New / old Troll player - How to appropriately Troll

Banky's pairing is a very good place to start.

1) No one can rely on armor alone to beat a dedicated gun line. Even Gaspy 3 with 9 Slayers is using both ARM and SPD. You can use Borka 2, Kolgrimma, or Gunny to solve this if it's a problem in your meta.

2) Borka 2 and Doomy 2 use beast bricks to beat other beast bricks. They do still need the Mauler. I run Borka with both a Mauler and Rok and Doomy with 2x Maulers, because Rage is so important for him that a backup is wise and the Mauler is a great beast anyway.

3) Doomy 2 and 3 need big battlegroups but any of our warlocks can run them at least passably because of whelps. It's just that Borka 1 and the Madraks do prefer units.

Welcome to the community!

I just recently made the move in the other direction (we shall see how permanent that is, but i am really enjoying Circle as a change of pace) and i think the factions are great examples of two factions that are very dissimilar and can allow you to feel like you are playing an entirely different game than before. Excellent choice!

It looks to me like you want to be fairly competitive in your games, and then id recommend you do what i did when i moved to circle. Pick a successful tournament player and emulate them. If you are not interested in the lists that player is using, pick another successful player and so on. The thing that you actually CAN do with trolls (and still be competitive) that you most certainly can NOT do with Circle is pick basically any five casters and two themes you like and build a competitive pairing out of that. I believe that ALL troll casters are competitive, and ALL themes too. Sure, you cant play any caster in any theme, but most casters in trolls actually do well in 2-3 themes and some work in all 4. We have an absolutely brilliant balance between casters and themes compared to Circle.

Now, on to some of your actual questions!

1a) High ARM helps a lot, but against dedicated gunlines like Caine 3 it will not be enough. Feats can work, but we also have access to lots of Shield guards. I have played Madrak 1 in BoH with 6 Warders, 2 Bouncers and then double champions and that absolutely owned the gunlines i was up against. There will be some that do not care about your shield guards enough, but Nemo 3 was not one of them. Careful placement of your models was absolutely key, but that type of list is a beast on attrition if you can deliver it, and you probably can.

2a) Borka 2 is probably the best way to go (though he probably does it even better in his SotN build). Slayers are good and cheap, but it takes 30 points of Slayers to kill a Mauler often enough, and your heavies can usually trade 1 for 1 assuming they have Rage and the Stone Strength. I played Kolgrimma in PoD against slayer spam, and it won attrition, but i lost on scenario because i went second. Going second is REALLY bad against that list.

Relying on defensive tech is not a sure thing though. If they go first, and you have to use a defensive feat just to be able to claim board space, they might just back up and wait you out. If you can some how either force them to commit, or get the alpha (Doomy 2 comes to mind) you will be way less reliant on going first.

3a) Almost all of our casters can run a competent beast brick, but SR2017-18 has been unkind to many of them. Our beast bricks are generally pretty slow and defensive in nature and you might well lose on scenario even though you would win attrition handily if the game went on. Fast beast bricks are probably the only really viable ones atm. I have been glancing at the possibility of using the northkin elder with Borka 2 PoD for that very reason. running 12" is way better than 10", though losing 1 STR is really bad when you need it, and the blanket removal of incorporeal from the normal elder is also super key in some cases.

1b) Slayers do not only rely on ARM to save them from shooting, but also incredible SPD and the fact that there are 9 of them. You wont have 9 troll heavies.

2b) Rage is sort of factored in to troll design. Your non-character heavies will not murder other heavies without it, but with it, even a Bomber can often scrap a Khador Heavy in melee. Primal works too, but as a Circle player im sure that you are way too familiar with the horrible drawbacks of that spell when your heavies are expensive and need to do more than one round of work.

3b) I usually go half and half. If i play ranged focused lists with Bombers and the like i might have more than half the whelps ready on the table. If i play melee focused lists i prefer to have more ready to spawn. Whelps can be INCREDIBLE for stopping some ones plans. it usually takes more than one heavy to kill a troll heavy, and placement of a whelp could mean that a low model count list all of a sudden can not remove that whelp to land their second heavy. Back in the day of pre nerf mad dogs i played a game against Karchev where i killed 9 mad dogs before he killed a single non-whelp model, and whelps were really key there. He had too few ways to remove them at range and couldnt finish off my heavies. If you play Calandra against living models they become even more amazingly fun. Whelps are a minigame and being good at that minigame can net you wins for sure!

Here are my first few painted models! I am really happy with how they turned out. I like my bright colors, but I managed to keep this color scheme slightly more muted than normal, at least for me .