I’ve lost a lot of games of Conquest in my time, so I’ve done my fair share of reflecting on what could have been. The outcome of a game can always be pinned onto one or more of:

• The luck of the dice. Poor reinforcement rolls or a sensible clash that leaves the enemy alive longer than they should be can change a game. 
• Decision-making. Every turn of the game a player prepares their cards and sends their units in various directions. There are many mistakes one can make here. 
• List-building. This is where everything stems from. The 80/20 rule of playing wargames would say that putting effort into getting a list right is worth it.

A wise man (who happens to go by the name of General Cross) summed this up much more eloquently the other day (while I was removing a unit from the table he’d just destroyed) by saying that games are determined by on-table decisions, off-table decisions, and chance. Let’s take a moment to think about those off-table decisions, and establish a good approach to building a decent list in Conquest: The Last Argument of Kings (TLAOK).

Keep It Legal

The perfect list is worthless if it doesn’t stick to the rules and gets you booted out of a tournament. Thankfully, the official Conquest app is free and, risking overstating the case, is utterly brilliant. It’s not perfect – tournament rules state that the PDFs on the Para Bellum website overrule the app when there’s a difference – but these differences are extremely rare and get dealt with very quickly.

In any case, creating an army is intuitive once you’ve got your head around the basics. I’m not going to try regurgitating rules that are available for free from an official source, but if you’re in the app and follow this process you’ll be golden:

• Choose some characters, one of which will be your warlord (you’ll get a red exclamation mark telling you to do that anyway).
• Add regiments to each character’s warband within the rules.
• Add upgrades throughout the army.

Game Tempo

The reinforcements aspect of TLAOK is a really nice feature that makes it feel different from a lot of other wargames, and it offers a good sense-check to list-building that can turn a mediocre list into a sophisticated one.

The order that your units will appear on the table is going to depend on reinforcement rolls, but regardless of those specific results will follow the Light-Medium-Heavy sequence. Generally speaking your Lights will establish board presence and dictate the location of combat for the rest of the game, but most will die within a few turns. Your Mediums will play the role of the anvil, holding an enemy in a position to allow your Heavies to act as a hammer to finish them off. There’s a lot of potential for variety away from this theme, but it’s as good an assumption to start from as any.

If you run a lot of Lights and no Heavies, it’s likely the placement of your units in the first couple of turns will shape the way the table looks for the rest of the game, but your opponent will overwhelm you later in the game. If you’re light on Lights you’ll likely use your first few reinforcements reacting to what’s on the battlefield and need to break through your opponent’s line before you start to score.

There’s no one right way to distribute your forces, in spite of the universal statements we all see banded around that claim the opposite, but this is something to bear in mind. You might want an early-game army that establishes a high line and then holds it for as long as possible – make sure you have enough Lights! Or you might want to be a bit more patient and play from behind. That’s fine too.

If you’re just starting out, a pretty good rule of thumb is to go with a split along the lines of 30% Light, 40% Medium, 30% Heavy. That means you have the chance to shape things, get some points on the board and have the ability to last as well.

Trade-Offs

We can already see from that discussion that for everything you say “yes” to, you need to say “no” to something else. It can feel difficult to exclude units that you know are good and fun to play with, but 2,000 points will disappear quite quickly so if you want a list that will perform well, you’re going to have to consciously sideline certain ideas. As the excellent The Tabletop Miniature Wargamers’ Handbook puts it, “Embrace the fact that you’re saying ‘no’.”

Every army has units that just look better. The W’adrŭn’s Blooded are noticeably better than Braves while effectively doing exactly the same thing, but only cost 5 points more. No brainer. But if you’re building a Chieftain’s warband and for some reason find yourself caught between the choice of a Quatl and some Slingers, which play substantially different roles, that 5 points might be really important to save.

Rather than looking for the best units to fit your idea for an army list, instead start from one pivotal unit that you know you really want to shine. The Order of the Ashen Dawn get a lot of attention for being an extremely strong unit of Cavalry, but what they’re exceptionally good at is not dying. If they’re in a bad position, you might have just wasted 300 points of your list. Most units in Conquest are at their best when working alongside others, and being on the receiving end of a charge in one’s side while stuck with superglue to the Ashen Dawn is a pretty unpleasant experience.

Regiment Sizes

The number of stands in a regiment is another trade-off opportunity. The default smallest unit size in most armies is three stands – that’s a minimum-sized unit (MSU). Going for MSUs across the board is a great way to pick everything that you want, and while it adds a bit more complexity when choosing your turn order is probably the right way to go in most cases, with one obvious exception I’ll come to in just a moment.

