Fantasy Fellowship Deep-Dive: Optimizing Your Characters, Part 1

Good morning gamers,

If you've been following the blog for the past year, you know we've been walking through Fantasy Fellowships (and we're almost done!). Playing through scenarios has been fun - sub-optimal equipment choices, sub-optimal unit choices, and very different victory conditions have led to some very interesting games (you can read about mine on the Quest of the Ringbearer page).

But one of the things that I've been struck with as we've been playing is how much value the stats and rules of your units actually contribute to how well your games go. I mean, do you NEED good units in your Merry/Pippin slots? How good does your wizard need to be? Well, today begins a new five-part series where I take the principles of the Fantasy Fellowship deep-dive posts I've been doing and applying a statistical score to different categories for each unit that can be taken in a particular Fantasy Fellowship slot, and finding out who are "the best" units for each position. 

If the Google Analytics are to be believed, our least popular posts on the blog are generally related to a) Fantasy Fellowships/Quest of the Ringbearer, b) math posts, and c) Shire or Sharkey's Rogues reviews. Naturally, then, we will kick off this new series by doing a post that covers all three topics. :-) We begin our journey with what might be the two most important characters in your Fellowship: your Ringbearer and your Companion. Let's dig in!

Five Easy Math Stats For MESBG

Good morning gamers,

If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you probably know that Rythbyrt and I really like math facts. Whether it's computing your likelihood of winning/killing in the context of heroic actions, special strikes, or making full-blown spreadsheets that iterate through two sets of combatants beating on each other, we love figuring out new, unexpected ways to maximize your army's effectiveness by delving into mathematical probabilities.

Photo Credit: Stock photo?

But what about players who don't want to be math junkies? Are there some simple and valuable things you can store in your brain to give you a ballpark estimate of what to expect in the outcome of your games? Well, today we put the complicated math on the side (sort of) and focus on five very simple things you can remember that will help you gauge your expectations (and maybe learn a little math along the way). Let's dig in!

Math Fact #1: Rolling 3 dueling dice = 70% chance of getting a 5+

In MESBG, the most exciting part of any game hands-down is the Fight phase. Unlike magic (which might be able to be resisted, but might not) and shooting (which you get absolutely no say over - though you can make your opponent work harder), fighting involves you rolling dice and your opponent rolling dice - and just because you have the better units doesn't mean you'll roll better than him. This makes the opposed rolls when dueling really important.

So this leads to our first math-based principle to remember: try to roll at least three dice in a duel. Why? Because rolling three dice gives you a 70% chance (0.7037 probability) of rolling a 5 as your highest number. Unlike in the board game Risk, you only care about your highest die result - if you can get 6s in all your duels, you have the opportunity to kill lots of guys and also have a great chance of not taking a lot of damage. The more dice we throw, the more likely we are to get a natural 6 (which is awesome).

In Defense of: Castellans of Dol Guldur

This is a sweet paint job (not mine...)

Photo Credit: Azazel's Bitz Box

Tiberius: Today Rythbyrt is back with a defense of one of his favorite units: Castellans of Dol Guldur. I know what you're thinking: Castellans are horrible heroes who can't be defended - not even by the TMAT team. While I could attempt a defense of the units, my experience has been tied to fighting them, not running them. So, I leave you to Rythbyrt to learn how these guys work.

Rythbryt: I'll be honest: when Tiberius asked me to do this write-up, I had two instant thoughts:

1. Absolutely, 1000% YES!

2. Wait, people don't like Castellans?

Apparently, people don't like Castellans. And I'm not sure why. They're one of the most unique profiles in the game. They're incredibly flexible. They pack a surprising whallop. They're spooky. I think the models are dope (although I admit the one with two blades is a tad flat). And they even have their own fight song!* So why all the hate?

No idea. But if your local meta isn't a fan of Castellans, yet loves all sorts of stupid, popular list ideas (like pretty elves, slogged dwarves, a mounted horse king, massed rangers, or five magical wizards storming a spooky castle), have I got some a LOT of thoughts for you!

