A place to empty my mind, and phone of Middle Earth plans, painting, and club meeting spectacular defeats and victories
Firstly my 'armies' - it is a skirmish game after all, there will be no Pelennor Fields or Helms Deep style collections here - the club i go to generally play at 800 points which varies in figures from 1 (Smaug) to about 80 if you're taking a goblin horde.
The history behind my army choices has many twists and turns - i originally started with an Azog Legion force, a small 500 pointer that was the man himself, a couple of beserkers and some gundabad orcs - in the mists of time and the passing of one club to another these guys were sold and the game was never more
A friend from the old club contacted me to say hed found a new club and would i like to come down, we'd always played Bolt Action but he was getting back into LoTR and he was a keen tournament player - after a couple of visits i started collecting a force again.
Its baddies, its always baddies, Bolt Action - the Germans, the Empire in Star Wars, the Orks in 40k, the Skaven in Blood Bowl, i cant help myself. So, the epitome of all that is bad in Middle Earth - Angmar - demons, spirits, orcs, trolls, ghosts - this was the one for me. So after a couple of months the Angmar force is mostly done, a few additions to make, therell be a 'holy crap, i really needed a XXX here' emergency, there always is, but in essence 1000 points is finished
Theres the management -
We have here Gulavhar the Terror of Arnor and Burdhur the Troll Chieftan - the entire army is in effect the anvil that these two hammers can be used upon - stop the enemy, fly over the top and eat them from behind while Burdhur smashes through from the front
The Barrow Wights - these guys can lead men, but theyre special ability is the spell Paralyse - unavoidable as a standard model, can be dispelled as a hero but at a cost - take enough wights and you can chew through the enemies dispel ability and leave them open to attack - the idea been to get the Wights within range of the enemy heroes, paralyse them, hop Gulavhar over the top of any defences and drop down to devour the defenceless Aragorns and Theodens of the world
The bread and butter of the army - the angmar orcs, and the dead marsh spectres. I have these arranged as 5 swordsmen at the front, with 5 spearmen at the back - this allows an extra dice roll in an attack as the spearmen support the swords, and then a dead marsh spectre on either end of the front rank of 5. These spectres, if successful grant you control of an enemy model if they fail a courage test, this lets you move them around the field, into the line of sight of bows or into the range of a baddie, say Burdhur. I have 3 groups of these
And lastly, the mobile force - the Warg Riders - these guys have throwing spears, so just before they hit they throw in a spear for an extra attack. I have two groups, one of seven led by a captain - theres 5 here, and two on the painting desk, and another group of just 7 yet to be bought
On club night, before understanding Angmar I was suffering terribly. The main part of MESBG is a feature known as heroic actions, each hero figure has a stat line above vanilla troops granting them might, will and fate - a way to avoid Gimli getting killed by a goblin on the first turn of the game i suppose - and heroic actions are paid for using might, the more heroes you have the more might you can use. My regular opponent has a lot of cheap heroes so has a lot of might - the most effective use of this he uses is in movement - in MESBG you roll for priority at the start of each turn, this isnt simply you go, i go - now imagine i have a line of orcs within charge range of his army, I NEED to go first on the next turn to get my charge bonus and decide who fights who
i roll a 5, he rolls a 4 - YES...... BUT, he now declares a heroic move using a point of might on the nearest hero, meaning that group of figures of his can go first, before mine SO i call a heroic action on the orcs leader using a point of might - now because weve both called the action it simply comes down to a dice roll again of who goes first 1-3 for evil, 4-6 for good
would you believe in the last 17 dice rolls ive won one of these decisions!!!!!
Too much text here so ill carry on in a bit