Quick Starter Armies for the Battle of Edoras Box Set!

Good morning gamers,

The new edition has been out for just over 6 months, and while we don't have all of the models that are in the Armies of the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit supplements, we do have enough to get started in the game. As I did with the Battle of Osgiliath box set, I'll be looking today at the very practical question of how to turn your collection of models from the Battle of Edoras starter set into an actual army on the tabletop at different price points.

Before we dive in, I'd like to reiterate something that I do from time to time on this blog: 

GW is not sponsoring us here at TMAT. 

I get no kickbacks from the way you spend money, I don't have affiliate links, and I'm not associated with a webstore or physical store of any kind. We here at TMAT are just a bunch of gamers trying to play with toy soldiers on a budget. As a result, the recommendations I provide here are the result of much thinking and planning - mostly for myself and maybe my musings and plannings will help you too! With that, let's start by looking at the Forces of Good from the starter set . . .

400-point Army of Edoras for $200: The Battle of Edoras Box Set

Our first stop is . . . well, just the contents of the box set. This is technically more than $200 USD in the GW store, but it's less than $200 if you buy it from an independent retailer - it also isn't going to be a great army, but it can be yours with just the purchase of the box set (which not only gives you the rulebook and a cheat sheet of the profiles for the units in the box set, but also gives you some terrain, some dice/measurement sticks (get a tape measure, of course), and a paper mat to put on your table . . . all good things).

The list writes itself since we only have two heroes and 24 Warriors of Rohan - all of which we can field at 400pts:

Haleth is a good beater hero, though a bit fragile. Hama is . . . fine as a shooting hero, but probably a bit overpriced. Still, they're yours and they will get you into the game with enough of an experience to help you figure out what you want - exactly what a starter box should do.

Now as we add some money to our price point, we can get an "actual" army . . .

600-point Army of Edoras for $400: The Battle of Edoras Box Set, the Armies of the Lord of the Rings supplement, Rohan Battle Host, and Rohan Commanders

For this army, I'm going to ask you to find something on eBay or some other independent retailer that might be hard to find: the Rohan Battle Host box. If you can find that, this particular army list becomes a lot easier to make, though a little hobbying will be required. We're making the following purchases, which together comes out to about $400 USD:

• The Battle of Edoras box set ($220 - this gives us a bunch of Rohan models and the main rulebook, which alone would be about $200, so the Dunland part of the starter set is basically free)
• The Armies of the Lord of the Rings supplement ($64 - this gives us all the profiles for the Army of Edoras, along with a lot of other profiles)
• Rohan Battle Host ($75-100, but you can also get Eomer and 6 Riders of Rohan for about this price as well - in the battle host, we also get 24 Warriors of Rohan, which gives us an easy way to expand our army as the points level increases)
• Mounted Rohan Commanders ($65 depending on whether or not you want them mounted or not - both gives us a banner guy and a generic Captain that we can use)

We don't have a model for Frealaf yet, so since he has "armor" and a hand weapon, we can actually use a Rider of Rohan model to represent him - just use a hobby knife and cut off the bow/quiver from his back and smooth it out with putty. If you have some bare Eomer heads, you can hack off the head of the Rider and replace it with an Eomer head if you want to make him really different. We'll want to do a similar conversion on a Warrior of Rohan, making sure that there's no shield on that model and painted up to look cool (maybe with the other bare Eomer head).

With the extra Cavalry models, the banner, and our Frealaf conversion, we have a pretty interesting 600-point army - and if you have 24 extra Warriors of Rohan, you could replace Hama with a mounted Captain of Rohan and 2 extra warriors!

This list is better than the one before - though without Hera in the list, Frealaf is only "sorta good" - Shieldwall is excellent for making D5 troops harder to kill and Frealaf himself has a pretty good damage output. However, to get her, we'll need to up our dollar level and our points level by a bit . . .

750-point Army of Edoras for $500: The Battle of Edoras Box Set

We don't know Hera's exact cost, but given that her new infantry model is $30 and her brothers as a pair are $52, we can expect that for less than $50, we'll be able to get Hera on foot and mounted. Since Warriors of Rohan are currently running at $52 for 24 guys, we can get Hera and an extra batch of warriors for $100 (OR we can skip on the extra guys if you were able to find the Rohan Battle Host box in the previous set - SAVINGS!).

