Halfway through the season, the design team have decided to drop a huge rules update with the new Battlescroll. It's not just ticky-tacky points changes; we’ve got rules updates for factions, a large increase (but not enough!) in the number of heroes that can slot into regiments and an expansion on the seasonal GHB rules themselves. It’s a bold update that shows they’re not just looking at faction balance, but approaches to list building and the flow of the game.

A very welcome change for this Battlescroll is a front page summary of the key changes, and better visuals for changes to the document. With a 72 page document, this quality of life improvement is almost the best part. In the spirit of brevity, we’ll list out the key changes for each faction before jumping in with the detailed analysis.

Core Rules

Key Changes

• It’s not mandatory to place faction terrain that’s included on your list.

Just one core rule update: An FAQ on whether faction terrain in your list has to be deployed. It doesn’t; you can choose not to (although you still have to follow the normal priority order - no bluffing then changing your mind). Situationally useful if you think your Stormreach Portal will be more hindrance than help, or for factions that can drop terrain in game but have a cap, like Sylvaneth.

Advanced Rules

Key Changes

• No more Covering Fire after a Redeploy.
• Clarification on abilities targeting units placed on faction terrain.

Fairly light here too. The Covering Fire command gets a wording update, now requiring you to pick “a friendly unit that did not use a RUN ability this turn and that is not in combat).” This stops the combination of Redeploy and Covering Fire, which was situationally very irritating. Other movement shenanigans aside, you can now be sure that if you put a specific unit closest to your enemy’s ranged threat in your turn, that’s the one that’s going to be receiving the attacks.

Except for one snag - the document hasn't removed the FAQ specifically stating that Covering Fire can be used after Redeploy. Probably just an oversight, and we suggest playing by the intent of the new update until that gets tidied up, which it likely will.

Elsewhere there’s a firm confirmation that, although the model placed on faction terrain such as the Shrine Luminor cannot be directly targeted by attacks, it can still be targeted by abilities in general, with the Realmshaper Engine’s Power Unleashed ability given as an example.

Credit - Soggy

Season Rules 2024-2025

Key Changes

• Taking a double turn now gives your opponent the Underdog role for the rest of the battle, or until they take a double turn.
• If you’re losing by 6+ VP you don’t suffer penalties for taking a double turn - your opponent doesn’t become the Underdog, and you can pick a battle tactic to score as usual.
• Honour Guard changes - two new choices, updates to existing ones, ability to pick a second Honour Guard for the player with more regiments.

This is an interesting set of changes. Seizing The Initiative seems at odds with itself, both trying to discourage the double turn by making you give away the Underdog bonus, but then also de-restricting the double turn if a player is 6 or more VPs behind in the battle. In this situation you’ll be able to take a double without giving away the Underdog, and you’ll be able to pick a battle tactic as usual. On the surface this feels like a bit of an over-correction - double turns as it stands tend to be reserved for situations where regardless of scoreline, two turns in a row is going to solidify your position by tearing the heart out of the enemy army and maximising your scoring for the rest of the game. People do seem to shy away from the double more this edition and vocalise the loss of 4VP from a battle tactic as the reason, so perhaps this will shift the balance a bit. I’m not sure if being 6VP down is too low a number, though, for still getting to choose a tactic; you can be exactly 6 under and in some battleplans score an easy 7-8 points in one turn reliably taking the lead and win. 

Onto Honour Guard, more specifically Regimented Forces. This allows a player with more regiments than their opponent to pick a second, different Honour Guard ability, applied to a unit in a different regiment to the original Honour Guard (i.e. not the General’s regiment), excluding any Regiments of Renown. This is a nice change, presumably trying to tease the community away from the 1-2 drop lists in exchange for a bonus; some armies care way too much about choosing to go first/second for this to tempt them away from it, but is a nice bonus for the 3-4 regiment armies to get something extra. There have been some significant changes to the Honour Guard abilities to support this extra rule. First up, Special Assignment and Priority Target both get a slight rewording (removing specific reference to the General’s regiment) to make Regimented Forces work correctly. Bodyguard also gets this update, but in addition gets dialed back a little, now requiring both the Honour Guard and the leader to not have charged in order to get the -1 attack buff. The most egregious beneficiaries of Bodyguard so far this season have been Karazai and Krondys, hanging out with a unit of Praetors to make them a huge pain to shift. This change will mean they have to play a little more defensively, and won’t be able to engage on their own terms without losing the attack debuff. Overall a good change - dials back the worst edge cases of the rule whilst keeping it powerful and thematic. Hopefully this will encourage some more variety in Stormcast Eternals list-building.

Given that you’re potentially choosing two Honour Guard abilities now, there are also two new ones to choose from. Field Sergeant lets you pick an in-regiment infantry hero (such as the Knight-Vexillor) to give all non-fly infantry +2” movement wholly within 12”, which is situationally useful for footslogging armies; Fyreslayers and Maggotkin are huge winners here. Prized Beast meanwhile is a nice buff for non-unique monsters, giving them +1 to hit in combat (including companion weapons), and letting them ignore Battle Damaged. A nice addition to something like a Dankhold Troggoth or Stonehorn Beastriders but even more egregious on a reinforced unit of Stormdrake Guard or a Mega-Gargant. Expect to see this one a lot in certain lists. 

We’ve called it out in the individual faction sections too, but as might be expected this Battlescroll includes a lot of role-adding to enable more foot heroes and monsters to join regiments, ready to take advantage of the new Honour Guard abilities.

Cities of Sigmar Spearhead. Credit - Soggy

Spearhead

This came as a surprise: a number of balance changes on many of the existing Spearheads. If you haven’t tried it yet, Spearhead really is a fantastic game all its own and worth playing! I’m glad to see these changes and think they help and hurt the right ones effectively. The stronger Spearheads such as Ogors and Gitz now have (more) units arriving later in the game allowing for some counter play and lowering the likelihood of a turn 1 alpha strike effectively ending the game. Weaker spearheads such as Kharadron Overlords gain reinforcement on units to keep them going into the late-game and allowing you to play more offensively with your units. 

Fantastic. I wasn’t expecting updates for Spearhead but I’m really glad to see it happening! 

Regiments of Renown

As with much of what we’ll talk about below a few key Regiments of Renown have received points updates, most notably Mega-Gargants went down 30 points each, Gotrek is down 20 points, and the coward's choice Saviours of Cinderfall are up 40 points. Love to see it! Gotrek still feels a bit expensive but he’s headed in the right direction and those Mega-Gargants have received more attacks as well making them very attractive choices now. Callis and Toll are cool in a Cities army but it was getting boring seeing these crop up in just about every Order army, so it's great to see them get much more expensive and harder to take.

More Updates

This isn't all of it! There's further updates for just about every faction which we're splitting up down the nearly-gone Grand Alliance matrix. Check out the rest of our coverage here.

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