Conquest: Last Argument of Kings has a few mechanics that are unusual in wargaming. Low rolls being successes is great if you’re rubbish at making 2+ Armour Saves, and the Command Stack is a surprisingly deep system of planning out your activations in your turn (check out this article for a deep dive there). But probably the biggest departure from wargaming conventions is that you don’t deploy any models at the start of the game. Instead, your army arrives on in waves through the Reinforcement mechanic, arriving with faster lighter units at first and escalating into heavier units as the game goes on.
As a game mechanic this can be very engaging in two ways. Firstly, you get this really cool escalating game where you’ll fight for permission with your light skirmishing units who are followed up by the heavy hitters. You also don’t have to commit your army entirely at the start of the game, and you can dynamically reinforce the battlefield with your units as they arrive. This lets you shore up collapsing flanks or to capitalise on successes whilst responding to enemy threats. Its amazing how flexible and exciting this feels to play as you do feel like a commander directing troops into battle.
The thematics aside, there’s lots of interesting tactical aspects to the Reinforcement mechanic. I’ll refresh on the core mechanic first, then talk about list building with Reinforcements in mind and finally some ideas about what to do when one player has an early advantage in Reinforcements.
Reinforcement Rolls
At the start of every turn, you and your opponent will roll for your Reinforcements to arrive on the battlefield. Each of the three weight classes (Light, Medium, Heavy) has an increasing chance to arrive depending on the game turn (see below). Generally speaking, units arrive on a 2 or less, then a 4 or less, then automatically. A cool feature of the mechanic is that you don’t roll for each individual unit, but as a ‘pool’ to choose from. If you have three Medium units and two of them arrive, you pick any two to arrive of the three. Simple enough.
There are some additional mechanics that help with managing your Reinforcements. Before rolling you may choose any one unit that is eligible to arrive from Reinforcements and have it either automatically arrive, or remain in reserve. This will almost always let you bring on one unit of choice each turn, but there are some situations you may choose to delay a unit. There is also the powerful special rule Flank that lets you choose when to bring on the corresponding unit rather than rolling. For clarity, units using either of these rules don’t contribute any dice to the Reinforcement rolls.
One last thing to be clear on is that the results of your Reinforcement Phase is open information to your opponent. Whilst you resolve them simultaneously, at the end state both players should be aware of what units are arriving on this turn.
Consistently Balanced (and a Deep Dive into Jotnar)
If you have a regular Nords opponent this year, you may have encountered the list affectionately known as “Oops all Giants”. Its pretty oppressive if you haven’t seen it before, usually running 5+ Heavy Class Jotnar that batter their way though your army (this is before the Mountain Jotnar was brought to Medium Class, but it serves to illustrate). There’s not many armies that bring that can bring that level of damage output and Wound saturation. It’s undoubtedly powerful, so why haven’t we seen it winning events? There’s two reasons you can look to: Balance and consistency.
When talking about a balanced list, we normally think about having a good mixture of units to make sure we’re not leaning heavily on one strength or weakness. The more you lean into one strength, the more you expose yourself to the weaknesses. When looking at Reinforcements, the problem that Oops all Giants has is that its main body doesn’t arrive until turns 3-5 allowing a fast list to control the board and secure objectives. In some scenarios and matchups this is fine as the raw power of Giants can overcome this, but in others the list simply gets outmanoeuvred before it can reply properly. What we see more now is 3-4 Giants with more Medium and Light units brought in to support the early game, letting the Nords player contest the middle ground better before its big hitters come in.
With consistency we think about the probability of the units in a list achieving their aims. Lets say you’re playing the Jotnar list with 4 Heavy Regiments. You can bring one in automatically on Turn 3 and roll for the others. On average you’ll get a second one in on Turn 3, and you have a reasonable chance to get the third (automatic) and fourth (66% chance) on Turn 4 which is a pretty decent situation. 1 in 27 games however you’ll pass every Reinforcement Roll and have all four on Turn 4 which is fantastic. Likewise, you’ve got ~30% of failing all three rolls in Turn 4, and a 3% chance of failing all of your reinforcement rolls on Turn 3 and 4! Both results are unlikely, but if either happen you’re going to have a very different play experience.
Consistency matters in a one off game but becomes exponentially more important in a tournament. In a three-round event, you have a pretty strong chance to fail all your Turn 3 rolls in at least one of your games, seeing a huge portion of your list back in tempo. Its one of the reasons Flank is such a powerful rule, as it guarantees your elements of the list on the table when you want it.