Hera and a pile of extra guys allows us to reach 41 models at 750pts with four pretty decent heroes in the mix:

If you don't want to wait for the Hera model to be released, you could pick up the Hera, Bride of Death model right now along with 24 Warriors of Rohan and run a Defenders of the Hornburg army - if you managed to get the Rohan Battle Host box and have some money left over, I'd try to get Crazy Helm as well, but here's a list without having to buy him:

Both of these lists sport good numbers and while the second has weaker heroes (which will require two conversions of Warriors/Riders of Rohan unless you're willing to wait for the previewed Lief model to be released), the latter does have Dominant (2) on all of its infantry . . . that's pretty sweet.

Okay, let's turn to Evil, where things are actually quite interesting . . .

400-point Besiegers of the Hornburg/Usurpers of Edoras for $200: The Battle of Edoras Box Set

The Battle for Edoras box set gives us the makings for two different armies at 400 points - a Besiegers of the Hornburg army and an Usurpers of Edoras army. The Usurpers list probably wants Thorne and Freca in the list for banner rules, access to additional units, and increased Fight Value, so this first 400-point list - that just requires the starter set - will be a Besiegers list:

As with the Army of Edoras starter list, this is suboptimal in a lot of ways - but it uses the models you have and the Besiegers army will give your Dunland Warriors +1 To Wound when they're near objective markers (which is often good - and I think better than the Hill Tribesmen/Chieftain getting a 6+ save and possibly better than all Dunland models getting +1 To Wound against heroes, but I could be argued either way on that one). Our list can get better, though, if we just dump $200 more dollars into the investment - and we'll actually be looking at THREE different ways you can invest that money to work for you . . .

600-point Besiegers of the Hornburg/Usurpers of Edoras/Army of the White Hand for $400: The Battle of Edoras Box Set, the Armies of the Lord of the Rings, and 1-3 other purchases

Hill Tribesmen and Wild Men of Dunland (and their respective chiefs) are exactly the same profiles - they just exist in different ages. This is great for those of us who want some variety in our purchasing options, but no matter which of the three army lists that you want to build to, your first two purchases (and just under $300) is already spoken for:

• The Battle of Edoras box set ($220 - this gives us a bunch of Dunland models and the main rulebook, which alone would be about $200, so the Rohan part of the starter set is basically free - and we'll need parts of that for one of these lists)
• The Armies of the Lord of the Rings supplement ($64 - this gives us all the profiles for all three army lists, along with a lot of other profiles)

If you want to stick with the Besiegers list, the purchases you need are simple - the Troll and his buddies and some Crebain:

• Shank & Wrot, Orc Scavengers ($75 - we're getting some oomph into our list and some really interesting special rules to boot)
• Crebain ($50 - these guys are fast units that are great for sitting on stationary objectives - and even benefit from the +1 To Wound bonus from the army list - and are hard to shoot off of things or Heroic Combat through due to their high wounds)

This list comes in with a not-unimpressive 31 models, but if I'm honest, I'd really like to boost those numbers with more Hill Tribesmen - but more on that when we jump up to $500:

As an alternative, we could run the Usurpers of Edoras list, which doesn't give us access to the Troll, but it does give us access to Freca and Thorne - and with Thorne, we can put some of those Warriors of Rohan we already purchased to work:

• Freca ($32 - this guy gives us a lot of buffs and he's cool, yeah?)
• Thorne ($32 - want some grunts that have higher than D3 and that we already bought in the starter set? I thought so . . .)
• Infantry Rohan Commanders ($35 - we don't need mounted units, but we do need a banner and a war horn)

You wouldn't think this would give us the pieces we need to succeed - but we can actually get to 38 models with JUST the Wild Men that came in the main set, 9 Warriors of Rohan from the main set, the war horn and banner guys from the Command set, and our new heroes and Wulf (this list doesn't have Targg in it):

