My turn to take up Mystery’s mighty baton and have a bash at giving you the run-down of the best army in the Warhammer world, based on my experience of nigh on twenty years gaming with the Empire.

Before we launch into the army special rules, a general piece of advice. The Empire is the most flexible of all the armies in the game. This is at once its greatest strength and weakness. Every army does something better than Empire, but are always weaker in another field. The Empire is solid to good at everything without ever really excelling. This means, there are no ‘obvious builds’, very few ‘auto-picks’. You need to decide what you want to build your army around. Do you want a balanced all comers list? A horde army? Cav heavy force? Magic based death? Maybe a fluff build of hordes of religious nut jobs? Or do you just want to play with the coolest looking models? Any and all are viable builds rules wise and with everything (bar a few FC characters) being plastic, the models are there too. Give the general direction of your army some thought before you start collecting.

Army special rules
Just one, but it’s a lengthy one – Regimental Units and Detachments. In short, when you take an infantry unit which has the ‘regimental unit’ rule, you can take one with the ‘detachment’ special rule to act as a support unit, providing it is no more than half the size. Why would you want to do that? Well, because they get some awesome benefits with no disadvantages. They function as fully independent units, but when within 3”, Detachments use the regiment’s LD. They gain most of the regiment’s psychology rules, such as stubborn, hatred etc. When the regiment is charged, the detachment can stand & shoot or even counter charge. Basically, you can buff and support your units on the cheap. Which as we shall see, is what the Empire is all about. I’ll indicate which units have which rule with an R or D. Several units have both rules.

Imperial Armoury
This has some funky ‘experimental’ guns which a small number of your units and characters can take. Not much to say on these; read the profiles and take them if you want. Full plate armour is the big thing here. Armour with a 4+ save. Several units come with it as standard. Put it on every hero that can have it.