Unexpected Military Formations: Trapping Your Own Heroes?!?!?!?!

Good morning gamers,

Today we're covering a formation that I've been trying out with the new Defenders of Erebor Legendary Legion: a way to trap your heroes so they can proctor free Heroic Combats. In general, trapping your own models is a horrible idea - but in that Legion specifically, you can turn heroes with fairly run-of-the-mill profiles into absolute monstrosities. However, as we'll see later in this post, this formation actually has applicability to lists outside this Legion for those of you who want to add an extra dimension of cunning to your game play (an innocent mind game with your opponent, if you will). Let's get right into it!

The Objectives of the Formation

In the new Defenders of Erebor Legendary Legion, there are two Legion bonuses that grant free Heroic Combats to the four "royal" heroes from the Legion - and they're triggered if the corresponding hero of the pair is trapped:

[A Bond Forged in War] If either Dain or Brand would be Trapped at the start of the Fight phase, then the other may declare a Heroic Combat without spending Might. If successful, they must join their Trapped ally's fight if possible. If this is not possible, then they must move as close as possible to their Trapped ally.

[The Heirs of the Kingdoms] If either Thorin III Stonehelm or Bard II would be Trapped at the start of the Fight phase, then the other may declare a Heroic Combat without spending Might. If successful, they must join their Trapped ally's fight if possible. If this is not possible, then they must move as close as possible to their Trapped ally.

If you've taken Brand, he has the Stoic Fighter special rule in his profile which gives him still MORE bonuses when he's trapped:

ACTIVE - At the start of a Fight involving Brand, check to see if he would be Trapped should his side lose the Duel roll, with the exception of if a friendly model can Make Way for Brand. If Brand would be Trapped, he may reroll a single D6 to win the Duel roll, and a single D6 when rolling To Wound.

These rules paired together gives us an interesting incentive to . . . well, actually trap our own guys. Trapping a model is actually quite easy in the game if you only have one avenue of retreat, as a model must Back Away if it can, but friendly models don't have to Make Way (that's optional). Prior to the August 2022 FAQ, since any model that can't Back Away is trapped, a player could legitimately declare after moving a friendly model (we'll say he has a spear) to block the retreat of Dain, Brand, Bard, or Thorin, that the spearman is "not going to make way" and the hero would be trapped.

Thanks to the aforementioned FAQ, we know that refusing to Make Way isn't allowed for "trapping" the model at the start of the Fight phase - so how do we form up our ranks to trap our own guys effectively? Ideally, we'll have a formation that not only allows us to manage our match-ups (since calling free Heroic Combats won't do us much good if we're slammed by really big heroes, diced up, and killed) and make it SUPER hard for our opponent to get mounted models (that would get bonus attacks and knock us Prone for the next turn) into us or Barge/Hurl into our hero to make life difficult. For this, we turn to a variant of several formations we've covered in the past - the Blunted Double Wedge.

The Blunted Double Wedge Formation

To illustrate this formation, let's look at the following 800-point force:

• Thorin III Stonehelm [ARMY LEADER]
• 1 Iron Hills Dwarf
• 2 Iron Hills Dwarves with spears
• 3 Iron Hills Dwarves with crossbows
• 1 Iron Hills Goat Rider
  
• Bard II, Prince of Dale
• 3 Warriors of Dale with shields and spears
• 6 Warriors of Dale with Esgaroth bows
  
• Bifur the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor
• 2 Iron Hills Dwarves
• 3 Iron Hills Dwarves with spears
• 1 Iron Hills Goat Rider
  
• Dori the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor
• 1 Iron Hills Dwarf
• 2 Iron Hills Dwarves with spears
• 1 Iron Hills Goat Rider
  
• Gloin the Dwarf, Champion of Erebor
• 1 Iron Hills Dwarf
• 2 Iron Hills Dwarves with spears
• 1 Iron Hills Goat Rider

We've seen previously in this series how to do a Wedge formation - and wedges are a great way to present your opponent with a highly concentrated center of mass for them to ram into (or you charge into them with a big center-of-mass model). Wedges also make it hard for your opponent to wrap around your battle line because the taper requires them to go deeper into your side of the board in order to make it to the other side (and can help your line benefit more from banners in the tip/center of your wedge).

Today, we have two heroes who need to be trapped - so we're going to make two wedges that taper into the next wedge, giving us a kill zone where the heroes will try to meet:

I don't own Erebor Reclaimed models, so the Khazad Guards are Iron Hills Dwarves, Dwarf Warriors with shields are Iron Hills Dwarves with spears, Dwarf Warriors with Dwarf bows are Iron Hills Dwarves with crossbows, and the Rangers and Dwarf King are heroes

While this army could certainly run as a series of 4s formations, I've formed up the lines so that we have our big heroes flanked by other models that taper into wedges as we get further from the center - and notice the "W" shape that's made as the two wedges approach each other. This list has two heroes at the tips of the M (Thorin III and Bard II) and they'll be casting their banner bonus to the guys fighting deeper in each wedge.

