Hey Reader!
Welcome back! We're back reviewing more of the armies from the new edition, and today we're looking at the 3 profiles tied to The Three Trolls. This army was hard to use in the last edition, both because of a restrictive alliance matrix (all of which required you to lose your army bonus), but also because they only had like 400pts worth of units total in the list. So if you were playing at higher points levels, you were forced to ally if you didn't want to give your opponent a huge advantage.
But those days are over: now in the new edition this army plays at high points levels as well! So we'll jump into how the units have changed, how the army special rules have changed (as they finally have a legendary legion of sorts), and how their points scale at higher points levels without adding warrior options.
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| Gonna base these guys now that they're good! |
But of course the real Brutal Power Attack we tended to use for William in the old edition was Mince 'em Fine, and that hasn't changed either: both players roll a D6, add their Strength, and William deals X wounds to the target equal to the difference if his is higher. It's not a bad rule: on average you're starting around a 10-11, and even if you roll a 1 your opponent probably needs a 4+ to avoid taking wounds. So it's pretty sweet.
Defensively he's still 3 Wounds past D7 (1 Fate base), which is good, and he counts as Dominant (5) (while the others are Dominant (3), which is also not bad), so he can hold an objective against serious resistance. He also causes Terror (like this mates), so that's one thing in his favor against horde armies.
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| Always liked this sculpt the most, even if he's #3 for most |
He also still has Roast 'em Slowly, which allows him, when within 6" of the campfire, to forego attacks by instead moving them into base contact with the campfire and setting them on fire! While being set on fire is not likely to remove a hero, it does effectively take them out of the fight for a bit, and more importantly this is a way to move a model who would be scoring on/near an objective away from where they are, as you could potentially be moving a model about 6" + your 60mm base away from where they were when you fought them. Which is pretty nice: you do have to be near the Campfire, so placement on that is important, but could be useful in some situations.
Defensively Bert is a lot like William: 3 Wounds past D7 with 1 Fate base, so not horrible. While he has access to Heroic Defence, there's one major issue with this: most models are already going to be wounding him on 6s, so the only thing you're really getting from that heroic action is the inability to Might a wounding roll to a wound (which is not nothing, and of course against models with +1 to wound you will still force them to get 6s instead of 5s or even 4s, but still: the D7 means you're losing some value on that heroic action that other heroes get).
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| Smaller but dangerous! |
So all told you have 400pts wrapped up in 3 monsters that all contribute well for their points, and each came out ahead of where they were last edition without a price increase.
Special Rules: How Have Army Special Rules Changed?
So there are some changes from the previous edition; to start, you can't run this army under 400pts, as the first special rule requires you to take all three trolls. No more "I'm running the Three Trolls, but I'm really only running one troll" anymore: you have to take all three. Not a major loss - most events are at least 400pts - but it is a thing for you to be aware of: no running just Bill at a 150pt event.
Second, you can once again take them as a single warband if you like; it does reduce the chance that you get split up in a maelstrom mission, which is nice, but in general you are probably better off putting them in individual warbands, as you'll probably need to get to different places on the battlefield, and sometimes it's nice to have more than one warband to deploy to counter what your opponent does.
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| I'm old school, what can I say |
Though this can be mitigated, as we will discuss next, because the trolls gained something new, and this is where we can scale their points costs up for higher levels of play, which is where we turn next.
Upgrades: How Have Higher Points Levels Changed?
The A Troll's Hoard special rule gives you the ability to purchase upgrades to the trolls for 50pts each, so that you can scale them up to higher points levels beyond 400pts. There are twelve of them, so in a shocking turn of events, since it's me, and I'm the one known for doing those cheeky Top 10 posts on our blog, here's my ranking of the top 10 upgrades you can purchase for the trolls (with two honorable mentions, as there are 12). It's a two-for-one today! :P
#12: Stone Troll Endurance
This one is very simple: whenever you would suffer a wound, roll a D6: on a 6+ the wound is ignored, just like a Fate Point was spent. Now I know there are people out there who really like 6+ Fury Saves (Rythbryt is one of them, and I think Tiberius vacillates on it depending on the day), and if you have to take a 6+ Save on a model you want it to be one with 3 Wounds, so to be clear, this upgrade has a place and could get you a lot of value out of it.