(Gosh, I've missed this...)

Dueling Calculator: Building A Monte Carlo Simulation, Part II

Good morning gamers,

In our last post, we viewed how to set up a Monte Carlo simulation to give us a better understanding of how models do when fighting each other (rather than just generating statistical probabilities). We only focused on the dueling aspect of the game because . . . it was really involved. Today, we finish the discussion (for now) to get the basics of wounding into the simulation. Let's get started!

Building The Simulation: Setting Up Inputs

In our last post, we had to roll dice for both sides, identify penalties applied to those rolls, determine if boosting rolls is a good idea, and then figuring out the highest roll for each side. More than 60 columns later, we found "the winner." Today, we don't have to do as much - but we DO have to generate a ton of columns. Rolling to wound in MESBG is done by one side during each duel (generally speaking - some models, like Sharku or Sharkey, can deal damage to their aggressors when they lose a fight) and it's often resolved within a few seconds of viewing the roll. But here's what's going on during those handful of seconds:

• We figure out how many dice each model will be rolling (factoring in whether or not the enemy is trapped and we double our dice);
• We identify the wounding difficulty we need to reach to successfully wound;
• We roll the dice and look at our initial results and identify any successful wounds;
• We identify if we have any rerolls that we can use (which could be rerolling 1s or rerolling any failed To Wound rolls);
• We identify which dice have succeeded in wounding after rerolling;
• We identify how much Might we'd need to spend to boost a wounding roll; and
• We spend Might to boost wounding rolls that we want to work.
  

In order to walk through these steps is going to take columns - lots of columns for clarity - and we're going to have to make a lot of assumptions that go back to our inputs page. 

Our inputs page has the following information that we can use:

• Base Attacks
• Charge Bonus
• Whether the enemy is trapped
  
• Wounding Difficulty
• Whether the model rerolls 1s To Wound
  
• Number of full rerolls the model receives
• Might allocated to boosting wounding rolls
  

The important thing to keep in mind is that the "Trapped" section is independent of knock-down - is my opponent trapped based on his innate positioning (regardless of whether you charged the guy or not). Setting this up right is important since we're rolling to see who has priority.

Notice that we've also set up different inputs for rerolling 1s and full rerolls - since we can reroll as many 1s as we want when we Feint (or however else you reroll 1s) and we usually have a limited number of rerolls, we will need to keep track of which dice have been rerolled on 1s before we do full rerolls.

Okay, let's get into it!

Dueling Calculator: Building A Monte Carlo Simulation, Part I

Good morning gamers,

Last year, we did a few posts on how to build an Excel-based calculator to determine your probability of winning duels (without boosting and with boosting) and the probability of wounding (either the average expected wounds you'll deal or the likelihood that you deal X wounds to an enemy). These posts, while very useful in providing a statistical view of combats in MESBG, are incomplete. You can tell the calculator that you assume someone has charged, or that someone is within range of a banner, or to some degree that someone has help winning the fight. But no matter how hard you try, there's more information that we might want - and it would be helpful if we could see examples of a combat. For this, we need a simulation - more specifically, a Monte Carlo simulation. And today, we build that.

Monte Carlo Simulations: Repeating A Scenario Many, Many Times

Monte Carlo simulations operate on the following theory: if you repeat a situation thousands of times, you can derive trends from them and get an idea for what to expect in a given (or changing-but-controlled) situation. This is particularly useful when we're rolling dice - you can mathematically figure out your likelihood of getting certain results statistically (as we've already done), but when you have dependent rolls (like dueling and wounding), it's sometimes helpful to see them in examples. And that's what we're doing today.

We're going to create a scenario (two sides fighting) and repeat the scenario 2000 times. Instead of assuming priority, we're going to roll for it - and that means we need to change the scenario inputs a bit. We already have things like Fight Value and number of dice to win the fight and wound on each side, but we need additional information too.

