Guest Post: (In)convenient Allies in MESBG: Preconditions for a Competitive Alliance with Sharbie

Good morning gamers,

This weekend we host yet another article from Sharbie - if you haven't read his previous article on the Watcher in the Water, you should. Today, Sharbie explores the idea of including allies in your lists - what do you look for in an allied contingent? What can they provide that merits losing your army bonus (unless you're Historical allies, which most factions aren't)? Can you go too far with an allied contingent and lose the core of your original force? All of these questions will be covered below - take it away, Sharbie!

While brainstorming yet another Moria list recently, I was struck by the prospect of including Allies in my army. A quick look at the Ally Chart revealed that almost every Evil force was a Convenient Ally for my chittering hordes of Goblins, and the array of choices seemed almost overwhelming. However, I soon came to realise that only a bare handful of these options even began to approach viability, let alone outweighed the benefits of just including more Moria troops. In fact, I was beginning to think that the Moria core of my army was just unsuited to including Allies. Thinking a bit more about the problem, I ended up with a list of factors that were interfering with my plans of a grand alliance to sweep my foes before me. These factors seemed to neatly subdivide into those relating to my core army, those relating to the armies I was allying in, and those relating to the force as a whole.

A few initial notes are needed before we can dive into these factors. Firstly, if your goal for the alliance is just to re-enact a great scene from the films or books, then feel free to ignore all of these. Bring Haldir in your Rohan army (he’s even a Hero of Valour too!) and live your dream. Secondly, this is primarily an article about Allies of Convenience. Historical Allies just don’t share many of the difficulties I’m going to discuss, so you can basically treat them as an extension of your core army list in most cases. Impossible Allies, on the other hand, are only really worthwhile to inflict some nightmarish cavalcade of cheesy horrors onto your opponent (Elendil + Aragorn, for example). (Ed.: there are cases where an Impossible Alliance can supplement the weaknesses of your army - such as the Sharkey's Rogues + Goblin-town list I did a few months ago) So without further ado, let's see what you need to form a successful Convenient Alliance.

Four Checklist Items For Your Main Force

Within your own army, there are about four boxes you need to tick for Allies to make sense. The first of these is that your army list has a hole that you want filled. In an allied list, Mordor is much more frequently seen as the allied contingent than the main force because there are very few unit roles that it can’t fill “in house”. Why would you ally in Cave Trolls and Goblins when you could just field Mordor Trolls and Orcs instead? 

Secondly, the hole has to be substantial enough to justify giving up your army bonus. This will in turn be affected both by how big of a deal the gap is and how much you care about your bonus. The Shire, for example, suffers a lot for want of tougher troops or a power hero or two, while free Woodland Creature really isn’t that big a deal most of the time. The Iron Hills, on the other hand, are probably tough enough to live without a wizard or cheap infantry, and their army bonus is pretty great if Dain is around. An even more extreme example is the Rangers, who basically live and die by their army bonus. I can only imagine making them Convenient Allies if I was playing an all-hero list and didn’t want to field any actual Rangers. This will vary substantially from army to army, but it’s a very real issue to consider.

Similarly, the other two issues will affect some armies much more than others. You’ve got to have at least a Hero of Valour in your primary army, which is easy for some armies (why are you taking Rohan without Theoden?) but much tricker for others (Amdur or Khamul are a lot of points if you’re not going pure Easterling). If you end up needing to pay a Hero of Valour “tax” to field your allies, then it becomes much harder to justify their inclusion. 

Finally, your primary army can’t be too reliant on expensive buffing characters or models. If you need to spend several hundred points on characters whose primary purpose is to boost models from your primary army, then you need to be fielding enough models from that army to justify the cost. Rohan is a perfect example of where this can be tricky. Basically every Rohan army centres around Theoden and Gamling with the Royal Standard (though the latter at least may be starting to change). These two pieces bring a heap of value to the army, but also a heap of expense. If you want to include the two of them and an allied contingent (led by a Hero of Valour no less!), it can become quite difficult to fit in enough Rohan models to benefit from your leaders and make them worthwhile. Similarly, if your main army includes Big Boz with his Big Boz Banner, then you’re investing a lot of points into making your Minas Tirith warriors fight better, so you need lots of Minas Tirith troops to justify it. This can make it hard to squeeze in anything other than a nominal allied contingent (i.e. Galadriel Lady of Light, the token elf representation in so many armies).

Thoughts For Your Allied Force

Similar issues complicate the selection of the allied army. It has to actually fill the gap in your army for which you’ve sacrificed your army bonus, and they can’t themselves rely on their army bonus. There’s no point allying in some Rangers of the North to provide bonus hitting power if they aren’t going to have A2, for example. Similarly, they need a Hero of Valour that you actually want. Suladan may be cool and all, but you probably don’t want to shell out for him if all you needed was a handful of light cavalry to grab objectives (Ed. While a Haradrim King would certainly be cheaper, Suladan does give you a six-inch-benefits-everyone banner, so he might be a good ally-in anyway). 

