Ok…I’ve been reading more discussions here and will be taking a closer look at a couple of the new books later this week at my LGS but wanted to ask since many of you are much further along the Warband road than I.
There are things I like about Warbands…at least in concept. It seems part of it is to break up an issue of using one hero and a horde of warriors. We generally have a nice mix of named and unnamed Heroes in our local gaming group. Even our Orc and Goblin hordes typically have a named and a couple Captains spread around for Stand Fast and Heroic actions. So generally I imagine most of our lists would translate into legal Warband armies with little modification.
The new deployment sounds like a fun idea as well and there is still some flexibility there on how quick you want to be on top of your foe. Even our more shooty forces rarely do the shoot-fall back-shoot thing as that gets boring for both sides. We more often see shooting in support of advancing troops or similar and two turns of heavy shooting is usually our max (we also use a lot of terrain typically so there are options for closure under cover for at least some of an army). So here too Warbands makes a change that doesn’t seem too bad at least on the surface.
The total fail is, in my opinion, going back to open allies separated only by Good / Evil. Even before LoME came out most of us tried our best to build armies around basic theme and time period but it was better when there was something official we could all agree on. Although we don’t agree with 100% of GW’s decisions they made with LoME, I’d say it was well over 80% on target with enforcing Tolkien themed forces. They threw that out the window when they went to WotR and now it seems they don’t care to keep it in SBG any more. They probably decided the open concept has a better chance of promoting a variety of sales.
I also understand that some historic Profiles and prices have been adjusted, but these generally sound good so far (as a Spider Queen player I'm very content with her going up in points for example). And of the new Profiles added, there appears to be a typical GW mix ranging from ‘pretty good’ to ‘WH refugee in Middle Earth’. Not much can be done about those beyond good conscience and peer pressure.
So here’s my personal questions and delimia:
Has anyone looked over the new Warbands and crafted any sort of LoME style alliance guidelines that can be adopted locally? If not, is it something that seems possible or are the Warband lists just so much of a mix to begin with that you can’t relate things logically by Age or thematic allies?
Also, if we decided to play ‘classic’ games at times (using LoME lists and LoME scenarios) are there any new points or Profiles that seem like they will be broke under the old list building? I know we’d have to decide locally which LoME list certain new Profiles belong to but as long as nothing’s too over powered that shouldn’t be much of an issue.
Any other gotchas a long time SBG player should be aware of when trying to transition? For those that don’t know me (I haven’t been around for a while) I was an avid SBG player and we tried very hard to get into WotR as well. Many of us have multiple 2000+ point armies. We ran a couple events and a 6-month long Tale Of Gamers to encourage the game and build additional forces. But to be honest even though the mechanics were pretty fun it just felt so far away from Tolkien’s Middle Earth for most of us that interest in the game just faded away and several of us jumped to historical gaming.
A few are missing Middle Earth though and I’d like to start encouraging an SBG revival at our local group as it remains one of my favorite game systems. My preference would be to move forward locally with Warband rules and Profiles as that's the new direction, but at the same time to give our local players a document suggesting some Middle Earth guilde-lines for thematic allies. But if the new structure has drifted too far (or if GW makes the mistake of making a whole new rule system) then we’re probably going to lock ourselves in the past and just stick to old LoME and Profiles. I'd rather not see that happen.
advTHANKSance!
Corsair reavers are the new shizzle since they got a boost in defense. And Harad is now allowed 50% bows, but only if you limit them to certain troops.
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