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“Whelp, there it is.” - Tag Team.
Today we return to our look at the core units of turnip and continuing with cavalry we come to the Whelps. In fact we come to them at a particularly interesting point in their existence where they’ve just lost the ability to capture twice in one order.
A Shellwood Whelp I speedpainted the night before Turnipcon 4
So are we sending them to the glue factory or is there still a place in our party for our prized ponies?
Whelps as of v17, still the same in v18
Once again we have 12” move with an average charge range of 19” and a weapon’s range of 18”. This time however we have 4 bodies at 5+ inaccuracy, very similar to chaff without Skirmish, but with a very passable 8 attacks at 5+ base going to 4+ with CCW. While they lack the chaff’s shooting defence the Whelps get to rely on just being a big pile of wounds, we have 4 bodies at 2W giving us 8 total wounds.
So before any abilities we have a fast and reasonably tanky screen that has just enough bodies to get a hit or two through in shooting and doesn’t nessecarily auto lose in melee. It’s the kind of profile where if it charges something that’s supposed to shoot or shoots something that’s supposed to charge you can probably scrape out a successful engagement.
Now we come to dash. Previously this ability was basically the best in the game, the only requirement for capping an objective was to end a move within 1” of it. On the 3ft square boards that turnip is usually played on it was basically trivial for a unit of whelps to cap two objectives every order. In fact, on bountiful harvest scenarios if you could hunt snobs, focus down units or even just stall out snob orders to engineer a situation where you could activate two units of whelps back to back it was basically a free win.
Well as of the v18 playtest this is off the table, the rules or capping objectives now specifically forbid a unit capping twice in a single order.
Only one objective can be captured in an order. If a unit moves within 1” of two or more objectives in a single order, such as with the Whelps Dash special rule, the player must choose which objective is captured.
While it’s sad to see it go I think it’s for the best, whelps double capping created an arms race where you had to have them in your list in order to keep up against opponents who brought them, and in a game where you usually only bring 4 units having 25% of your list written before you start is severely limiting for list diversity.
Thankfully the change only effects capping objectives and doesn’t curtail how dash works in anyway, so we still retain the single best positioning ability in the entire game. I’m a huge believer in shoot and scoot, getting to move out of cover to take a shot then pop back in is nice, but what’s nicer is throwing yourself down a flank, taking a shot at someone who can’t shoot back and forcing a nasty retreat angle, before you walk onto your opponent’s backline objective able to threaten snobs next turn.
BP Whelps are the single best positional shooters in the game, they have the wounds and repositioning to walk away from stand and shoots even if the lose, they can always find the right position to make melee units take a nasty walk backwards into dangerous terrain tests before walking onto an objective or to threaten something else.
Missile whelps can walk in and out of threat ranges handing out panic tokens, screening your big threats and picking up the odd empty objective. I’m not the biggest fan of Missile in its current state, but if your in a cult that needs to generate panic tokens on opponents more than it needs to win shooting engagements then I like it a little more than Missile Chaff for the role, those extra wounds mean you can take a charge much better than chaff.
The problem I find with missile chaff is that they just don’t win shooting engagements, sure you can stand and shoot as much as you like to get off more hits for free panic, but are you not better served by taking BP Whelps, winning the engagement and forcing DT test for extra panic.
CCW Whelps have lost their key strength of charging in to double cap, a great way to punish a BP fodder block marching onto an objective was to just charge it with CCW whelps at an off angle where you could end your charge in base contact and capping the objective, you’d usually come out a little ahead if they were powdersmoked or a little behind if they took a stand and shoot but you were trading 2-3 wounds to cap two objectives that BP Whelps weren’t really capable of threatening. That isn’t the be all and end all of them, they’re still a respectably tanky way to deliver 6 attacks at 4+ to backline units which is a scary prospect for both snobs and artillery followers.
Consider the following deployment:
Rocket’s Vs. Slugs on 3’x3’, Slugs have the initiative
Now generally this isn’t a great situation for BP whelps, we’ve taken a positional shooting unit into some of the best shooting units in the game, and we may have blundered by deploying a reactive piece first. But we’ve created an interesting fork, they generally have to take the midboard objective with their Chaff or their Fodder, or lose the tempo of going first and hand us the defensible terrain (not a great option).