The first benefit of opting for MSUs is that it simply increases the number of cards in your stack. With more units, some of the challenge of building that turn order is taken away (and replaced by a different challenge). Let’s say your unit of Household Guard is within Charge distance of an oncoming Hephaestian. Of course you want them to go first, to avoid taking the charge, but if you lose the supremacy roll that turn is going to suck for you as you draw your card and miserably activate the now severely depleted unit.

Putting in a couple more options gives you more resilience, because you can put the Household Knights first instead, which are outside the threat range of the Hephaestian but can charge into the side regardless of who goes first. That gives you the chance to put your Household Guard much deeper in the stack and use them more tactically.

A delicious way to grant this power regardless of how the battlefield is shaping up is to put in several of the same sort of unit. Having three different units of Legionnaires means that you can put one of the cards first and then activate whichever one looks like giving you the best outcome once you know who’s going first.

More cards also means more activations, and when this works well it’s an absolute joy. If you’ve got 12 cards in your hand and your opponent has 6, they’re going to finish their turn and now you get free reign to introduce havoc.

But there is a downside to an MSU-heavy list. A set of three stands of almost anything is going to die if you send enough hits into it, while a bigger unit simply has more staying power. It’s (sort of) true that a set of 6 stands will take twice as long to die as a set of 3, so one double-sized unit of Rajakur will probably do a better job as an anvil than two MSUs. The ‘sort of’ in that sentence is due to the rules around becoming Broken and Shattered – a particularly hard hit that would wipe out a unit of 5 stands will actually also destroy a unit of 6. On the Joshing Around in Eä podcast we produced a hyper nerdy spreadsheet that tried to work out the optimum number of stands to include, and while it made a fascinating discussion it’s also simply true that a bigger unit will survive longer than a smaller one…more about this below.

Universal vs. Situational

A decent amount of decisions you make while pulling a list together come down to trying to balance statistics. Maybe there’s an incredible upgrade that’s going to make a charge so impactful that it will decide the game, but against the army you’re playing this week you’re not confident you’ll be in a position to use it.

There’s skill in every game of Conquest. With the right person playing the list, the situations that make those aspects of a list situational are more likely to come up than not. But the same is true when you’re facing that player – the situation you’ve so carefully planned for (and shelled out so many points on) isn’t going to occur.

Some bits of list-building are going to be relevant all of the time against every list you play. The Hundred Kingdoms’ Noble Lord causing everything around him to reroll 6s is helpful all of the time, so is a pretty good ability to lean into. But granting The Mantle of Saint Nicholas to a unit that sometimes is going to be in range of a Theist Priest is probably going to feel like a waste of points in most games, even though it’s sweet when you pull it off.

Synergies

Ultimately, everything in list-building comes down to synergies. Finding synergies that work will turn a list from a bunch of decent units into a cohesive whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. I’ll illustrate with a cautionary tale.

I wanted to use my new Siegebreaker Behemoth. Nothing wrong with that. But at the time it could only appear as part of the Lineage Highborne’s warband, so I ended up spending a solid third of my points in a tournament on a unit that’s good by itself but didn’t really gel with the rest of the army. I didn’t come in last place, but only by default. I did lose every game.

Instead, consider a Pheromancer-led army. As a warlord the Pheromancer gives Force-Grown Drones, Onslaught Drones, Stryx and Brute Drones the Regeneration special rule, and creates a bubble around himself that causes failed Resolve checks to be rerolled. None of those units by themselves are standout in terms of stats. They’re somewhere between bad and barely passable, however fun the Stryx’s Fly / March 10 / Lethal Demise combo is. But a list made up almost entirely of those units quickly becomes horrible to face.

I played in a tournament last year with a Pheromancer list, which centred around a decent-sized block of force-grown drones featuring a Biomancer. I warned my opponent that he’d probably want to look out for my ability to heal, and he asked how many stands I could restore in a turn. The combination of Regeneration, the Biomancer’s own healing abilities and the Accelerated Hybernation pheromancy meant that the answer was 4 stands per turn. At 4 wounds per stand, he answered “Right, so I need to do 16 wounds to make a difference,” and I had to point out that no, that would be the worst amount of damage to do. There’s not much more disheartening in a game of Conquest to deal 16 points of damage (quite possibly with no more from morale, given the rerolls), and then see it all come back by the end of the turn.

Final Thoughts

We should return to where we started, though. Providing a list is legal, the only important thing really is that it must be your own. If you’ve chosen to buy certain units because they’re pretty, ignore everything I’ve said here and run them instead. Conquest is fun, and if a list is contributing positively to that fun, you’re definitely doing it right.

For the record, seeing my Siegebreaker Behemoth wading through the enemy while losing every game was absolutely worth it.

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