It’s time to dig into the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout Factions, and how you can turn the Brotherhood of Steel Core box for Wasteland Warfare into a competitive and campaign-friendly Factions crew.
Thanks to Modiphius for sending the Brotherhood Core box over for review!
Model Review
The Brotherhood Core Box is a Wasteland Warfare product, giving you seven Brotherhood miniatures designed around the encounters you’ll find with the Brotherhood in Wasteland Warfare. It’s not explicitly designed for Fallout Factions but, at the moment, represents the best starting place – as we’ve discussed before! – for playing the Brotherhood in Factions. Comprising one Power Armoured Knight and a lot of squishier Scribes, Initiates and Aspirants, it’s a good set to build from.
As you’d expect with Modiphius resins, these are finely scaled highly detailed models, perfectly capturing the look of the game enemies/allies they’re supposed to be. The detail, particularly on the softer textures of the scribe and aspirants is exceptional, and deeply cut enough to reward either very labour intensive painting or a quick wash-and-go.
With detail so fine, and a preponderance of Fallout’s iconic if fiddly laser rifles, you will need to carefully remove any resin shims (the fine “skin” of resin that stretches between two very elements of the same piece separated by a gap) and carefully clean any remaining bits of resin flash. There was one shim I couldn’t remove at all – in one of the Initiate’s laser rifles – so I’ve painted it black instead, which just about works. A good scrub with an old toothbrush also helps, so make sure everything’s cleaned before assembly.
One thing to point out here though – goddamn do I hate resin bases. I went to file these smooth after slicing them off the sprue and then thought “there’s nowhere in my house I can safely file resin” and then plain forgot to do them outside. The detail on top of all the resin bases is great, and if you’ve got a mask go for filing them smooth. Personally I really don’t like them.
I think this is a good, high quality kit, with the only real, non-old-man-style-gripe issue being that connecting guns to arms can be a bit of a pain. You’ll want to get the Knight and Initiate guns in some hot water before gluing on, as even a little bit of warping from the resin can result in some unsightly wrist gaps. Apart from that, though, what little assembly you have to do is quick and easy, and modelled bases with good indentations make for strong attachment points even when models are on one foot. As these are resins, there are no options for building – what you get it what you get. The knight could potentially be kitbashed with the various plastic Power Armour kits, but if you’re buying that to kitbash this one, just build another knight!
I painted these following (mostly!) SRM’s How to Paint Everything: Brotherhood of Steel guide, subbing in oils for his brown washes to go for a patina of dirt instead of rust. It’s a good guide, go read it!
They scale well with Modiphius’ plastic Power Armour sets, and you’ll not notice any difference between the resin and plastic knights once they’re on the table.
Playing with the Brotherhood of Steel Starter
While we wait for the long-teased Brotherhood plastics, and as we’ve already said before, this is an ideal box to pick up to get going with the Brotherhood in Fallout Factions. Before, though, we were working off the get you by lists. Now, with Factions out in the world we can have a look at the box in campaign and tournament play.
You get a lot of caps in box, leaving you with quite a few options:
Paladin with Gatling Laser (79)
Field Scribe with Laser Pistol (21) – x2
Aspirant with Laser Rifle – (25) – x2
Initiate with Laser Rifle – (23) x2
That’s a Leader, Two Champions and Four Grunts – a legal list clocking in at 217 points. You will need to get something else to get up to the 250 cap limit, but the options are many and may be significantly different between Campaign and Competition play. I’ll presume for this that you want to run your Initiates and Aspirants as they are (rather than as 4 Initiates) and you’re going full WYSIWYG with weapons. Your main play here is essentially a medium to long ranged shooty list, hoping to get some good ignite rolls. Nothing is particularly punchy, and you’ll soon feel the lack of fast weaponry, but your shooting is all at least quite good. Against an optimised crew you’ll go down quick and hard, but playing against most opponents you should stand a good chance with this as a core starter.
Competing with the Brotherhood
The caps cost of the box changes in Competitive play – scribes with laser pistols drop to 14 caps rather than 21. That leaves you with 203 caps, and a pretty chunky available budget to round out your competitive list. There’s nothing in the Brotherhood list that fills in a nice 47 caps, so you’re looking at a few different options.
Option One: More Bodies
You’re doing quite well already in terms of activation economy with this box – 7 models is a good size for a gang when one of them is in power armour with a heavy weapon. 47 points will pick up 2 more – an Aspirant with Combat rifle and a third Initiate with Laser rifle. The Combat rifle gives you the all-important, all-powerful Fast+Maim combo, while another Initiate tips you over to 9 models. That’ll help you with objective play and lay down a withering amount of Ignite shooting.