But even if we assume that 1 Wound is worth 10pts in value (which is an assumption; I'm not sure what the exact math is on it, but I'm pretty sure it's roughly 5-10pts, so we'll go with 10 to reduce the total that you'd need to save to make it worthwhile), you'd need to pass 5 saves to make your 50 points back for buying this upgrade. That's 30 potential wounds, and you save 5 of them, leaving 25 wounds on average to split between your heroes...which is way more than they have, even (spoilers!) with other upgrades below factored into the mix.
Now it's true that in some games you play - and those are likely to be the ones you remember, because Survivor Bias is a thing - this rule will save the all-important last wound on Bill, and you'll win the game because of it. So if you have the points and want to take it, by all means do! It's part of a four-part upgrade tree I'll recommend below for increased survivability for your trolls, so there is a way to make this work if that's what you prioritize. But in general, looking at a list full of really good options, this one doesn't even crack the Top Ten.
#11: That's Mine That Is!
Unsurprisingly, the wordiest one is not in the top, as it has a lot of provisos and limitations. Each troll can place a 25mm Stash Marker (can I also take just a brief moment to say how much I appreciate that they give the base sizes for everything in this edition? Like markers typically had a size, so this is not new, but since it's coming up right now I appreciate knowing the exact size of things when making them. Carry on) next to one of the trolls at the start of their activation: it counts as a warrior model if within the radius of an objective, and can be removed by enemies in the End Phase if they don't participate in combats, spear support, use a ranged weapon, cast a magic spell, be prevented from moving, or be under the effects of a magical power. And each troll can only have one Stash Marker, so max of 3.
This is useful - no issues with taking it, as improving that Dominant 3-5 to effectively 4-6 as long as you can protect the Stash Marker has its uses. But there are better options in this list to accomplish the same thing, but better, and without the ability to remove them, so that's why this ranks so low.
#10: Kitchen Utensils
This one is effectively the benefits of the old Feint special strike without reducing your Fight Value: they may reroll 1s to wound when making strikes. Now since it's "when making strikes" you can't use this with a Brutal Power Attack, which means it can't fix a Mince 'em Fine D6 roll, ironically, but on the whole it is useful, especially if your heroes roll like mine.
The issue here is that it's very circumstantial: if you fail to wound but don't roll a 1, you've gained nothing, and seeing as there are better ways to improve your damage potential elsewhere in this list, I've rated this one pretty low. We want things that are more reliable, and we can do far better for damage potential than this.
Which is not to say that you shouldn't take it: if you really care about model removal, there's a four-part list below that involves this one to capitalize on your damage capabilities. But in a field of opportunities, I think this one is behind many of the others, but still makes the Top Ten.
#9: Cover of Darkness
This one is simple: you can choose to make the fight take place at night, and you gain Cave Dweller, so you can see at night and you can get over obstacles more easily. Both of these are useful: the former bonus will help protect you from archery at beyond 12", enemy archery won't get +1 to wound against you as you have Cave Dweller, and your throwing stones can benefit from that +1 to wound if your opponent does not have Cave Dweller. So S8 rocks with +1 to wound on a 4+ SV is nothing to sneeze at.
The issue, though, is that a lot of your bonuses come from the Campfire, which if it didn't make light, and if you didn't want to be near it, there'd be no problem. But I think you do: the banner bonus is good enough that you'd probably want to be near it, and the benefits for Courage and magic resistance are also very useful. Technically the book doesn't say how far the light goes, but considering the light radius for Blinding Light is 6", I think it's fair to say that the light at least extends to 6", especially since that's the radius of the effects of the Campfire.
The effectiveness of this bonus also skews based on your opponent: if you're facing an army with limited archery (Army of the Dead, some Isengard / Minas Tirith / Mordor builds, Angmar, and at present the Shire, ironically) you might not actually gimp your opponent that much, when you could have spent 50pts getting something better. So since it's more swingy in terms of its effectiveness, I've rated it lower.
#8: Bowl Them Over
As someone who loves Throwing Stones in all forms (and have been using them on trolls, ents, and hobbits for years), it just warms my heart when someone on the rules and design team remembers this rule, because we don't get many updates, :P But this edition we now have ents that can move and throw stones in the same turn (admittedly half distance move), and if you take this upgrade you can treat your throwing stones like a throwing weapon, which means -1 penalty to hit (so 5+ SV now), but you can move your full move and then shoot with your 12" throwing stone. That's awesome! And the damage is still S8: no reduction there.
