A lot of you will already be familiar with Clay's work and we couldn't be happier to have him on board as one of our Community Bloggers!
Who better to take you through the intricates ins and outs of the Enlightened Faction?
“Back in 2013, when the first Kickstarter for the game was live, there were just four factions to choose from. I had quite an easy time selecting The Union to be my faction of choice and was ready to give all my love and devotion to Ulysses S. Grant and his iron war machine. The Warrior Nation and Outlaws were neat, but not really what I wanted out of the game. The last faction to choose from was The Enlightened and, at first, after looking at a few of the starter set renders I decided to write them off as a typical arrogant highly advanced faction in the same vein as Eldar.
How wrong was I?!
Not long after, I decided to back WWX and become a part of the game’s growing community. Among them was the Enlightened underboss simply called ‘VII’, and I felt my whole being screech to a halt.
This monstrous two-headed robotic patchwork corpse robot was part of the scientist faction I’d written off? I immediately went back and took a good long look at the Starter Set to see what I could have possibly missed which eluded to this. As it turns out, upon closer inspection, the hired hands I had written off as just science assistants were, in fact, dead bodies animated by a combination of RJ-2027 and cyborg exoskeleton enhancements!
This was a game changer and the exact moment I went from being interested in a cool possible side game to jumping into my new main tabletop love.
VII had such awesome concept art and really showed what the faction was really like. Since then we have had more models released into the faction and they just continue to get more and more awesome.
But, enough about me, let’s get to why you are here.
Why should YOU play the Enlightened?
Well, if just looking at VII wasn’t enough, let’s delve into a faction overview of how the faction plays and what defines it. After this I will discuss each Boss, underboss, sidekick, light support, hired hands, and heavy support options available to the faction and how to get the most out of them.
So, to kick it all off let’s talk about the faction and its themes.
The Enlightened are the “undead” faction for Wild West Exodus, and as such have a lot of aspects common to other similar factions in other games. The main theme being Attrition and the revival of lost models.
The Enlightened contains many many models with the rule ANIMATION which essentially says that this model may die, and isn’t removed from the table. Later on, during the game, these inert models can be reanimated by other models to rejoin the battle- giving death the cold shoulder! Going hand in hand with this reanimation theme is the second big attribute of the faction: The Horde. Many games have an undead army that has lots and lots of expendable fodder models and the Enlightened are no different. The humble construct is their version of a zombie or skeleton. It’s a corpse that is animated by jamming RJ-1027 canisters into its brain and attaching an exoskeleton to its limbs to allow it to move. These are the Enlightened’s bread and butter unit and are cheap enough to easily bring a handful or more every game. I’ll cover more when discussing them directly but, essentially, the Enlightened can take a lot of them and they are a mainstay in the way the faction plays.
The Enlightened have many other aspects that help them stand out from the other guys vying for power in the world of WWX. Residual damage is a common thing you will see through the Models available. Many attacks will impart fire, radiation, poison, or interference on an enemy. So, even if your attack didn’t do any damage you still have a positive gain by slowly killing your enemy through these more underhanded tactics. The last thing to mention is Influence. The Enlightened can get a decent chunk of it from their living models, but a lot of their sidekicks and underbosses are not living and do not bring any influence with them.
With all that said, let’s get to general play style for Dr Carpathian and his allies.
As mentioned you can bring a lot of cheap (though less skilled) models to the table in the form of your hired hands and some sidekicks and light support. However, the whole faction isn’t a horde of mediocre combatants and the majority of the living characters are actually quite dangerous (favouring ranged combat than getting up close). The flip side of that is the larger more monstrous creations (such as the aforementioned VII) are almost literal tanks that lumber forward and crush anything beneath their mechanical feet. This combination of durable front-line monsters and backline models, who reign destruction upon the enemy, works very well. The expendable fodder eats up activations and bullets while the more valuable and less resilient living scientists manoeuvre to shoot or even claim important objectives.
That is just an overview and I’ll get more in-depth as I cover the different models and what they bring to the table.
Read my next blog when we get started on the first section of the models: The Bosses. ”