262 Hobgoblin Shots a Turn? Late-Night Chaos Dwarf List Engineering
262 Hobgoblin Shots a Turn? Late-Night Chaos Dwarf List Engineering
Some army ideas are born from careful testing, matchup knowledge, and a deep understanding of the rules.
And some are born at nearly 3 AM, when Michał started asking the truly important question: what if a 2000-point list was basically just two gigantic blocks of hobgoblins?
This was one of those nights.
The core idea
The concept was gloriously simple: take two massive units, each built to abuse as much shooting as possible through sheer width, ranks, and the dream of Volley Fire doing absurd things.
The first version Michał threw out was:
- two blocks
- each 21 wide and 11 deep
- around 131 hobgoblins in a single unit
- which, in the most optimistic reading, could mean 262 shots per turn across the army
And of course, once you start stacking keywords and special rules in your head at that hour, it immediately begins to sound indestructible.
“Ld10, because Warband and Horde. Sounds tanky.”
There is something deeply beautiful about a list idea that is simultaneously hilarious, terrifying, and probably impossible to deploy properly.
The real enemy: geometry
Very quickly, the conversation stopped being about list-building and turned into a fight against tape measures, deployment zones, and the physical reality of the tabletop.
That is where the dream started getting complicated.
A frontage of 21 models on 25 mm bases is, for all practical purposes, about 21 inches wide. Which sounds funny at first, until you remember that tables and deployment zones are not actually infinite.
Then came the next problem:
- if two giant units stand side by side on their long edges
- there is barely any room left between them
- and suddenly the whole plan starts colliding with a 60” table width
- while the deployment zone depth being discussed was only 9”
And that leads to the very real hobby question:
How do you even deploy an 11-rank-deep monster unit when your deployment zone is shallower than the unit is long?
This is the kind of problem that only appears when a list has already gone from “interesting” to “performance art”.
If 21x11 is silly, what about 33x7?
Naturally, the next step was not to become more reasonable.
It was to ask whether the formation could be made even wider.
Michał immediately pivoted to another option:
- 33 wide and 7 deep
- which would let 135 models shoot from one unit
At that point the list stops looking like a normal army and starts looking like an event hazard.
The downside, of course, is that two units with a 33” frontage each do not politely fit next to each other on a 60” long table edge.
So the tactical puzzle became less “how do we win games?” and more:
- can this legally exist,
- can it be placed on the table,
- and if yes, does the opponent simply faint after hearing the number of dice involved?
The spirit of the list
What we loved most about this exchange is that it captures a very real part of the hobby: sometimes we are not trying to build the best list.
Sometimes we are trying to build the list that makes everyone at the event walk over and ask:
“Wait, how many shots is that?”
And honestly, that has value.
By the end of the discussion, the vision had evolved into something even more heroic:
three rows of 77 hobgoblins would fire 155 shots a turn
Followed immediately by the most honest competitive assessment possible:
“I need to think about it. I’ll take it to some tournament and do it. So I can get tabled in turn one. But only after shooting 300 times :)”
That is the energy we respect.
Hard being a Chorf
There was also one perfect summary line in the middle of all this:
“It’s hard being a Chorf.”
Yes. Especially when your grand plan involves industrial-scale hobgoblin logistics, impossible deployment math, and enough dice rolling to cause concern at neighboring tables.
And then Ender delivered the finishing blow:
“You sound like Kharadron with extra steps.”
Which, to be fair, is an incredible description of any plan that tries to solve problems through absurd volumes of shooting while introducing unnecessary complexity.
Will this list work?
We are not going to pretend this conversation produced a polished tournament-ready answer. It did not. What it produced was much better:
- a wonderfully cursed army concept
- a rules-and-geometry puzzle
- and a reminder that army-building is sometimes about chasing an idea until the table itself says no
Would we love to see this monstrosity deployed at an event? Absolutely.
Would we expect it to survive contact with reality? That is a separate question.
But if Michał ever does bring the mega-hobgoblin gunline to a tournament, we sincerely hope two things happen:
- it gets at least one shooting phase,
- and somebody counts every single shot out loud.
Final thought
This is maybe our favorite kind of list-building conversation: a mix of genuine rules curiosity, bad ideas escalating into worse ideas, and just enough self-awareness to know it might all end in disaster.
Still, if you can fire 300 shots before getting removed from the table, was it really a bad plan?
We are not sure.
But we do know we want photos if it happens.