How to Beat: Bretonnia

#5: Defensive Abilities
For the most part, Bretonnia has exceptionally high armor saves. In fact, I'm pretty sure that they're the only army that has access to a unit with 2+ Armor Save units in their Core section. In addition to this high armor, we're piling the Blessing of the Lady, giving them all a Ward Save that gets better even when their Armor takes a hit. Top that with the fact that Bretonnia can very easily afford two characters with 1+ re-rollable Armor Saves. This is kind of a big deal, and keeps the Bretonnians still viable despite the age of their book.

#4: Armory and (most) Virtues
Yes, just like the Beastmen, the Bretonnians still have access to a lot of really cool magic items. Some of them are overpriced and not all that useful (most of all the Virtues are like this actually and the some of the really good ones have been FAQ'd away) but the others that remain are still pretty awesome, albeit it a bit expensive. The ones you're most likely to see are the Silver Mirror, the Sword of the Quest, the Errantry Banner, the Grail Shield and a few more too numerous to mention. Not to mention some abilities that are very unique and not very common in the entire roster of Warhammer Fantasy. Again, I'll go into more detail later, but for now that's the best I can do.

#3: Obscurity
Now you may be wondering why I put this at the #3 spot when I put this at the #1 spot for the Beastmen. The answer is simple. How often do Beastmen show up to GT's in comparison to the Bretonnians? You have your answer.

#2: Lance Formation
Without the Blessing of the Lady, Bretonnia could survive still. Without the Lance Formation, the army would not be worth the ink it took to write our outdated book. It does a whole host of things for Bretonnia, and by far this will be the longest paragraph as it pertains to the success of the Bretonnians perhaps more than anything else, besides the next reason of course.

#1: The Virtue of Heroism
... That's all I can say. We have the ability to take a character who can literally delete anything he gets into combat with. Considering Bretonnia is a combat style army, this is really big!

HTB: Defensive Abilities
As a Bretonnian player, I have the luxury of knowing my troops are going to need to get clocked by something really fucking nasty before taking any wounds. This really makes up for the fact that in comparison to most other armies, my troops are outnumbered 1 to 3 on a good day. Bretonnia (in terms of it's knights) are certainly an elite, quality over quantity, style army. However, that does not mean I'm not without a care as to what I go into combat against. There are two particular armies that I am deathly terrified of going into. The first is the Skaven. The second is any army that includes a Level 4 on the Lore of Metal. Skaven are particularly scary because they have a lot of stuff that hits at Strength 4 and below that ignores armor completely. For Toughness 3 knights, that's the worse case scenario. Most stuff, even shit with the Armor Piercing rule, really isn't a bother. I still have a pretty high Armor Save after the modifiers and a bonus Ward Save after that. However, stuff that hits a Strength 4 and below that allows no Armor Saves doesn't trigger the 5+ bonus of the Blessing, just the generic 6+ Ward. Never, ever, ever, rely on a 6+ Ward to save your ass. Trust me, it's a bad spot to be in. The other thing you can do to circumvent the high armor and Blessing of the Bretonnians is to use spells that ignore armor saves completely and/or test certain attributes. Remember, they're still just humans at the end of the day. Humans with armored horses and an ability to hit like an avalanche, but still just squishy humans at the end of the day.

HTB: Armory and (most) Virtues
Now becuase of the age of Bretonnia's book, there are some items and abilities via Virtues that are ridiculous because they are holdovers from 6th edition. For the items, the ones I would be cautious of would be the Sword of Heroes, the Gromril Great Helm, Token of the Damsel, Silver Mirror, and the Errantry Banner at a minimum. All of these do really nice things for not all that many points. Now we get into the apeshit stuff which comes in the form of Virtues. Now, some of them are just plain overpriced and a few have even been FAQ'd away. But there are still quite a few of them that are very powerful and you should keep any eye out for them. Virtue of the Impetous Knight in a unit of Errant Knights with the Errantry Banner is absolutely terrifying. Virute of Audacity and Virtue of the Ideal can make Paladins into Lords for 30-35 points respectively. Virtue of Confidence is a great way to deal with those damned Chaos Lords who always challenge and get their stupid Eye of the Gods abilities with that. Virtue of Noble Disdain is a great way to set up a Paladin and/or a Lord to go War Machine hunting. Now, you may have noticed one of the big ones is missing, but that's going to be saved for later.