A Khandish King, on the other hand, is basically the perfect embodiment of what you were allying Khand to get (chariots and literally nothing else), so he has great value for an allied force. Finally, the earlier discussion on buffing characters applies even more strongly here. Royal Guard hit really hard, but mostly only when you’ve got Theoden, and 100 points is a lot to spend for a F5 A2 character. The same is true of basically the entire Fiefdoms list, for example. A lone power hero or monster, on the other hand, makes for an absolutely perfect Allied contingent because they don’t care about auric buffs or army bonus’ — they’re just there to Kill Stuff Good. It’s why you so often see characters like Gwahir, Galadriel or Boromir floating into other armies as allies, for example.

Finally, the combination of the two armies can’t create some new weakness. The most common one is simply ending up with too few troops after you fit in all your Heroes of Valour. It might be fun to ally some Iron Hills in with Rivendell, but Dain and one of the elven Big Three is well over half your points in some matches without a single warrior for them to lead. Glorfindel and Dain would make a sick tag team, but they’re still probably going to be worn down once all their friends are dead. Even if they aren’t, a mission like Reconnoitre can be almost impossible without having enough warriors running around, so you’ve got to be sure you can actually play the mission as well as hit stuff really well. Another slightly more niche issue arises when one contingent can laugh off a specific counter while the other can’t. Your Shire Army doesn’t care about enemy sorcerers in the slightest until you ally in Boromir, for example, while your Iron Hills Dwarves were happy to ignore bowfire until you added those Rivendell Knights. This is less common than the aforementioned numbers issue, but it is still worth considering to avoid an army that’s less than the sum of its parts.

Application: Convenient Allies for Moria

So where does this exhaustive list of difficulties leave my poor Moria Goblins (other than a bit confused by the complexity of the world outside their mountain)? Well, they firstly end up needing to take Durbûrz instead of a pair of Captains. Figuring out what they need is pretty simple: cheap mobility and infantry that can comfortably outfight a Hobbit. We’re not too reliant on buffers to play, though I probably can’t fit in a drum if I’m taking allies. And our army bonus is fine, but fairly lacklustre. So it looks like we can justify allying if we’ve got a good option to do so.

The long list of available options condenses down pretty quickly once we start applying some of the requirements already discussed. Angmar and Mordor provide cheap mobility, but have expensive characters we don’t really want (we’ve got Bat Swarms and monsters for taking down heroes). Same goes for all the Hobbit lists except Goblin-town, which just has nothing we want at all (Ed. the ability to bring models on from any board edge or from a terrain piece can supplement speed issues you run into with Moria). We can already get Spiders and Bats within our own list, and Smaug is not an allied contingent unless you’re playing ~2000 points. The Serpent Horde, Isengard and the Easterlings have expensive Heroes of Valour we don’t want (aside from maybe Lurtz). 

What we’re left with, somewhat surprisingly, is Umbar, Far Harad and Khand. These all have relatively cheap combat Heroes of Valour we wouldn’t mind including and solve one or more of our weaknesses. Umbar can stiffen our Goblin lines a bit and provide some decent shooting to unhorse enemy heroes, while Khand brings chariots to sweep far objectives clear and break enemy battlelines. Far Harad can bring hitting power, mobility, and enough blowpipes to skirmish well if need be. None of the options are that cheap to include, but they don’t really create any new issues for the force and they shore up some of its weaknesses. They don’t feel very appropriate, but hey, this article never claimed to be about theme. Any of these three options could plausibly improve our Moria list and make it more versatile, potentially making something stronger than the sum of its parts.

So that’s allying! There’s a lot more hoops to jump through than is immediately obvious, but the payoff can be pretty great. Let me know in the comments if you think there’re any things I’ve missed, I reckon there’s more probably even more requirements I haven’t thought to list. For now though, I’m off to dream of goblin chariots and pirates.

Tiberius: Thanks Sharbie for the thoughts - alliance options are a very interesting part of list building in MESBG. In our list building series, we looked into allied contingents for certain factions to supplement their weaknesses in certain areas (like Numenor) or because they allow us to get better versions of units we already have (like the Dark Powers of Dol Guldur).

On Monday, instead of delving more into allied contingents, we'll instead be starting an eight-part series on specialized Heroic Actions (which should close out the rest of the year for our weekly Monday article). We'll pick up allied contingents sometime next year - until Monday, have a safe weekend and happy hobbying!