Fresh FAQ Day in The Old World: Fanatics, Base Contact, and a Few Nice Buffs
We love those hobby evenings when one innocent message turns into everyone diving head-first into rules updates. This time it started with Stas dropping into chat with the classic question: did new errata land today? A few minutes later, Reddit was already apparently on fire, and we were doing what every Warhammer group does after an FAQ drop — trying to work out what actually changed, what we had already been playing correctly, and what might affect army-building going forward.
The first big bit of gossip was about Fanatics. Stas spotted discussion saying that you can now shoot them, which is exactly the kind of small rules clarification that can end up mattering a lot on the table. If you play against Greenskins regularly, that immediately changes how you think about screening, pressure, and clearing space for your movement.
Michał summed up the mood perfectly: all of Reddit was buzzing about it. And honestly, that tracks — a change like that is small in wording, but huge in practical play.
Then we moved on to another kind of FAQ gold: the clarifications that make movement and measuring less awkward. Stas found one that got an immediate positive reaction from us, because anything that makes charge geometry and wheel-related measuring cleaner is welcome in our book.
That kicked off a proper rules chat. Michał tried to phrase the movement interpretation in practical terms: are we now effectively measuring the “third side of the triangle” between the starting front rank position and the final front rank position? Stas said that was how he understood it too, and that feels like one of those cases where the FAQ is trying to formalise what many people were already approximating at the table.
From there, the conversation drifted into a much more army-building-relevant topic: who actually gets to attack in combat after casualties are removed?
At first, Stas had a moment of panic: if models have A2, does this mean all of them now get to hand out both attacks? That would obviously be a pretty big shift for units that rely on attack volume.
But after talking it through, the answer was basically: no, only the models actually in base contact fight with their normal attacks. The important clarification was about models from the second rank being able to step forward into base contact. That matters a lot in situations where the front rank gets heavily cut down.
The example Michał gave is exactly the kind of thing worth remembering when writing lists and evaluating unit width:
- you have 6 models in the rank,
- only 2 are initially fighting,
- then 7 models die,
- and the unit gets to strike back with 5 models.
The key subtlety is that those 5 replacement models may have started in the second rank. So even though they step forward, that does not suddenly mean they were always entitled to full attacks from the start. That distinction keeps the combat sequence much more sensible, and also means some of our previous assumptions were not actually far off.
In other words: this FAQ did not blow combat wide open, but it did make one edge case much clearer.
For us, that kind of clarification is exactly where army-building starts to get interesting. Every time combat sequencing gets cleaned up, we end up revisiting familiar questions:
- do we still want to run units extra wide?
- how much are we relying on second-rank output versus true front-rank damage?
- does this make certain elite infantry blocks more reliable, or just easier to play correctly?
- how much value do we get from units that can absorb casualties and still maintain meaningful attacks back?
And if Fanatics really are easier to interact with at range now, that also nudges list design in a subtle way. Shooting that previously felt like a “nice extra” can become much more useful if it helps solve annoying board-control pieces before they derail your movement plan.
Finally, Stas dropped one more screenshot with what he called some pleasant buffs — and of course that is the kind of FAQ reading we all enjoy most.
So our first impression after this little group read-through is pretty positive. Not because everything changed, but because some murky interactions seem a bit less murky now. That is usually the best kind of update for us: fewer weird arguments at the table, cleaner measuring, and a couple of rule nudges that might actually influence how we build lists.
We are definitely going to keep an eye on how the wider community settles on these interpretations — especially because, as Michał pointed out, everyone immediately starts wondering what kind of lists the designers had in mind when writing these clarifications.
If you have already tested the new FAQ in a game, we would love to hear what actually mattered on the tabletop and what turned out to be mostly Reddit panic.