hi guys

i nearly finnished my first battle company and play some games from time to time with a friend of mine. i have some questions about it.

where can i look up the fighting etc. values of my units?
we allready need two books to play. i only know the values of my warband because he have a screenshot from some pdf of it.
but i'd like to look at other warbands and their units.
so im looking for that "source" pdf.
couldnt find it on the gw site. do we really need a third book?

i play minas tririth and my friend plays isengard. he starts with 7 models. i start with 6. his fight value is 4 on all models. i got 3. so everytime we roll for combat victory with the same dice result he automaticly win due to his higher fight value. i got 1 defense more on my units, ok, but that doesnt help me a lot. also my shields are useless since he need to roll 5 for 5 def and also 5 for 6 def.
i lost so many games that i cant blame it on bad luck.
is it just me beeing a worse player or is it just that unbalanced like it feels for me? what do you think?

thanks in advance and greetings from germany

Hey Skanga, welcome to the forum.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say fighting values for your warband. Do you mean the stat line of each model in the game? If so, you'll need to get either the books or the PDFs of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings profiles from GW. The screenshots you have are probably from one of the GW PDFs. Obtaining it anyone way would be a violation of Germany's copyright law. Here is a link to those on the GW website:https://www.games-workshop.com/de-DE/Middle-earth?N=2273115266+3687251212&Nr=AND%28sku.siteId%3ADE_gw%2Cproduct.locale%3Ade_DE_gw%29&Nrs=collection%28%29%2Frecord%5Bproduct.startDate+%3C%3D+1592589240000+and+product.endDate+%3E%3D+1592589240000%5D

On the second point, I would say Isengard Uruk-hai are better than most humans and they will have an edge in 1v1 fights. That said, what you have run into is probably has more to do with their only being two companies playing against each other repeatedly. I had the same problem when a friend and I played Rohan vs Gondor for a while. My friend's Rohan had a few advantages early on, a bit of good luck, then wham! We were five games in and his Rohan company had snowballed into something I could not contend with. I'd wager something along those lines would happen frequently with a small player pool. Maybe you guys could start again and include some narrative scenarios in the campaign to give the company that is falling behind a chance to get some gear and elite reinforcements.

After all, Gondor's advantages in mobility and ranged weapons over Isengard don't come into play in battle companies until you get both Citadel Guard and knights. Then you can get horses, lances, longbows, and make your heroes more of a threat to Uruk-hai.

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"Draw your sword with a heavy heart, but swing it with a heavy hand"

Thanks for your reply Wan Shi Tong.

Since the chances to roll a mounted knight on the reinforcement chart are very low i'm allways wondering if i should buy horses for my boss and seargents. but a horse is as expensive as an additional roll on the chart so i never did it. once i hade a knight but in its first scenario the enemy warband started in the middle of the map and the horse died directly after deployment from a crossbow shot. a frustrating moment in deed

im a slow painter so im gonna stick with minas tirith for a while but maybe im trying dunharrow or moria expedition. wanderers in the wild and lothlorien also sounded interesting for me.

Have you tried using the "shielding" rule with your Minas Tirith troops that have shields? Then you get two dice to win the combat against the Uruks. You can't strike but it might give a bit more time to bring in extra numbers.

I stumbled over that rule the very day you gave the advice. i had some games to try it out and i think its pretty usefull in some situations. i use it a lot at the beginng of a match to bot get the whole company slaughtered by his berserkers. I wait with the "usual" duell rolls till the rest is a bit thinned out.

That brings a question to my mind. the berserkers get a malus to duell rolls and a bonus to to wound rolls. meaning the hit more unlikely but when the do they probably kill everything in base contact. what my opponent does is bringing one or two whatever units with the berserker who dont have the duell roll malus. so he wins the fight with the others and then kill everything with the berserker.
is that a thing you could do or should the berserker win the duell roll by himself to be allawed to do his roundhouse kick?

It's legal, it's a good way to use two-handed weapons. When you're using a Berserker, you definitely want to keep it alive. It has tremendous damage output and it's too valuable to have it losing fights, so yeah, give it extra warriors so it can roll as many dice as possible and win fights.

When you're fighting against that, your opponent is putting a lot of resources into one fight: Berserker + one or more Warriors, that's a lot to get one kill. You can either concentrate on that grouping, break them up so you're fighting just the Berserker, and just the additonal warriors (not together), or you can focus resources on your opponent's other models. You have options for what you can do.

Let me know if I got too wordy there, basically you can either try to interrupt the big scary combo, or you can avoid it and kill other stuff.

usually i do shielded duell rolls to push his troops around a bit untill i find a good opportunity to overwhelm the berserkers.

we just found out that heros can wear any wargear that any possibly unit of that warband could possibly wear. when i first read it i was happy to have one or two longbows early on but then i realised that berserker sword isnt a skill for a one and a half sword. its a weapon... so he'll probably buy those for all his heros : /

the normal range troops can still fight in melee. is it possible for him to buy a crossbow AND a berserkersword and use both with one mini?