HTB: Obscurity
Same way you counter the Armory and Virtues of Bretonnia, either buy the damned book or play them a lot. However, you have noticed that in my HTB: Beastmen post I put Obscurity at their #1 spot while this is at a #3 spot. That's because Bretonnia is much more common than Beastmen in both the local scene and at tournaments. For example, on Sunday I took my new Army of the Quest Bretonnian army to a large tournament in Tahoe. Including me, there were three Bretonnians players, and my buddy Will was the only one to bring Beastmen. Keep in mind, there were sixty-four people at this tournament. That's a fairly large sample size, even for a large tournament that wasn't a GT. Thus, Bretonnians are a little well known than Beastmen and thus don't have the ability to fully exploit their obscurity as a primary strength. However, they are still a very rare army and they are further made odd by the age of their book. At the end of the day, you really need to play them in order to get the feel for them.

HTB: Lance Formation
It could be argued that Bretonnia could survive without the Blessing Save. It could be argued that Bretonnia could survive without any Virtues whatsoever. It could even be argued that Bretonnia could survive without anything in actually being in their Rare section. What cannot be argued is that Bretonnia absolutely cannot survive without the Lance Formation. The first thing everyone noticed in 8th edition when the rule book came out was; "Jesus! Cavalry sucks now!" It's expensive, unwieldy, and usually has no ability to generate static combat resolution. The Lance Formation allows Bretonnia to survive without infantry, and in a game where infantry is really the best kind of unit all things said and done, this is really big. The Lance allows Bretonnia to field cavalry units where we can have the entire front row filled with characters. It allows us to keep our spell casters effectively safe from all forms of harm, excluding miscasts (which are really REALLY scary for Bretonnia) and shots that penetrate ranks. So, how do you really deal with the Lance Formation if you're playing against Bretonnia? Well, the first thing you may notice is the length of the lance's, and in particular how nice and juicy those big old flanks look! If you're playing an MSU style list, your #1 strategy should be to pin down the lances and hit them in the flanks with your smaller and more elite units. I know my buddy Art, who also plays Bretonnia, hates it when I get my Ripperdactyls into the flanks of his lances when they are stuck on bricks of Saurus Warriors. The other thing to note is that if you can stop the Lance from charging, then you can take away 90% of it's killing power. Keep in mind, unless you're fighting Questing or Grail Knights, these guys are only hitting at S3 at an average Weapon Skill and Initiative. True, they're cased in armor and wrapped in a Ward Save, but unless you're playing End Times rules then these guys are capped at 15 a piece (Questing and Grail Knights are capped even lower). Throw in two combat characters and a spell caster, and we make that six rows of three guys apiece. They're not outnumbering anybody really. The one thing to note is that some of the power behind the Lance formation is that it allows the knights to attack with most of their formation while not allowing the opponent to effectively strike back with all of it's troops due to the tiny frontage of the Lance. In an era where hordes are so powerful, this is a really nice advantage, especially when Bretonnia gets into the grind where it has some problems with more numerically superior foes. The best advice I can give is get into the flanks, and if you can, make sure they don't get the charge off. The latter of the two is very difficult because Bretonnian Knights are very fast and will very rarely be in poor position for charging.

HTB: Virtue of Heroism
The important thing to note here is that if you buy the book and you read this virtue, you're going to be like; "Why was I ever afraid of this?" No, for this you need to consult the most recent Bretonnian FAQ which says; Replace the paragraph of the Virtue of Heroism to read: the character with this virtue has the Heroic Killing Blow special rule. Even when we couldn't take magic items with this virtue, it was still pretty damn powerful. Now? Jesus, add Sword of Swift Striking or Sword of Bloodshed for absolute carnage! Bretonnia is the only army that can, with some degree of certainty, stroll up to a Kadai Destroyer or a Steam Tank, roll a 6 to-hit, and just murder it there on the spot. People often equate the power of the HKB Bretonnian Lord to the power of a kitted out Chaos Lord or a terrifying Vampire Count Blender Lord. Now, there are some disadvantages to this Virtue that can be exploited. The first is that you're going to have to add one of the before mentioned magical weapons to make this rule actively effective on the board. This has the downside of taking up the majority of your Lord's points and making it almost unusable on a Paladin. It also means that defensive gear is probably going to be looked over for when you're doing this. If you can snipe out this guy or get a luck cannon shot, then you need have no fear of the HKB Lord. The other thing to do is to feed unit champions or lesser characters to this guy, because he must accept the challenge or lose the Blessing for him and the entire Lance he's in. That way you can protect your Level 4/BSB/General from the power that is him. The other thing is to never throw monsters at this unit, monsters are like an HKB Lord's wet dream.