Army-building rabbit hole: 1000 points of Cathay Sky Lantern nonsense
We love those hobby moments when a quick list idea turns into a full-on rules excavation. This time it was a 1000-point Grand Cathay list for Warhammer: The Old World, and more specifically one question:
how silly can Sky Lanterns get?
The short version: pretty silly.
It started with a list
The conversation kicked off around a rare allowance limit and the discovery that some Characters can take a Sky Lantern as a mount — specifically the Magister and the Strategist. That immediately pushed us into list-building mode.
Michał threw together this draft:
245 - Lord Magistrate, Dragon Fire Bombs, General, Sky Lantern, Iron Hail Guns and Dragon Fire Bombs, Sky Lantern Bombs
210 - Strategist, Sky Lantern, Iron Hail Guns and Dragon Fire Bombs, Sky Lantern Bombs
222 - 10 Jade Lancer, Ambushers, Jade Lancer Officer, Standard Bearer
146 - 16 Jade Warriors, Halberd, Jade Officer, Standard Bearer, Musician
170 - Sky Lantern, Iron Hail Guns and Dragon Fire Bombs, Sky Lantern Bombs
993 pts
And honestly, for a brief shining moment, this looked like exactly the kind of list that makes you grin before anyone has even put models on the table.
Then we started reading the rules more carefully
At first, the Sky Lantern looked absurd in the funniest possible way.
We were going back and forth over how many weapons it actually gets, what belongs to the crew, and how the bomb rules interact with the platform. There was a moment of genuine disbelief when we realized the lantern setup was not just “one gun on a balloon”, but a whole pile of crewed weaponry and bomb options.
The Arcane Journal screenshot helped a lot here:
That was the point where the theoryhammer really kicked in. We started imagining all the nonsense:
- moving up aggressively,
- dropping bombs in movement,
- then shooting,
- being awkward to pin down,
- and generally acting like the most annoying flying platform possible.
Naturally, this led to several minutes of increasingly cursed excitement.
The dream version of the lantern
For a while, the balloon was becoming more and more ridiculous with every message.
The list of things we got excited about included:
- Unbreakable
- Flee & Shoot interactions
- Shooting Deck / 360° shooting from the chariot platform
- Impact Hits because it counts as a heavy chariot
- Disengage
- Feigned Flee
- Reserve Move
At that point the Sky Lantern was starting to sound less like a support piece and more like some kind of flying rules exploit with decorative paper attached.
We were already picturing the classic sequence:
- move up,
- drop bombs,
- shoot,
- get charged,
- react in the most annoying way possible,
- somehow still keep being a problem.
This is exactly the kind of army-building energy we enjoy: half excitement, half panic, and half “surely this cannot work like that”. Yes, that is three halves. That is also the correct amount for late-night list theory.
Then came the important correction
And this is why these conversations are worth having before a game.
The really important catch was this:
if you buy Iron Hail Guns and bombs, you still have to choose what you are shooting with.
So no, the lantern does not get to do absolutely everything at once in the shooting phase just because the upgrade line looks terrifying on paper.
Stas found a useful comment clarifying how to approach that interaction:
That brought the whole thing back from “this is broken beyond reason” to “okay, this is still very spicy, but now we can actually talk about it like adults”.
Or at least like Warhammer players trying very hard to be adults.
So what is the actual appeal?
Even after the correction, we still really like the shape of this list for 1000 points.
Why?
Because it does something very clear:
- it puts mobile pressure on the table,
- it threatens weird angles,
- it forces the opponent to think about movement and charge lanes,
- and it wraps all of that in a very funny Cathay package.
The core idea is not subtle. You get a solid enough base with Jade Warriors and Jade Lancers, then add one or more flying lanterns that create problems the opponent has to answer right now.
That kind of list is fun even before it is optimal.
But it definitely has counters
As the discussion went on, we also started listing ways this plan can go wrong.
A few counters came up immediately:
- anti-fly effects, including a banner that can reduce the lantern to 1” movement,
- Terror pressure,
- and generally anything that can punish expensive flying pieces that rely on positioning.
One particularly funny point was the reminder that Unbreakable does not protect you from Panic tests. It only protects against Break tests after combat resolution. So if Terror forces a Panic test at the wrong time, the lantern can still have a very bad day.
That led, naturally, to the mental image of Stas answering flying lantern nonsense by reaching for even bigger nonsense: wyverns, giants, arachnaroks and a troll hag.
Which, to be fair, is a perfectly respectable Old World problem-solving method.
The classic 1000-point problem: where is the magic?
The one thing that really stood out in this draft is that once we started stacking all the fun lantern tech, the list ended up with basically no real magic presence.
That is the tradeoff.
You can chase the Lore of Current Meta, but at 1000 points every upgrade hurts, and every cool trick pushes something else out.
There was at least a small bit of consolation when we noticed that for 30 points you can squeeze in a Fireball.
Will that solve the problem completely? No.
Will it make us feel better about the list? Absolutely.
Where we landed
By the end of the discussion, the final mood was something like this:
- Sky Lanterns are still very interesting,
- they do a lot of weird and powerful things,
- but some of the most outrageous first impressions were us getting excited before fully untangling the weapon interactions.
Which is, in fairness, a normal way to discover Warhammer rules.
So if we do put this on the table, we are not expecting an unstoppable monster. What we are expecting is something much better:
a list with a strong gimmick, lots of movement play, and a very high chance of generating stories.
And really, for a 1000-point game, that is exactly what we want.
If nothing else, we now know that a single Cathay balloon can consume an entire evening of list-building, rules checking, screenshots, panic, laughter, and counter-tech planning.
That feels like a success already.