September FAQ - Elysians

The September FAQ came out last week. Overall Elysians received a nerf, but less of a nerf than the current heavy hitting army lists recieved, so overall we came out ahead.

The previous Beta rules have been confirmed and are now officially part of matched play.
That is the Battle brothers, psychic focus and character targeting rules. However I don't know anyone who wasn't using them rules anyway so there is no change there.

The Tactical Reserves rule beta rule has been changed, as so will remain as a beta rule in the new form. This is where Elysians have taken the biggest nerf, in that now you can aerial drop no units in your first turn. I've been using this to protect units from round 1 shooting, and then aerial dropping them in to guarantee at least one round of shooting. I've found this was most effective with the Tauros Ventaors as they still shoot at full BS and get the 5+ invul save. It's also handy with flyers. Now if you want to shoot with a unit turn 1, it will need to be on the table turn 1. However the new Prepared Positions stratagem I will describe later will help greatly.

Another change to the tactical reserves rule is that it now uses points to designate half of your army to start on the table rather then power level, which makes sense, as who uses power level.

There are two new beta rules, one of which is a big deal for Elysians. Prepared Positions is a 2 CP stratagem which can only be used by the player going second, and the entire army (except titanic units) count as being in cover turn 1. This is a huge bonus as Elysians will often be going second, and need to weather that storm of fire till it is time to aerial drop. And on the other hand, if Elysians do go first, turn 1 is not when we have the most firepower.

The 2nd beta rule is called Tactical Restraint, and allows no more than one CP to be refunded per battle round. While Guard have one of the most efficient CP regen systems in the game, Guard and Elysian in particular do not have a huge reliance on command points. It is also relatively easy to run a brigade or multiple battalions, giving a substantial starting pool of command points which will easily provide sufficient CPs to last the game.

There are a host of other changes to various codexes, with a lot of the knight stratagems going up in cost, as does Agents of Vect. Nothing especially relevant except the meta will shift again to whatever the new hotness will be.

But one other change is a big deal, and regards units with the fly keyword. No longer do they ignore vertical distance when moving which closes an exploit, but units with fly can no longer move over units when charging. This makes screening much easier to do, as screens can only be avoided in the movement phase.

So in all it could have been a lot worse, but Guard got off relatively lightly. Elysians slightly less so due to the reliance on reserves but overall this FAQ will be good for us, mostly due to other armies nerfs and that prepared positions stratagem.