You can also reroll the distance for your Hurl Brutal Power Attack, which makes it far more reliable, which is also good. While it may not be the most powerful of all the builds, this upgrade does have its place, and unlike a lot of the others it really changes the playstyle a lot, allowing you to play a rather dangerous skirmish force with F6-8 trolls. So while it's not for everyone, and not objectively one of the best, I'll be playing with this one on the blog for sure.
#7: Bumbling Charge
I know what you're going to say: this is a weird one for the bottom half! And that's true: it's quite good, giving you 4 Attacks on the charge for all of your trolls. It's not the totality of Monstrous Charge or the Cavalry rules as it doesn't knock people prone, but still very useful if you can get the charge off (so call those Heroic Moves!).
And this is why it's in the bottom half: since you only start with 6 Might base (3 on Bill, 2 on Bert, 1 on Tom), on its own, while this can be powerful, considering that you're slower than cavalry and you don't have a lot of Might Points, this one on its own is highly situational: maybe you'll get to use it a lot, maybe you won't. And depending on whether you're facing magic users, the benefits of being 4 Attacks could be mitigated through magic.
So it's good: it will appear in one of the lists below. But I don't personally think it's top half material.
#6: Troll Cunning
Just breaking the top half of the list in full, and just under the halfway mark of the Top Ten, we have Troll Cunning. This one is simple and gives you two benefits, one of which will come up a lot, and one of which doesn't come up nearly as often, but can come up thanks to the special rules they have. First, you can't be trapped while you're standing, so as long as you're not knocked prone by a magical power, monster charging you with higher Strength than you, or struck by a big siege weapon, surrounding you won't double the dice against you. That's really good for stretching out those 3 Wounds and 1 Fate Point!
The second benefit is that you can reroll failed to-wound rolls against trapped opponents, which, while you're not likely to get a 3-point trap on people, the fact that you can Save 'em for Later (to paralyze them, thereby trapping them), Squash 'em into Jelly (to knock them prone, then trap them next turn) with Tom, and Hurl with any of them, means you can actually get this benefit more often than you'd think.
Not the greatest, but it pairs nicely with the Bowl Them Over rule, and will help to keep you alive. Of all of the Under 5 options, this one is one to consider when list building.
#5: Tasty Livestock
Honestly, any of the top five are worth choosing, and if you're playing at 650pts, these are probably the five I'd choose. Tasty Livestock is simple, yet has tactical complexity that I really love: at the start of the game after deployment and objectives are placed, place four 25mm Livestock Markers beyond 3" of enemy models / objectives, and beyond 6" of a board edge: while within 3" of a livestock marker during their activation (so they don't need to end within 3", they can start near it, claim it, and walk away, etc.), any troll can remove that marker to regain 1 Wound they've lost earlier in the battle.
That's really good: not only can your opponent not move or remove the markers, but these are effectively health drops from video games that you get to spread out before the match begins. Effectively increasing your Wounds from 9 to 13 may not be the best use of 50pts (again, a wound is probably worth roughly 5-10pts), but the fact that you have access to extra wounds is something most armies don't have unless they have Elrond or Radagast.
What holds it back from the Top Three is the strategic element: if you place a marker thinking there will be a lot of fighting there, and then there isn't, and then you need to walk away from the fight to recover wounds, you could end up losing more wounds just to chase down an extra one. So while it's useful, and relatively easily to make useful (place them 4" from an objective, and then get to that objective), so I've rated it higher than some of the other situational ones.
#4: Dominant Presence
This one is situationally the best in the whole bunch, depending on the scenario in my book; if you don't play any scenarios with objective control this one is completely useless, but if there's an objective - which is a lot of them - then this is easily top three, if not the best of them all.
When within 3" of an objective (which is also typically scoring distance), their Dominant 3-5 gets a boost: you automatically count as holding it, and the opponent counts as having 0 models in range. So they have to drive you off the objective to take it, and if you score extra VPs for having double or triple the number of models, your Dominant 3 means you're automatically counting as double or triple the enemy's total.
So again, super good, as long as the scenario has objectives. If it doesn't, you've just wasted 50pts. Furthermore there are some objective missions where being within 3" and "controlling it" doesn't do anything - remember how I said above that Destroy the Supplies was a tough one for these guys? That's an objective mission where controlling the objective scores you nothing: you still have to get into base contact with it and not be engaged / have fought that turn to remove it. So useful, and I'm probably taking it if I don't know the scenarios in advance or if I see that there's an objective control mission, but not among the top as it doesn't always help.
