Nine Companions: Building a Hero-Heavy . . . Shieldwall?

Good morning gamers,

Today we're continuing our ongoing formations series (my, it's been a while since we did one of these!) and we'll be talking about hero-heavy and all-hero lists (more to come on this topic as the year progresses). Most of the posts we've done with formations have to do with conventional armies that have a handful of heroes working in concert with a host of warriors (usually infantry, occasionally cavalry). If you've ever tried to move from a conventional force to a hero-heavy force (either all-hero or heavily slanted towards heroes), you have probably found that you need to think differently and play differently than you would with a conventional force - especially in objective missions.

Today, we're going to look at a few different ways you can set up your heroes on the board in order to make all-hero or hero-heavy lists function well as a shieldwall (especially if you find yourself up against a conventional force). We're going to first look at why you'd want to run more heroes as opposed to the bare minimum number of heroes (maxing out on warriors instead) and then look at how you can change your formations to maximize the value of your heroes. Let's dig into it!

Understanding Heroes: Why Run More Heroes?

Heroes are one of the best features of MESBG - and chief among the reasons they're so great is that they give you access to Might points (or at least, most of them do). Might points can, of course, be used to boost rolls (making an almost-win into a win-by-tying or a win-by-being-higher), which makes the hero unit FEEL better than his weight in grunts in certain situations. Most players, however, want to use their Might points for calling heroic actions - though which heroic actions you want to be calling will be heavily influenced by what your opponent has.

When I got started playing MESBG back in 2010 (it was LOTR SBG back then), there were only three heroic actions: Move, Shoot, and Combat. Move and Combat were basically all anyone called - and we all hoped that our big combat heroes with 3 Might would be able to call 3 Combats and kill 2 models followed by 2 more models for three turns . . . well, this doesn't really happen very often, but if it does, boy do you feel like your hero is something special!

For hero-heavy and all-hero armies, Heroic Moves and Heroic Combats are your most useful heroics - not only because every hero has these, but also because Heroic Moves and Combats alter the tempo of the game, allowing you greater control in where your heroes are and what their matchups are. Yes, having Heroic Strike can be really valuable too - but hero-dominant lists will get FAR more value out of crashing through grunts than they will rivaling big pieces . . . especially if your force doesn't have warriors around to guard the flanks of the heroes while they work.

Heroes also have an improved profile over their core warriors (some heroes have profiles on-par with their elite options). On offense, this generally means that your heroes will have a higher Fight Value (usually +1 or +2), higher Strength (usually +1, but not always), and more Attacks (usually +1 or +2) than your warrior choices, so they become an anchor point for your battle line. While some generals might choose these units to take on the heroes in the enemy's battle line, it can be more useful to have your hero chop through some grunts and let your warriors tank the enemy hero/heroes as best they can.

On defense, you usually see a boost as well - increased Defense (usually +1), Wounds (usually +1 or +2), and Fate points (usually 1-3, but occasionally 0). If your opponent is trying to break you, he may be tempted to wound a warrior instead of a hero just because the hero has an extra Wound and probably at least one Fate point - he'd rather have some success right now instead of the potential for success later. This is particularly true when allocating hits with archery . . . unless there are VPs on the line for wounding/killing the hero model.

The last benefit of running a hero that we're going to discuss is that the increased profile (and Might) of a hero can help you artificially extend your battle line. Most big heroes don't want to just fight one model - especially if it's a grunt. They'd rather charge two models, and that means that heroes that are embedded in a shieldwall - or that are running up against an enemy shieldwall and are being run as part of an all-hero or hero-heavy list - are going to want to charge two models. If you have a battle line of 8 models, with two of those models being heroes, you can assume that your ACTUAL battleline length is roughly 10 models long instead of 8, since each hero is going to try to charge two people. We've talked before about how extending battle lines (especially if you gave shields to your spearmen - not everyone can these days) can be a great way to beat enemy shieldwalls - and this is definitely true if you have heroes who are good in combat and don't need help.

Okay, let's look at some formations for using hero-heavy or all-hero lists!

Formation #1: Heroes in Six-Model Shieldwalls

Our first stop is going to be looking at formations for lists where you're running slightly more heroes than you need - the following list has 4 heroes and 30 warriors in it:

Let's just say this to start with: we've got four heroes when we could have only run three, but we've STILL gotten over 30 models at 700 points . . . that's pretty good. Each warband is designed to have a two-by-three shieldwall block that can be run on its own, but is best run alongside another shieldwall block so you have six files, two ranks deep.

Two of our four heroes have two-handed weapons that they can wield without penalty if they are near each other (Bifur and Ori) and the two other heroes (Thorin and Bombur) can use their weapons one-handed or two-handed (without penalty if they're near Ori - that's pretty good at shredding an enemy shieldwall! With 1-3 Might per hero and the ability for Bifur to get free Heroic Moves after he kills someone with his embedded axe-head . . . I mean, this list has a lot of power in it.