If they take it with the chaff they can either march and hold their stand & shoot, or they can move & shoot to strip shooting from our whelps. They will be the nearest target for all our units bar the rocket battery so we an choose whatever we feel the best option is, if they decided to march, we can volley them with our chaff (our chaff on 6+, theirs on 7+). If they decided to ding our whelps we can get a free charge with our bastards and generally have a pretty good shot of wiping them off the board round one while taking no wounds, but that leaves our Bastards exposed to both BP Fodder and Grog volleys. So what do we do instead? Well why don’t we just charge them with our Whelps. We risk a Dangerous Terrain test and we take fight where we usually have 8 attacks at 5+ vs 4 attacks at 5+. We might not wipe them every time but we’re usually taking them down to one or two models and taking the midboard. In this situation we can either back off out of Grog range (we can even cheekily tuck our selves to the left of the fodder to block Grog line of sight), hunker down in our Defensible Terrain or aggressively push their left home field objective.
Chaff take, Whelps charge, deciding where to dash
If they choose to take with Fodder we just powder smoke them with the chaff, if they screen by marching their chaff back up, then we can run them back over with our bastards without exposing ourselves to a Grog volley and set up for more positional shooting with Whelps or just find an angle with our whelps to walk their Fodder back again.
Fodder take, Chaff Volley, Chaff Screen
This obviously doesn’t cover every scenario and you might be able to suggest a brilliant counterplay around these options (there might be something like, Slugs stalls with their snobs and bring in the Grogs on order 3), but I hope it goes towards illustrating how the flexibility of Whelps means that you can always make their choice a bad choice by charging, finding an angle to take the shot you want or throwing them recklessly into some shooting and walking them safely away to make something else hit it hard.
I generally steer away from recommending anything for Tod because even my brain is too small to play it optimally, but Whelps are the kind of unit that can lose well.
You have the wounds to tank bad combats, the mobility to position for the right fights and dash to reposition afterwards.
Weirdly I think this is one of the best uses of MIS Whelps, as outside of Tod’s they will generally be capable of losing most engagements in the game, so in Tod they’re going to be winning a lot of engagements, while also continuing to stack panic.
Save your volleying fodder for Gluttony, sacrificing a 2 wound model is a very inefficient way to get the extra attacks, you’ll do it some times when you need to get some shots through.
Where things really shine is the mutations list:
The tricky thing is that snobs don’t get to follow whelps on the dash, so your whelps probably aren’t going to be benefiting from the mutations every order, unless your giving up your dash or using it after a charge/move and shoot to walk back into command range.
Whelps are chaff that actually get to move in this cult, dash is a lifesaver for the turns when you lowroll your movement and when you high roll you can take cheeky volleys with defensible terrain bonuses and -1 Vulnerability before dashing onto an objective.
This cult thrives on positional shooting and stacking dangerous terrain tests, the downside however is that whelps have a nasty habit of having to take multiple dangerous terrain tests to do anything useful in this army, sure you only lose a model on 1s and your opponent loses them on 2s but you’re Whelps might have to take a good few more saves than your opponent’s units.
The big one here is the ability to give your whelps BLC on demand, letting you turn early game positional shooters who generate panic, into late game chargers who can auto kill on the run down.
Probby’s demand for panic generation from your follow units also makes a compelling argument for running Missile Whelps but then we come back to dichotomy of MIS Whelps for more panic from hits in engagement or BP Whelps for better chance of forcing a retreat.
I fully believe that Whelps are the most flexible unit in the game, they’re suprisngly tanky, super maneuverable and just good enough in melee or shooting to always be able to find a good fight.
They benefit massively from the “Build Your Own” school of cults without having an obvious best way to play. Obviously they’ve had a massive fall from grace in light of the objective capture changes but I don’t think that’s a good reason to put them back on the shelf.
You can basically stick any weapon on your Whelps and find a way to make them perform (yes, even missile). If you want a high skill expression positional play piece that goes well with any cult you can’t do much better.
That’s why You Should Play More Whelps.