These two factors is one of the major reasons that Oops all Giants didn’t see more tournament successes despite being a very strong list. It would almost always win some games, but was unlikely to avoid the faster, bad matchups it didn’t like and have enough luck with Reinforcement rolls to get the board presence needed.
Weight Management
The above is an extreme example, but it illustrates why you should try and build your competitive lists to be balanced and consistent in the Reinforcement Phase. You need to have enough Light early presence to skirmish with the enemy for objectives and take board space. You then need to have enough Mediums to follow up and score early objectives, as well as drive off enemy Lights that are in difficult positions. Finally you need powerful Heavies that can deal with problems and close out combats that you’re losing, or capitalise on breakthroughs to secure objectives.
Every Faction can build heavily into Light, Medium or Heavy units depending on your preference. You’ll need to find what works for you and your faction through your own games, but here’s a rough guideline you may like to follow in terms of composition:
- Magic number 11 – Conquest favours higher activation lists at the moment, so it’s a good rule of thumb to include at least 11 activations (cards) in your list.
- Rule of Three – Three Warbands is a good starting point, as it will let you access a wider array of units and hit that magic number of 11. More than three risks too many points in characters and not enough units.
- A pair of Heavies – Taking no more than two Heavy units guarantees your army will all arrive by Turn 4, giving them at up to 7 turns to affect the game. You can take more, but you start to risk a bad set of rolls and losing a key unit until Turn 5.
- A couple of Lights – This depends on your faction and options, but at least 2 Light units means you can establish board presence Turn 1 and start affecting your opponent’s decisions.
- Half a dozen scorers – Lights don’t normally score objectives, and there’s nothing worse than having to sit your 400 point Heavy Deathstar to babysit an objective because they’re the only Scoring unit nearby. If you find your list has less than 6 scoring Regiments in it, you could find yourself spread thin on scenarios with 4 or more obejctives.
This is by no means exhaustive or the most competitive list designs for each faction, but comparing your list to this checklist will help mitigate a list that carries a lot of Reinforcement Phase risks.
Overmatch (or, What to Do When Reinforcement Goes Wrong)
Conquest isn’t chess (shocking, I know), and what you may find is that when you play your opponent you have different strong ‘phases’ of the game. If you brought five Light Regiments, you’re probably going to have a great early game and suffer in the late game. The inverse happens for five Heavy Regiments. The question is, what do you do when you are facing an overmatch, or if you have overmatch at an early phase of the game.
If at the end of Turn 2 you have two Regiments on the board to your opponent’s six, it can be quite daunting. They may be scoring objectives and preventing you making aggressive plays due to the risk of a counter-attack. The first thing to do is keep calm (yes, I am British) and remember Conquest is a 10-turn game. You don’t want to give away your army piecemeal and unsupported or their numerical advantage will cascade. Generally it’s better to wait and let your forces arrive before coming forward even if that means giving up board space or even some victory points. The advantage you have is that you can see where your opponent has committed their units, so where possible try to counter deploy in the following turns. This could turn into a refused flank situation or simply lining up good counters to their units from your own roster. The main thing is not to rush into a situation you don’t need to.
On the other hand, if you are the one with six Regiments this is definitely an advantage, but not without risk. You may have had games where your units arrived, surged forward and got wrecked by the counter attack from the units arriving on the board. Whilst it feels great to cascade your units across into the enemy territory and attack, you end up placing units into threat range of the enemy Reinforcements whilst distancing from your own support. You need to pressure your opponent and take early wins, but without over extending your forces. The best way to do this is to threaten objectives more so than units. Ultimately your opponent will have to come and contest scenario points, and if you can set up to punish them for it then you will have better success. Take the advantages you can, but remember there’s a whole army just off the edge of the table waiting for you to come to them…
The Reinforcement mechanic is a fantastic system that adds so much dynamism to Conquest. Much like Command Stacks it really adds variety and colour to the game, as well as huge decision making choices as a player. It’s a pretty intuitive system, but a little time and planning on exactly how your army is going to arrive to the table pays off well in terms of your own game performance. There is so much to talk about the Reinforcements mechanic (we haven’t even mentioned Reinforcement lines, Command Stacks, scoring access, etcetera) that simply goes beyond this article’s scope. But for now, I hope this has given you some ideas about how you can make sure your Conquest army arrives at the right place and the right time.
As always if you want to get 10% off and support Goonhammer you can make your Conquest purchase by clicking here for US/Canada or here for EU/rest of world. You’ll also need to enter code “goonhammer” at checkout.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