We're also going to allow one side to get up to five model types in the fight (Vertical) and the other side up to two model types in the fight (Horizontal). Because fights break up into one-on-one when multiple models engage from each side, most situations will involve one model on one side and one or more models on the other. The lone model could have a spear-supporting model (or 1-2 pike-supporting models), so I've let the Horizontal team have a second profile option. There may be situations where you'd need more than two profiles for the lower-model-count side (such as an Isengard-Easterling alliance with an Uruk-Hai Berserker supported by an Uruk-Hai Warrior with a pike and an Easterling Warrior with pike and shield), but for simplicity today, we're going to limit the scenario to 5 vs. 2.

We're also going to build out the dueling roll portion only - mostly because the process of accounting for basic dueling and wounding rolls is incredibly complicated and takes a LONG time to explain (I tried doing both dueling and wounding in one post and it was WAY too long). So, keep your shirts on - we'll be back next week to deal with the wounding portion. Keep in mind, though, that we can still learn interesting things from the dueling portion only (which we'll talk about at the end).

Finally, we need to acknowledge when making a simulation like this the first rule of spreadsheet tools:

Columns are free.

Columns in Excel continue to be added as you journey further to the right. We're going to generate a TON of columns in this spreadsheet - and by not constricting ourselves to a certain number of columns, we can keep our granularity as we go and it will keep our cells clean and our work simpler in the long run. So with that, let's dig in and start simulating some fights (well, the dueling portion anyway)!

Dueling Calculator: Dealing X Wounds

Good morning gamers,

Today we're back in the calculator and talking about wounding things. Last time, we talked about how you can calculate the "average expected" number of wounds to a target and today we're looking at the other commonly-asked question: "How likely am I to deal X wounds?" Get your spreadsheets ready (or your coffee if you're just looking for rules of thumb) and let's dig in!

Wounding Rolls: Setting Reasonable Expectations

In this post, we are going to limit our discussion to figuring out how likely a model is to deal 1-6 wounds to an enemy model - we could go as high as 10 (the Balrog and Mumaks) or 20 (Smaug), but most models are killed after suffering 6 wounds AND very few models can deal more than 6 wounds on their own. You CAN apply these principles to doing more than 6 if you want to, but I feel like that's out of scope for this article.

Finding your likelihood of getting X somethings when rolling Y dice can be solved mathematically with a "binomial distribution," which is fancy talk for "finding all the distinct values you can roll for two variables (in this case the number of dice and the probability of wounding) and counting all the things that match." Yes, there's a more technical definition, but that's what it does. :) We're going to be using Microsoft Excel for this exercise, but if you want to understand the math behind the formula we're using, check out this YouTube video (and you can also check out this YouTube video if you build Google Spreadsheets).

To find our probability of getting X successes out of Y dice, we need the following four inputs:

• The number of dice we're rolling (we'll call these "trials");
• The probability of wounding our opponent (we'll call this "p_wound");
• The minimum number of successes we're looking for (we'll call this "floor"); and
• The maximum number of successes we're looking for (we'll call this "ceiling" - though in this case, the ceiling is going to be the same as our "trials" number, since we aren't looking for "exactly 3-5 wounds" in this particular math example).

Dueling Calculator: Average Expected Wounds

Good morning gamers,

A while back we did two posts on how to build a spreadsheet that calculated your probability of winning fights. Both posts focused solely on the dueling roll and how to compute your likelihood of winning a duel based on the number of dice being rolled, the Fight Values of each side, and common modifiers (dueling penalties, use of Might to boost your highest roll, etc.).

For the most part, that tool works well - if only one model is participating on each side of the fight. Once you get more than one friendly model in the fight, you get some really complicated interactions - here are a few of them:

• What happens if some models are using two-handed weapons (-1 to their dueling rolls) and some are using one-handed weapons (no penalty to their dueling roll)?
• What happens if some models have Might that they can use to boost their roll and others don't have Might?
• What about models (like Balin, Lord of Moria) who might be able to reroll both of their dice (but not other dice)?