Option Two: Drop a Scribe
Dropping down to one Scribe as they’re set up more for Campaign play than Competitive, saves you another 14 caps. That’s enough to replace them with the Terror that is a Charge perk Ripper Knight, making a simple substitution to significantly up your killing power.
Option Three: Metal Bodies
We’ve talked about the benefits of bringing robots around before, but they’re also a comparatively cheap way of finishing off this box into a competitive army. A Protectron is never a bad shout (32 caps), and an Eyebot can draw fire away from your squishier models (15 caps). Since there’s 47 caps to play with though, pick up a Securitron (Mk 1.0) for 45. It’s very good and presents another terrifying tough option to accompany your knight.
Option Four: Go Mad with Perks
With a substantial budget remaining, it’s tempting to really pile on the perks and upgrades. It’s probably is worth spending the caps to bump up the Initiate Laser Rifles to Fast, as otherwise you’re lacking any weapons that can double tap in the list.
What you shouldn’t leave home without if taking the Gatling Laser is the Selective Fire upgrade for 12 caps. Switching between Area (never that good an idea) and Storm 3 (always a good idea) as and when needed is incredibly versatile and gives you a weapon that, with the right range and a few harm, can reliably double out even the toughest opponents.
In terms of perks, the Lifegiver Paladin is a big draw, but I’ve so far found focus fire tends to take care of it long before the Lifegiver effect can kick in. Instead, think about boosting your other models – Adaptable on the Scribes is dirt cheap (3 caps each) and gives them a single shooting attack rolling against their formidable intelligence of 6. Adaptable and Four Leaf clover can combine to give one incredibly good 4-5 harm (average against a fresh enemy) shot a game, even with a laser pistol. Parting Shot can help keep scribes alive, as well as giving them a fair bit of kick should they survive a brawl.
Generally, as the box offers a spread of models but little Fast weaponry, Hobble on an Initiate is a good recommend, kicking a model down the activation ladder for a turn to ensure at least one more shot against them.
Campaigning with the Brotherhood
Unlike Competitive play, Brotherhood Crews will get an absolutely huge amount of play out of Scribes. High Intelligence, access to key Campaign perks and a training table skewed towards intelligence means that you’re well placed to take on the Wasteland. It’s also the best path towards quickly unlocking Tier Three goals – two (or even three!) Scribes, well played and doing a lot of rummaging, will power you up through the Protect Humanity from Itself questline, and Scribes have a high intelligence so aim for them to pick up some crucial campaign perks like Strategist, Medic and Coroner.
For me there’s only one change to make with the Campaign list and that’s dropping one Initiate for a Knight.
Paladin with Gatling Laser (79)
Knight with Ripper (55)
Field Scribe with Laser Pistol (21) – x2
Aspirant with Laser Rifle – (25) – x2
Initiate with Laser Rifle – (23)
This leaves you on 249 caps, a good mix of lighter range and heavier threats. It also opens up more possibilities in campaign play – a Ripper Knight is a better bet for a Vertibird Drop ploy than an unupgraded Gatling Laser, and two Knights will give you more staying power for longer campaigns by the simple metric that it’s much harder to force injury tests on Knights! Sticking with two Scribes will let you create a powerful little block of searching and rummaging models with enough firepower to let you hoard caps and parts in peace.
Abandoning WYSIWYG
If you’re playing somewhere other than a Modiphius event (where you want to keep things nice and WYSIWYG), or your prospective campaign opponents are already really annoying you, the thing to do with this box is undoubtedly run your Initiates and Aspirants with Combat Rifles, while changing up your weapons on your Paladin. That changes both your playstyle (stand still and maim everyone to death) and your caps:
Paladin with Flamer (67)
Aspirant with Combat Rifle (24) x3
Initiate with Combat Rifle (24)
Field Scribe with Crusader Pistol (31) x2
This leaves you a nice 25 points for one additional Combat Rifle Initiate and gives you just a ludicrous amount of Maiming shots – 5 initiates firing twice per activation at 24″, Two Scribes adding some 12″ maim and the cheapest possible Leader hitting grouped up enemies to add just enough harm to tip them over to an injury. It’s not nice, it’ll be a bugger to play against (unless your opponent has even more maim), but by god it will get the job done.
The ultimate “oh god so much maim” Brotherhood list drops one of the Scribes to take maximum grunts with combat rifles. But be warned – there’s no way fast maim weapons stay this good for long!
Overall
The Brotherhood of Steel core box remains the best way to pick up a Fallout Factions crew, with the easiest available Scribes, Initiates and Aspirants that you need. It’s well rounded enough that you can go straight out of the box and play with a reasonable setup. With whatever variant of it you go for, there’s room to expand in any number of directions, letting you tailor your crew to however you want to play. While we wait for the plastics, it’s a fantastic option for getting your Brotherhood on the table.
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