets souls that he can use to boost to hit or damage helping you make sure you keep hitting with that thresher attack or killing said target. 

If my target say is ARM 20 shield walled pike men then I will boost the damage after I kill each one in the thresher attack then the soul I get I will use on the next victim in the attack to boost the damage and so on. The last soul in the line I will use for my next round of charging or boosting to repeat the process. Now if there DEF 14+ then I do the same thing just boos to hit instead.

I give this guy easily the seal of approval for focus efficient Jack just not as good as the Seether in this regard but still it usually only takes one soul to get this guy going and he is set. His 2^nd ability is he can shoot a ghost shot 3” AOE that you can use to snipe important targets in the background that you can’t normally get to like important solos or UA ppl are keeping way back. Boost to hit and watch the body’s stacked sadly his RAT 5 warrants this but hey were cryx rang confuses us I guess.

Leviathan:

We are back to the crab jack chaise with the perks attached and the same problems too. The sad thing is this is one of are very few true range units in the Cryx arsenal and we are stuck once again with a RAT of 5 so you better be gunning for DEF 12 targets most the time less your willing to boost to hit. Now he dose come with a range 13 POW 15 / 14 pending if the targets Large / Medium base which is ware he scores great points.

On his own he can take down a heavy as long as you slow down that target and don’t let them get in charge range but hey that’s what rough terrain is for right? I tend to like to take this guy with a pistol wraith to combo stop target with death chill + Leviathans ROF 3 weapon. Now also the other problem I find with this guy is for his points your also investing 3 focus a turn to make him rly worth his points so get ready to INVEST with your caster fronting the bill if you want to make him work.

You found the Start

If your seeing this post then that means you have found the START. Let me throw some streamers around for you and light the fire works I purchased from across the border. So your here right? Then you probably fall into one of these three categories:

1)     You like Cryx

2)     You like Trix

3)     You miss clicked and will now be leaving my site please don‘t let the refresh page hit you on the way out and may your 404 error days come soon...

I guess you could be reading this to one up that snooty gamer at your local game watering whole who proclaims that Cryx are amazing and will HAXZOR you to death every game well I can only say this:

“... know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.“

That was a exert from “The Art of War“ written by Sun Tzu and it could not be truer. Whether you are just starting Warmachine or Hords, created by Privateer Press, or just want to listen to a geek ramble about minni games exploring tactics that have been in practes sense cave man Ugg wanted his nabors Land/Woman or hell both then your in the right place. I am going to try and focus on cryx the most but hey I will branch out to other topics. If you ever want me to discuss something in more detail then please post on my blog and I will get it set up for you.

And with that let the games BEGIN!