#3: Savvy Fighters
First off, I don't think this is exactly true of them: nothing about them in the book or movie makes me think they're savvy fighters. But here we are. Regardless, they all gain Heroic Strike (so bump for Bert and Tom for sure!), and when an opponent calls a Heroic Strike on a 4+ they can call one for free.
This is really good: your F6-8 makes it likely that people will call one against you first, it conserves your Might Points, and extends the life of your trolls by a lot. May not always come up (which is why it's not at the top), but it comes up often enough to be useful)
#2: Full Bellies
Yet another simple rule (which is good), and this one covers another base that the trolls are missing: all of them start with 3 Might, 3 Will, and 3 Fate, which is 20pts of value for Bill (+2 Will, +2 Fate), 25pts of value for Bert (+1 Might, +2 Will, +2 Fate), and 20pts of value for Tom (+2 Might, +2 Fate), so you're getting 65pts worth of stats for 50pts, which is a bargain!
And all of it is useful: you're getting added resilience (assuming you don't roll like me for Fate Points) on all of them to extend their Wound store, you're getting 3 more Might Points between Bert and Tom for calling things like Heroic Moves, and you're getting added magical resilience and boosts for low Courage rolls, all of which is good. Sure, it doesn't add any extra Might to Bill (who could use it) or extra Will to Tom (who could use it to sneeze on people), but it is nevertheless a boon you'll use in basically 100% of your matches. Definitely worth being in the top two.
And surprising no one, seeing as Centaur is doing this ranking...
#1: Nothing Like a Warm Fire
Yet another simple rule: you increase the radius of the Campfire to 18" off the bat, which is incredible for having reliable banner rerolls (easily catch 3 objectives in most games), magic resistance (so that hopefully you aren't Transfixed or Paralyzed), and the Courage bump to help deal with Terror armies. And if this is all it did, honestly, it would probably still be #1 or #2 on this list, because when you only have 3 models you need to make the most of them, and this does that in spades. And with 6" banners with a special rule attached typically being a 40ish point upgrade, like the value on this is awesome: it's easily an 100pt upgrade between the +15" radius to your average banner (while starting on a 80mm base, which is larger than basically every banner in the game), plus Resistant to Magic, plus +1 Courage. Phenomenal value for 50pts, and fills a lot of gaps.
But it gets better: it also counts as a banner for Victory Points so long as there are no enemy models in base contact with it at the end of the game. And while yes, the enemy can shut down the VPs from the Campfire if they're in base contact with it at the end of the game, they can't actually destroy it, so they'd be parking people next to it as the game draws to a close, but can't just remove it and move on, which is really nice.
Now there is a question about how this works with Cover of Darkness above: if you take this upgrade, does the light extend to 18" instead of 6"? How does that work? I'd personally love an errata on this, as I think it makes a HUGE difference about whether you take those two upgrades together. So for now I won't take them both, just to avoid confusion, but in the future it would be good to know.
Army Builds: How to Run The Trolls
I don't always do sample lists for these, but for this one I think it's useful to show what you could have at 500-700pts, especially since we've never had that in a pure Three Trolls list before. Plus I had some extra space since there's only 3 profiles and 12 upgrades, so why not, :P Instead of doing straight lists, I'm going to highlight a few combinations of 4 upgrades (so bringing you to 600pts, and you can add another set to get to 800 or 1000pts) to show you the styles of force you can run with these guys.
So to start off, we'll look at the Immortal Trolls: this one focuses on wound resistance and overall resilience, making sure that you keep your trolls on the board for as long as possible. We'll take Nothing Like a Warm Fire for the magic resistance and banner bonus to keep our rolls closer to the Law of Averages to win fights, Full Bellies to get us both the 3 Fate Points and increase our Might Points by 33% so that we can shut down enemy charge bonuses with a little more reliability, Tasty Livestock for wound recovery, and Stone Troll Endurance for a 6+ Save against wounds that may come in. I went back and forth on going for Cover of Darkness to try to reduce ranged damage agaisnt us, but you know, since there's a good bit of cover on maps nowadays, it may not be as necessary, so I'll go with these four. Plus, again, we don't know how the light from the Campfire works for light radius, so I'm going to forego doing a night attack just to be safe. But you can add that one to taste if you are playing at 650-800pts to further enhance your damage mitigation if you'd like.