The tips of the wedge are composed of three models - a banner hero and two warriors to stand at his side (each one an Iron Hills Dwarf). The reason for this is simple: we want to minimize exposing our heroes to fighting more than one model. TECHNICALLY, you can engage the hero with 2 infantry models, but there are few Infantry models (aside from a dismounted Aragorn or Azog) that frighten your heroes that much and they'll have to spend 4 models to engage your front three in order to do it. Getting in a cavalry model with another model (or a monster on what is probably a large base size) is all but impossible, meaning that if something big wants to fight us, it'll have to do it alone (and while there are plenty of mounted and monster heroes that will scare us, at least they won't have help).

Supporting the three front-line models are two spearmen who are touching all three of the models in the front. This gives them the ability to support any two of the three fights - mostly dependent on the order in which fights are resolved. Since both Bard and Thorin are 3 Attack heroes with banner rules that affect themselves, they're already rolling 4 Attack dice, so they usually don't need help winning their fights. If you want to spear-support, though, you can always shield with one of the two flankers (who will be a tough ask for most enemy models to crack through when they're rolling 2 Attack dice with a reroll at F4/D7-8).

The five-model formation that we have here ALSO does something else for our hero to manage his fights: it makes sure he can't be flanked by a flying/mounted model. Sure, our opponent could slam into a spearman with Gulavhar and Hurl into our fight, but it would require calling a Heroic Combat that gets resolved before the hero's Combat - and stopping that maneuver could be done with a different formation (something we'll cover in the coming months).

Because the Legion gives us free Heroic Combats when trapped to two of our heroes (one from Dale and one from Erebor), we need not one but two blunted wedges - and as you can see above, this gives us two places we can place pressure on the enemy battle line. The Heroic Combats must be used, however, to get into each other's combats - and while it might seem like a good idea to keep them together, having a little space between them gives each hero room to work, clearing out the enemy chaff on their way to help their friend. Leaving lots of space makes it very unlikely that they actually DO reach each other - or if they do, there won't be much in their wake when they're done.

For added strength, I'd recommend having another hero between these two wedges - someone to "manage the middle" and make sure the path these two heroes are taking will be open for them. In the formation above, I've placed Bifur in that slot - not the punchiest of the heroes, but if he gets his free Heroic Moves going, he should be able to affect both heroes with it (which is great for getting the positioning we want for those free Heroic Combats).

Unexpected Impacts of this Formation

The greatest benefit of this formation is that while we'll begin working through both flanks of the enemy formation, we'll eventually be pressing through their center. As we've talked about in our Fyrd Formations mini-series on shieldwalls, breaking the center of the enemy has a lot of benefits (most notably the requirement for a banner to pick the side of the line they want to support and the ability to wrap-and-trap the enemy). For our army, as we drive our heroes towards the center, the allied models we've brought in our force will find their match-ups get easier and easier. The trickiest part of this maneuver is to make sure as our heroes move to more central locations that we don't inadvertently leave gaps in our line for our enemy to exploit!

We've also chosen a tapered formation instead of a straight line and as we've talked about in a previous formations post on the Svinfilking/Boar Snout formation: we've made our battle line longer and deeper, which makes it harder to flank us. Yes, it's harder to bring our full force to bear on the enemy, but we've gotten our heroes into the action - and that's what matters most. At the edges of our battle line are other heroes, who could "break ranks" and charge in on their own if they want to kill things, but they can also make our opponent more skittish with his own forces and delay their engagement - which could be really good for us. Beyond the heroes on the tips of the wedge, we've also got archers and cavalry (not shown in the image above) ready to pounce on those who try to wrap around . . . yeah, no one's getting to our flanks (unless they move second and fly over us, I guess).

Our key objective here is simple: we want to feed our opponent's desire to kill models by allowing him to trap our most valuable stuff - but we want to do it in a managed way and THEN we want to deny our opponent from being able to benefit from it. F5-6 heroes who are rolling 4-5 dice require a lot of work for warriors to bring down - and since all four of the royal family members can Strike if they have to (and Thorin III might be able to do it for free), we can make enemy heroes/monsters work for it too (or die in a firestorm).

It's important to note here that, while we can call free Heroic Combats with this formation, if our opponent charges us with something big and scary, we might not WANT to be trapped - so we could just move our spearmen around, shield with the flankers of the royal family, and spear-support the one fight that matters.

The last thing I want to say about this formation is that this article has exclusively talked about its applicability to the new Defenders of Erebor Legendary Legion, but it's ACTUAL applicability is much larger than that. Anytime you find yourself fielding a hero who can't take a mount (any of the named heroes from Lothlorien, Rutabi in an Easterling list, most of the named Orc/Uruk heroes from Mordor/Isengard, or anyone from the Defenders of Helm's Deep) of if you have chosen to forego a mount on a hero because the model would require heavy conversion or is hard to buy (allying in the Fellowship/Thorin's Company into a list or big heroes from Rivendell/Numenor), you can use the wedge principles from this formation (without the trapping - don't do that) to better manage their match-ups, keep them from being overwhelmed, and make your army harder to flank.

Conclusion

Hopefully you found this article informative and if you do end up giving this a whirl, let us know how it goes in the comments! We'll have another formations post next month - until then, happy hobbying!