There's no monster threat in this one, but there are 9 throwing spears, several banner/Fight Value bubbles, and 7 additional models. I'm not saying this is the better of the two lists, but it certainly will be simpler to use and less dependent on a single piece or two doing the work. Now if we're willing to leave the War of the Rohirrim film alone, we can actually make a single purchase (besides the Armies of the Lord of the Rings book) to flesh out an entirely new army:

• Isengard Battle Host ($92 - you can probably find this cheaper on eBay, but it's actually in the GW webstore)

The Army of the White Hand allows you to pair Uruk-Hai Scouts and Saruman with Wild Men of Dunland and Wild Men Chieftains - perfect for a fun starter army that has a mix of elite and light troops and LOTS of magical shenanigans from one of the best magic casters in the game:

This uses all of the constraints we've had previously, using two of our three no-extra-gear Wild Men of Dunland as Wild Man Chieftains and then using most of the Uruk-Hai Scouts that we own from the box set (all but four). We reached our maximum model count of 46 models, so Grima will have to deploy with our opponent (oh darn). This list would be better with some Crebain in it, but we'll get some of those as we up the points value to 750 in our next section.

Also, I thought I was being incredibly clever with this find . . . only to read an article from the Drawn Combat blog the following day and find out that apparently this is a known thing . . . now you know too, if you didn't before. :)

750-point Besiegers of the Hornburg/Usurpers of Edoras/Army of the White Hand for $500: The Battle of Edoras Box Set, the Armies of the Lord of the Rings, and 3-5 other purchases

Like we did before, I'm going to assume that you have the 600-point lists in hand and we're tacking on an extra $100 to flesh out our armies. If we've taken the Besiegers approach, there are really only two purchase paths: more Hill Tribesmen or more Crebain. We will do a mix of both - 24 more Hill Tribesmen and 2 more Crebain:

We have a few Hill Tribesmen that are unused (1 vanilla, 4 flaming brands, 3 spears, 3 bows), which can easily get us up to 800pts (and we can get all of them and a two-handed axe for one of our chieftains at 800pts if we drop Targg's horse - or we just run without three of our warriors). All in all, not a bad investment and a really fun army to play.

If we turn to the Usurpers, we are in the exact same boat: all we can add are Crebain and Hill Tribesmen. We're in a more flexible position for list building because our 600-point list didn't have Targg in it, but I'm inclined to say that if we buy one box of Hill Tribesmen and 1 box of Crebain (we don't have any yet), we'll be in a good place - here's a list without Targg in it:

We still have some Wild Men larking around unused, but fewer than in the previous list (2 vanilla, 6 flaming brands) - and we still have Targg in tow. All told, we could easily add in another Chieftain and a flaming brand guy to bring us up to 800pts OR we could turn the Chieftain into Targg if we wanted. Either way, nearly 60 models at 750-800pts is a good-size horde and having F4 buffs and banner rerolls makes this a pretty potent list, I think.

As we turn our attention to Isengard, it's actually a really simple purchase: yet another box of Wild Men and yet another box of Crebain:

This list uses the 2 new Crebain, Saruman and Grima, all 24 Uruk-Hai Scouts, all three of our previous vanilla Wild Men as Chieftains (plus one more guy), all 16 Wild Men with spears, 5 Wild Men with flaming brands (4 vanilla guys means we'll only have 12 total of these guys, so 7 are left over), and 6 Wild Men with bows (10 left over) - that's pretty good use out of our purchases! We end up with 59 models (slightly more than the Usurpers list and more than 10 models ahead of the Besiegers list) - and we've got Uruk-Hai and Saruman in our list! I might recommend dropping 1 guy to add 6 shields to your Uruk-Hai (blue-tack some of those Dunland light shields if you want) if I was trying to be more competitive, but even if you ran this list as-is, I think you'd have a great time with it.

Conclusion

And yes, that's a way to start in the new edition if you've beginning with the starter set! I think there's far more scope for the imagination with the Evil side of the house, but we'll be back in a few weeks with some thoughts on how to get started with other factions that assume you AREN'T buying the new starter set. We'll do a tiered approach to buying like we did here, so be sure to check back here for more! Until then, happy hobbying!