Second, we'll look at the Monster Mash build: this one focuses on damage over everything else, removing models as swiftly as possible. We'll take Nothing Like a Warm Fire for the banner bonus (plus hopefully shrugging off things like Transfix and similar mitigating spells), Full Bellies for the extra Might Points, Savvy Fighters for those free/accessible Heroic Strikes to overcome power heroes, and Bumbling Charge to increase our Attacks to 4 when we charge (which should be more doable with 9 Might instead of 6). If you feel like adding Kitchen Utensils for rerolling 1s to wound you can; again, it's situational.
Third, we're going to look at the Bowling Party: this is a skirmish build designed to work down high Defence armies before closing the distance, and is especially useful against dwarves and the Army of the Dead who overwhelmingly favor getting in close. We're going to take Full Bellies for the added Might Points (just in case our throwing stones need to do a bit more work), Bowl Them Over for getting that oh-so-necessary scoot-and-shoot ability, Cover of Darkness to reduce incoming damage to us and probably giving us a +1 to wound on our ranged attacks, and honestly I'd probably take Troll Cunning since we'll be Hurling people a lot. It's niche, it's not the meta for these guys probably, but it's different from how we've played Three Trolls before, so that's great!
And finally we have the Total Domination Trolls: this one focuses on objective control, and we'll take Nothing Like a Warm Fire to make sure we stay on the objectives and win fights more easily, Full Bellies to make sure we have the stats to move first and survive longer once we're there, Dominant Presence to make us the kings of objective control, and I'd add Troll Cunning to make sure that we last longer on the objectives, since we know we're wading in and planning to stay. Naturally you can add things like Tasty Livestock or Cover of Darkness to help, and you can technically take That's Mine That Is if you really want that potential at an extra +1 model count, but in most cases I think that's wasted with this build (or at least it's not worth 50pts).
So again, lots of different ways to do it at 600pts, and I think that's awesome! We've never had this many choices before (mostly it was just allying with Goblin Town, or in my case going Red Alliance and adding Buhrdur with more trolls and a banner-carrying orc for the fun of it), and I'm loving that! And you can spread out your benefits at anything higher than 600pts, which is really nice.
Conclusion
This army is vastly improved from last edition in my mind: it actually has a viable way of winning matches, even on objective control, and that's fantastic. It's not too powerful, and you can still outsmart them, but you do need to put some work into it, and that's a good sign for where this army is. You'll see more games of me playing with them this year for sure, because I'm really enjoying digging into these guys! Until then, you know where to find me,
Watching the stars,
Centaur
"We are not all like the traitor Firenze, human girl! Perhaps you thought us pretty talking horses? We are an ancient people who will not stand wizard invasions and insults!" ~ Magorian, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Hey! I have really been enjoying the trolls in this edition. I mostly agree with the listing here, but wanted to share my current order of upgrades. full bellies>warm fire> troll cunning> rumbling momentum>bowl them over>cover of darkness>livestock>dominant presence>savvy fighters>endurance/utensils>that's mine. There is no rules backing the fire illuminating the darkness in cover so it should never reveal them regardless of position or upgrades(kind of like how flaming brands don't reveal models either currently). your packages make sense and if someone wants a specific play pattern I can see taking them instead, but I believe the order I have is the generic best way to build them as you scale up points. After using them the savvy fighters and dominant presence are just point sinks early on as so many lists struggle to present one of, let alone both in heroes that can threaten the 3 trolls with enough might points in strike to make it worth it, and numbers to make the auto win necessary. In a tournament setting I think playing cagey with bowl, cover, and dominant could be real and just push for OBJs as time runs out, but I don't like this idea for many reasons, but with only 3 models wasting 50/100 points is just not a good place to be. With this I do not rate those 2 nearly as highly as others. cunning it absolutely vital though as nothing (not even full bellies realistically) compares to the added survivability it gives them. charge really helps their killing power through priority, moves, barges, and combats, the extra attack really goes a long way. bowl is sneakily a good way to access supplies, and one troll killing a dude with throw stones and leaving a gap for number 2 to touch the supplies is a neat way to get around one of their biggest draw backs(I think you just accept your supplies are burnt and play to get all 6 off the table and win off the other vps). I think the list has a lot of legs, but definitely cant afford at 650- to waste points on upgrades that are not fully useful. I really wish utensils had a second effect for each of the trolls since they have a different piece of silverware, but alas, they didn't go that route unfortunately. Enjoyable read though, can't wait to read a report on them seeing the table!
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