Shire List, Part 2: Heroes Post 1 of 2

Dear Reader,

Greetings again!  I was out for the past week visiting family, and am just now getting caught up on all of my projects.  Spending 20 hours on a plane does wonders for gathering your thoughts on a list, and what follows is my assessment of the heroes available for Shire teams.  I'll begin with the hobbit heroes, and then move on to the non-hobbit (and more exciting) heroes available to you.  Before launching into that discussion, though, something should be repeated from my last post:

You play with Shire lists to play with heroes.

Yeah, you all saw that coming, :)  If you've ever wanted to field a hero-heavy force, go with one of the Eriador civs: Shire or Grey Company.  Unlike the Grey Company, though, your selection of F6, S4, D5-6 heroes is extremely limited, so you'll be working with a smaller (no pun intended), less sustainable crew in a Shire army.  That being said, you can cover all of the bases using a Shire list for dirt cheap, and that will be the focus of this post.

Shire List, Part 1: Warriors

Dear Reader,

Greetings from the Forge!  As you saw in my last post, Operation Tuckborough is nearing completion, and I'm really excited about some new possibilities for new boards!  In this post, I want to begin laying out some of the strategy and tactics for effectively using a Shire list in combat.  Over the course of the next few posts, I'll be detailing the warriors in the army (which will occur in this post), the heroes you can field (the next few posts), and a short discussion on tactics and deployment strategies for your forces to wrap up the discussion.

Before discussing the three Hobbit units in the army, though, I'd like to note that I've spent some time searching the blogosphere for any other tips and hints in regards to strategy with this force, and so far all of my searches (including searches in other languages) have come up with only one thread on Warseer from 2007, and in that article there was hardly any discussion on the importance or role of the units in your army.  So this is a discussion that has not been discussed very much by the gaming community at large.  I propose that this is due to three contributing factors.

Terrain Update: Operation Tuckborough

Dear Reader,

As I mentioned in my last post, I was nearing completion on a number of Shire-related terrain projects, and I wanted to update you all with a progress report from the Forge!  I also received my new Armored Merry and Pippin in the mail from eBay, so I will showcase them in this update as well.  I've been looking around at other ideas for Shire boards online, and so far I've only seen one on Warseer to date, so if you have any other ideas on things that would be fun to add to the board, let me know!  With no further ado, a few projects I've been working on...

Lords of Battle: The White Council vs. Easterlings

With the summer drawing to a close, Glenstorm and I got together for a quick game. We've fought all of each others armies on multiple occasions, but Glenstorm recently added a band of Easterlings to his collection. During the beginning of the summer, I wrote a post on Arwen and needed an excuse to give some of her strategy tips a try. So...this game will be between my White Council list and Glenstorm's new Easterlings. Here are the forces:

Conversion: Mounted Rangers of the North

Dear Reader,

Slight pause on Operation Tuckborough: I was clearing space on my desk so that I'll have the necessary space to work on Brandywine Bridge (which is going to be over 16" long; I'm pretty stoked, :) ), so I decided to attempt a model that I've thought about using for my Grey Company army, but the Perry brothers have not made yet: mounted Rangers of the North!  When doing my research on the conversion, I found two examples of people who had converted RotN into mounted models, one using a plastic model, and one using a metal RotN model.  I wanted two different poses, and decided to strike out on my own for this project.

In this post, I want to show the conversion process, and in the next post I'll highlight a bit about tactics and utility in an army (along with two other Ranger of the North conversions I'm working on, and the other 8 Rangers of Arnor I've added to my crew).

Conversion Projects: Knights of Dol Amroth and Warriors of Arnor

Hey Reader!

Greetings again from the Forge!  The boys over here at the How have been pretty busy clearing space on the workstation so that there's enough room to work on the terrain projects I promised in my last post.  To clear space on my desk, I finished up some long-term projects from a purchase I made several months ago, namely, what to do with a pack lot of over 30 Numenorian Warriors I purchased off eBay.  In line with Tavros' decision to convert swordsmen into Knights of Dol Amroth, I followed suit and crafted a number of Dol Amroth Knights as well, and I also came up with a creative use for all of those spearmen that came with them.

Something a bit more refined...

Dear Reader,

Welcome to August!  This month, I'm hoping to finish up a number of painting projects (and two more seasons of White Collar), including, as I hinted at in my last post, a number of civs and models I've never used on this space before, so stay tuned for further discussion on those models!  In this post, I want to highlight models that are, in my humble opinion, the most underrated models in the game, and a set of warriors that I am hoping to bring to the TMAT Grand Tournament in March, primarily for kicks and giggles, if not for style and class.  Per the title of this post, the army featured below is a bit more...refined...than the armies I traditionally run in that tournament. :)  For your delectation and delight, I present to you, the beginning of an army and a number of terrain projects that I'll be working on in August:

Yes indeed!  I've seen some guys online attempt to use this civ, and everyone has always razzed it for its lack of firepower, defensive abilities, movement, and strength, but I intend to use the next few weeks to highlight some of the amazing things you can do with a straight-up Shire list from LOME, or with a Warbands scheme (primarily as an addendum to another list, though you can run it as the core of an army).