It's also incredibly resilient, since the heroes are all D8 and the warriors (not the crossbowmen) are D7 with shieldwall . . . I mean, this list is not going to be easy to wound by most foes - and they couple this high Defense with good archery volume (10 S4 crossbows!). Once the enemy engages, three or four Heroic Combats (do you Combat with Ori?) that clear out two warriors each followed by another two warriors each is pretty crazy . . . pretty crazy indeed.

If I saw this list pitted against a 3-hero Erebor Reclaimed list, I'd be backing this list for sure - losing your choice of Bombur or Bifur to get 5 extra models isn't going to bring you as much value as the extra hero is going to give you. Yes, your break point drops a bit, but having more warriors isn't going to kill the same amount or give you the control that you'll get by having more heroes on the board. Now let's tweak the list a little in order to lean harder into the heroes . . .

Formation #2: Heroes in Four-Model Shieldwalls

Using the idea we just talked about, let's drop our numbers a little more by adding a fifth hero who gives us a little more punch:

This army is basically the same as the last list, except that we've traded 7 Iron Hills Dwarves (2 crossbows, 6 spears/shields, downgraded 3 spear/shields into mattocks) for Gloin to join the shieldwall. The shieldwall blocks have dropped to four-man bricks, but in trade for the roughly three files of the shieldwall that we've lost, we've picked up ANOTHER hero who can fight two-handed AND can extend our battle line by charging two people so he goes up to 4 Attacks (and no two-handed penalty if he's near Ori). We'll want our smaller blocks to operate in concert with at least one other unit (Thorin and Bombur don't need to be near Ori, Gloin and Bifur definitely want to be near him if they can), but keep in mind that we have a few crossbows that can be used to cap off the flanks (or embed them into the battle line and rely on your shield guys to carry the flanks).

The emphasis of this army list is, once again, to use your heroes to charge into multiple units (or stall something big) and chop holes in the enemy lines quickly so you can make up for having fewer models to begin with than most conventional armies at this points level. 27 models isn't a lot, but it's still quite a bit of heavily-armored troops - and we've still got 8 crossbows to at least have the option of sitting back and shooting at our opponent if he left his bows at home. Okay, now to focus on the main event . . .

Formation #3: All-Hero Shieldwalls

There are very few lists that can ACTUALLY make an all-hero shieldwall - mostly because the heroes you need in the shieldwall need to be able to a) hit as hard as a whole squad, b) last long enough to help you with scoring before the end of the game, and c) needs to be able to clear and hold an objective all on their own. This is possible for some lists (Erebor Reclaimed and hopefully someday Castellan-heavy Dol Guldur lists are certainly options), but for most lists, this is going to be hard.

For Erebor Reclaimed, this might look something like this:

We've almost tripled our first list's Might and almost doubled our second list's Might as well - and in trade, we only have a quarter of the models available to us. We've still got Thorin, Ori, Bifur, and Bombur from the first list and Gloin from the second list, but we've added Nori, Dori, Bofur, and Fili to the gang - mostly for resource sharing and two-handed weapon bonuses when near Ori (Fili was just because I had points left over - I could have gotten Oin for resource sharing). Getting extra Attacks, resistance to magical/special rule assaults, and a few extra throwing weapons are welcome, but we're really after the improved profiles and heroic stats.

There are other things we've gotten from this build, though - we've gotten almost TRIPLE our starting Might, so we can probably game the system a bit and make sure that we decide when the combat begins - we get to move second and charge wherever the enemy has decided to go. Once we get in there, we can probably declare Heroic Combats with some or all of our heroes in order to get the model disparity reduced.

Another thing we've gotten is, ironically enough, that our numbers have fallen - with only 9 models in our list, our opponent has to kill 5 models in order to break us . . . and all of our models are D7-9 with 2-3 Wounds and 1-2 Fate points . . . yeah, that's not going to go down easily. If we don't spread our guys out too much at the beginning (and be mindful of cover to prevent a wave of archery from getting lucky), we can probably avoid taking any damage at all until the game is drawing to a close - and any army that can avoid being broken is probably doing okay in most scenarios. There will be lists that outnumber us 10:1 - and we're probably not breaking those lists, but if we can CATCH the enemy, we can probably break most enemy lists that we run up against.

Finally, as regards a shieldwall, it's going to be easy for this army to string itself out and cover a good amount of ground while still remaining within 6" of Dain's banner rule. If we're near the banner (and everyone except Dori and possibly the Captain has Heroic Strike), our ability to beat most conventional armies in a shieldwall scrum is pretty good - and since we don't have a 1 Attack model backed up by a 1 Attack model, wrapping us doesn't reduce our combat effectiveness. Yes, trapping us would be bad if we lose fights, but a more conventional force has much to fear if they have been surrounded on all sides and every fight becomes a Trapped fight.

Conclusion

The strategies here might not be applicable to all factions - and that's okay. Some factions can play the shieldwall game with all heroes - and Erebor Reclaimed is certainly one of them. Other Dwarf factions can too, but next month, we'll look at some skirmish builds you can do for all-hero/hero-heavy lists - especially those that don't think they can do the shieldwall thing. Until next time, happy hobbying!