First Steps into Grand Cathay List-Building
First Steps into Grand Cathay List-Building
We had one of those very familiar hobby moments recently: staring at a fresh army list draft and wondering where to even start reading it.
That kicked off a fun little discussion around an early Grand Cathay roster draft in New Recruit for Warhammer: The Old World. Very early being the key phrase here — this was explicitly a rough first pass, the kind of list where some choices are there because they look interesting and some are there simply because something had to be clicked.
A very early draft, but already full of ideas
Michał shared a PDF of his Cathay list and immediately warned us that it was still a very preliminary draft. Which, honestly, is one of our favorite stages of army-building: everything is still fluid, every unit looks promising, and every rule sparks another “wait, that sounds really good” reaction.
At first there was even a minor technical hiccup — one of us realized the first page was missing in the exported PDF after accidentally unticking something. Classic list-building admin.
Still, even from that early version, the list already looked packed with options.
“That’s a lot!”
That was pretty much the immediate reaction, and fair enough. Cathay does seem to offer a lot of moving parts right from the start.
Lances look scary, halberds too… but
A couple of unit impressions jumped out right away.
Lances looked dangerous. No complicated theorycrafting needed there — they just gave off that immediate “this will hurt when it connects” vibe.
Halberds also looked strong at first glance, but then the downside came in quickly: no shields.
And that changes the picture a lot.
As Michał put it, without shields everything just kind of drops like flies. So even if the offensive profile looks attractive, the durability trade-off is very real. That feels like exactly the sort of decision we expect to revisit a lot when learning a new army: does the extra punch actually outweigh becoming much easier to remove?
The Lantern + balloon line of sight trick sounds great
One of the first truly exciting interactions in the draft was the Lantern.
The bit that caught our attention was this: if the Lantern is in play, then everything that uses stone-thrower-style shooting can use the balloon’s line of sight instead of its own.
That sounds both very thematic and very useful.
It is also exactly the kind of rule that makes an army click in our heads. Even before we know whether it is optimal, it already feels like one of those synergies that gives the faction its own personality on the table.
We’re definitely looking forward to seeing how much work that kind of setup can do in actual games.
Magic: currently more vibes than plan
The other big topic was magic — or more accurately, our current lack of understanding of it.
At this stage, nobody was pretending to have it fully figured out.
Michał admitted he still had no real read on the lores of magic, hadn’t gone through them properly yet, and basically just clicked something so the list had a legal choice in place.
Honestly? Very relatable.
On the other side, the fallback approach was equally familiar:
“For now I just picked Battle Magic.”
Which is often exactly how early list-building goes. Before we know the deeper synergies, we default to the options that seem broad, safe, or simply recognizable.
Then came an important reminder about how magic works in The Old World:
- you don’t simply choose your spells freely,
- instead, you randomize them at the start of the game,
- although there are items that can let you pick instead of roll.
That is one of those rules that really changes how we think about wizard upgrades and list planning. A lore might look amazing on paper, but if you cannot reliably access the one spell you built around, then the value calculation changes immediately.
The fun part of learning a new army
What we liked most about this exchange is that it captures a very real stage of army-building.
Not the polished version with a tested list and a confident game plan. The earlier one. The messier one. The one where:
- we are still figuring out which units are actually durable,
- we are spotting exciting synergies as we go,
- we only vaguely understand some sections of the rules,
- and magic choices are still somewhere between experimentation and educated guessing.
That is a huge part of the fun.
Grand Cathay already looks like an army with a lot of neat tools, and even this rough draft had enough in it to spark discussion: threatening cavalry, tempting halberds, clever artillery support, and the usual early confusion around magic.
We’ll definitely be curious to see how this list evolves once the rules get a closer read and a few games start testing what actually works on the table.
If you are also at the “I clicked something just so the list is legal” stage of learning a new army, trust us: we have all been there.