Been a while since I played, but I remember mordor being a little overpowered. I also remember elves having a horible codex. Is all of this still true?

War of the ring not SBG, guess I should read what forum I am in.....

Mordor is strong, mainly due to the Nazgul being cheap and effective with spells and special rules. Not crazy overpowered but certainly take much less finesse than elves or rohan. Having a 25% allies allowance helps most forces that do not have all the tools to get them. Battlehosts do not have to follow the common/rare ratio in allies so they are another way to help balance things out but really only in larger games.
I am the only evil player so far in my group and every time I play mordor using Khamul and gothmog, it really seems, almost too easy, with gothmog copying actions and khamul's special rule and spells I can usually survive any bad dice rolls or poor tactics without any major losses. Putting a point limit on epics is a common tactic to help balance out the spell disparity, like one epic hero per 750 points or 200points of epic hero per 1000 points.

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richmondwarmancers we play Lord of The Rings, Battlefleet Gothic, Infinity, some board games, and really whatever tickles our fancy..

Well, the short and simple answer is "yes, that is true". However, there are a few players (especially GW employees ) who would disagree with me. There have been lots of discussions here about the balance, or lack of it, in WotR, but I think you'll find that in general players will agree with you.

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"There are few left in Middle Earth like Aragorn, son of Arathorn." - Gandalf, Many Meetings

i think GW employees have to say its balanced, or at least denie imbalance... cause at my GW one who play WOTR alot says its balanced...

I think we need a little perspective here. The core rules as they stand are pretty good, no one faction has any single way out there powerful common, rare or legendary formations that can not be beat. There are some pretty stupid powerful combinations of epic heroes though. Without epics the rule set is easy to use and plays pretty well.
There will probably be some fixes for some of the epics and a few alterations of company point values if WoTR gets to v2.0.
Remember that GW does not want this to be another historical battle game, if people want to play with hussars and cossacks they will play with them and not swan knights and warg riders. Most of us play this because we are enamored with the fluff behind the game( and we may have some of the mini's from SBG). It would be great if it was a perfect war game, but it will never be that because it needs to be different than other war games and true to some of the fluff as well.

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richmondwarmancers we play Lord of The Rings, Battlefleet Gothic, Infinity, some board games, and really whatever tickles our fancy..

I would disagree only to say that there is NOTHING in the "fluff" of JRRT that supports GW's design decisions that have overpowered Mordor. GW used the same background (books and PJ's film interpretations of them) for their SBG game and for the most part they managed to keep that fairly well balanced. There was some stat-creep primarily starting around the Harad supplement, and there were some combos that were showing up more regularly, but I could honestly say that I could build an army from almost any faction and have a reasonable chance of playing a competitive game against any other faction using LoME rules.

This is just not the case in WotR...YET. I like to remind any newer players that SBG in early versions is not the same game it became with the OR rule release. It wasn't radically different, but the differences did matter and everyone I know that played the original version was happy with the changes and thought they made the game more enjoyable and competitive. Along with some rule changes came some tweaks to Profiles and costs, some up some down, to rebalance things.

This is my hope for WotR. It is a very unique wargame with a lot that draws on the tremendous flavor of Middle Earth and adds some interesting twists. However, they didn't roll a 6 initially with this. Lacking Might (courage to admit they have some serious balance mistakes and fix them quick with errata and FAQ) to change it, my hope is the game is successful enough to justify a v2 (reroll!) and that they take care of those issues then.

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Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

http://TacticsInMiniature.com

I havent had a chance to get into it (we play smaller games 1000 points) but do any of the good army battlehosts offset some of the Mordor power?

Im a mordor, Isengard player, I have Minas Tirith but it hasnt seen the table much.

I guess for me I must not be a "power gamer" or not very good at it, I bring a wring wraith or two at most in 1000 points, but they do loose., maybe 60-40 in my favor.

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Some of the battlehosts are fantastic; others are less so. I have experience using Mordor and Isengarrd myself. From experience I know that 'The Fighting Uruk Hai' is great (You're likley to take Saruman and a solid block of pikes and Uruks in a larger game anyway, and the extra abilities it grants are very powerful). The Scouts of Saruman are also good, making your Uruk scouts move about as fast as cavalry! Insane, and fun! For Mordor, there are some powerful hosts to. Again, from experience, I know that The Gorgoroth orc horde and Knights of Morgul are great.

If a battlehost soudns good on paper, it's probably quite good in practice. May sound obvious, but that's not always the case. I've faced The Spirit Legions of Angmar, and Ican say it strongly negates the inherent weaknesses of a typical Angmar Army, boosting units' fight, Strength and dispelling The Chill Miasama affect of the shades. Heroes beware! Buhrdur's warband also sounds impressive, as does The Harad 'Golden Army of Abrakhan' (The 'golden promises' rule sounds great, and very amusing too!)

You know which enemies you typcially face. A lot of advantages are circumstantial; handy in some instances, useless in others. I have no experiences of heroic battlehosts, but maybe someone could offer advice on those. Perhaps a list of useful/semi-useful/virtually useless B.H.'s would be worth making?

As a Rohan player, I found the "Riders of the Westfold" Battlehost pretty good. "Emoer's Knights?" Unless you're popping 300 pts for Gandy, not so much.

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"What's so civil about war, anyway?"

I used the Fighting Uruk Hai formation from Battlehosts. A big drawack is that you only get your ability is Saruman remains in range to your units. The range is not much, and it forces you to keep him near the front, which makes him an easy target for someone doing a heroic challenge.

He just is not tough enugh to face many of the more powerful guys. The end result is that you lose him pretty easily in a duel.

Read my posting which explains how my battlehost with Saruman was wipped by the use of Epic Rampage.

Brian

The Battle Hosts are a great idea, but missed the mark a bit on execution. Among other things they could really help solidify an army that is not as strong in the core rules, helping to boost the usability of some underplayed forces.



I think the Riders of the Westfold is a very good example of a BH done right. It is themed, has a reasonable cost, requires a fair number of Formations (rewards collectors), and is not over powerful. The other BH I'm very familiar with is Thranduil's. Again, reasonable in cost, required models and bonuses that are themed and not over powered. And both provide a little boost in usability and competitiveness to an army that is ok but could use just a "more". In my opinion, the majority of BHs fall into this category.

There are some however on each end of the spectrum. Look at the Ent Battle Host for example. It's expensive, 75 points if I remember, and requires you to have Treebeard and at least 3 Ents, which is a big investment in real money and points. And what do you get for it? A minor bonus when fighting a single faction (Isengard) and one generalized (but not worth the cost) bonus. A better designed BH could have made Ent armies an attractive option to play by giving more generalized bonuses. Now look at some of the Evil BHs. Morgul Knights has the same points (IIRC) and gives WAY better bonuses that can be used in nearly any game. And the Flying Nazgul BH (can't remember the name) turns any of your Nazgul within range of the WK into VH2K models. I'd pay 75 points in a heartbeat to allow any Ents within range of Treebeard to be VH2K.

The presence of a few "must have" BHs (the only ones coming to mind are Evil, but I'm sure there are some over powered Good BHs as well) and a few "why the heck would I waste points on that" really makes the BH supplement look like it was put together by too many people that weren't talking well with each other and had very poor guidelines to go by on costing. A better review and simple point adjustment would clean up a lot of issues with the current BHs (don't alter the BHs, just make the points reflect on-the-table value) and then they can publish a few new BHs to fill in some gaps on under utilized armies. A quick point Errata for BH would help dramatically and cost GW nothing more than a day's work by the team and some bandwidth to publish a PDF.

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Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

http://TacticsInMiniature.com