Back to Basics: Banners

Good morning gamers,

When I first started playing MESBG (back when it was LOTR SBG), one of the biggest waste of points in my mind were banners. Depending on your faction, you'd pay 25-35 points for a flag that prevented you from taking additional war gear (like a shield or a spear), gave its carrier a -1 penalty to his dueling rolls, and "all it did" was give you a reroll in whatever fights you could fit within 3" of that guy. Sure, if someone was standing nearby, they could pick up the banner, but they'd drop all their additional war gear and become just another "guy holding a flag." No thanks, I'll take 2-3 more guys instead, please and thank you.

But the one guy in our group who wasn't fooled by the hefty price tag and restrictive nature of banners was Centaur - mostly because he was playing Uruk-Hai Scout/Feral Uruk-Hai Isengard lists (with little to no spears) and Rohan infantry spams (who couldn't get standard spears). Centaur told us again and again that banners were worth it - and like any fool, I chose not to listen to him.

Fast-forward about a year and we got "the warband books," where banners were standardized to 25pts each no matter what faction was fielding them and suddenly, an Elf, Dwarf, or Uruk-Hai carrying a banner suddenly looks a bit more appealing (all three of which I was collecting at the time). Shortly thereafter, the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game was rechristened the Hobbit Strategy Battle Game and now banner-bearers could carry extra gear . . . that's neat. Fast-forward about five more years and we enter the current era of the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game and now you can pile up your banner-bearer with more gear than any reasonable person can actually handle . . . it's a good time to be playing the game.

But what is a banner, really? What's it doing for me and why do all those competitive players say I should have one? Well today, we're continuing our "back to basics" series and talking about all things banners - both the actual banners, the different units that are treated as banners or make other units count as being within range of banners (yes, there's a distinction with a difference there), fancy banners, and things that work LIKE banners but actually aren't banners . . . we've got a lot to cover, so let's get into it!

The Bare Necessities, Part II: Banners (and pseudo-banners and anti-banners)

Good morning gamers,

Today we continue our discussion of the Bare Necessities of an army in MESBG that wants to be able to score maximum victory points in a game. As a refresher, here are the things you’ll need to consider:

• Fast troops who can claim objectives or exit the opposing board edge;
• At least one banner;
• Ways of delaying/avoiding being broken (often in the form of large numbers);
• Means of killing enemy heroes; and
• Means of keeping your own heroes alive.

In our last post, we talked about cavalry/fast models and today we turn our attention to banners. As I mentioned in our last post, I took a long time to come around to using banners. I did this for several reasons: first and foremost, when I got started playing the LOTR SBG in September 2010, banners cost different amounts of money based on what unit was holding it (Orcs/most Men could take a banner for 25 points, Dwarves/Uruk-Hai could take a banner for 30 points, Elves could take a banner for 35 points). Back then you couldn't take extra gear with a banner, so the innate Defense of these units didn’t go up and the person carrying the banner became a very expensive target (an Uruk-Hai Warrior carrying a banner costed 39 points – if you ignore the cost of the Uruk-Hai Warrior carrying it, that’s the equivalent cost of 3-4 models right there).

Second, while a banner could be handed off to a friendly model if the banner-bearer was killed, you couldn’t take any additional equipment if you carried a banner (no adding a shield, pike, spear, bow, or anything to the banner-carrying model). This meant that banners usually stood around doing nothing while everyone else fought off the enemy. If you had an Uruk-Hai Warrior with shield (D6) near an Uruk-Hai Warrior with a banner (D5), if the banner-bearer was killed by an Elf bowmen (S3 bow wounds D5 on 5s), the shield-toting Uruk could drop his shield to pick up the banner (which would reduce his Defense from D6 to D5, reducing the difficulty to kill him from 6s to 5s). It wasn’t a cool thing.

Third, banners have very limited range (in general), so taking one banner was unlikely to do much for your army as a whole – you might be able to make a single hero or a squad of troops fight better, but you couldn’t make your whole army better without bringing several of them (and did I mention that taking a banner would undercut your army by 3-4 warriors)?

Let’s just say when we first got started, almost nobody took banners.

Except Centaur.

For a while, he was the only hold-out in defense of banners. And without fail, we’d face off against his army and he’d roll lower than us and say, “But I have a banner…” and then he’d roll a 5 or a 6 and beat us. And we’d all be scratching our heads, asking ourselves, “Why aren’t we winning?” Turns out, it may have been because of banners.

Is Heroic Strike good? (Part III: Dueling with Shields, Banners, and Mounts)

We're almost ready to analyze the merits of Heroic Strike, but before we get there, we have a few more pieces of wargear to sort out: shields, banners, and mounts. As a reminder, here's what we've discovered so far (in relation to small troop combats: 1-on-1, 2-on-1, and 2-on-2):

• RULE #1: In an even duel, both sides have an even chance of winning.
• RULE #2: Having higher fight value than our opponent helps us win the fight, but only if we have a drawn combat. 
• RULE #3: Adding more dice (on its own) is more likely to help us win fights than improved Fight Value (on its own).
• RULE #4: Flailing reduces our odds of winning the fight, unless we already have a lower fight value than our opponent.
• RULE #5: Feinting reduces our odds of winning the fight, unless we have a fight value that is 3+ more than our opponent's fight value. 
• RULE #6: The -1 duel roll penalty from two-handed weapons dramatically reduces our chances of winning the fight, regardless of our fight value. 

Let's start with shields.

(Bring on the maths…)