None of these critiques are in any way saying that the calculator that we built is bad - it's actually quite good (and I think quite elegant for what it was trying to do - but I'm biased). But the calculator isn't robust enough to handle complicated actions - and ALL wounding roll calculations are complicated. So, before we can think about handling the wounding problem, we need to make a few changes to the dueling calculator - changes that will help us answer questions about wounding more easily. We're still going to keep our calculator limited to one model on each side - we'll tackle multiple friendly models some other time.

Wounding Rolls: What Question Are We Trying To Answer?

When it comes to determining who wins a fight, the only question we're really trying to answer is this:

How likely am I to win the roll?

There may be knobs that need to be turned and tweaked (Is Feinting a good idea? Is Striking a good idea? Should I shield? Should I two-hand?) but by an large, these are all pursuing the same question - what am I gaining or giving up in order to win the dueling roll (and do the penalties I'm suffering or the advantages I'm gaining really matter).

When it comes to wounding, there are actually two questions we might be trying to answer:

How many wounds should I reasonably expect to get?

How likely am I to deal X wounds?

These are, in fact, two VERY different questions and which one you're trying to answer determines what we need to compute. The first question is much simpler, so we're going to answer that one today.

Tournament Time: Rythbryt's Army Thoughts

Photo Credit: Hall of Beorn

As some of you faithful readers may know, TMAT's spring tournament is upon us this weekend. (In case you missed it, you can find Tiberius's thoughts on his entry here.) It's shaping up to be pretty small (most likely five players overall), but everyone has a pretty good grasp of the rules, and we always have a good time of it. Plus it's a chance to try out some of my new terrain boards!

As with every tournament we've ever done, I had a characteristically difficult time settling on a list for this event. In fairness, given that this particular tournament is an escalation event, I actually had to settle on three lists... so I was kinda screwed from the beginning. 

I had several criteria going into this tournament:

• Run something new. Playing games is the most fun, but I enjoy the hobbying side of MESBG quite a bit, and had a lot of plastic kits sitting in my storage closet when the tourney was soft-announced by Tiberius around Christmas time. So I figured, why not take the opportunity to try something new? I've run orcs twice (Mordor once, and Angmar once), and Iron Hills the other two times (a hero-heavy Erebor Reclaimed for 2019's Grand Tournament, and an Iron Hills / Survivors of Lake-Town alliance at a follow-up Fall event), and while I dabbled in a few lists that featured more orcs or more dwarves, I ultimately decided on something different.
• Competitive at all three points levels... but not oppressive. Part of this is probably residual guilt from taking Angmar to TMAT's Spring festivities... that army is definitely competitive, but it's not exactly fun to play against (go figure, for a list with triple barrow-wights plus the Witch-King on Fell-Beast). This time, I wanted something that'd be at least somewhat fun to play against for most armies--yet another reason I shied away from my beloved Iron Hills dwarves (and a reason why I looked more seriously at regular Mordor orcs for a while)--while also giving me some fun pieces to play with. The escalation aspect had more of an impact on competitiveness than I thought it would: the Rangers of Ithilien Legendary Legion is really, really strong at 450 and 600, but I think it starts to suffer diminishing returns (or runs into harder counters) at the 750 level... not that I was considering taking the Rangers, of course (because I'm trying not to be oppressive, remember? :-P ).
• Combat heroes... preferably in multiples. Again, I'm not knocking Angmar, but it's an army (as I built it, at least) that didn't have much in the way of combat heroes (the Witch-King and a Wild Warg Chieftain), and almost no Might to speak of (5 total). I quite enjoy playing armies with lots of heroes, because it can create some interesting challenges for both sides: heavy-hero armies tend to be outnumbered a lot, so there's a lot riding on your heroes to even the odds before you succumb to attrition. It's also one of the best counters I've found in practice to enemy magic, because most armies don't run more than one top-tier wizard and/or two beefy heroes, so if you have 3+ combat heroes, there are very few armies that can lock all of them down. And let's face it... the game is far more interesting when there are heroes involved (especially if they're iconic heroes). The fact that the 750 match would be Fog of War (which can reward you for having multiple heroes) was a nice bonus, and I also suspected that there'd be a fair bit of Bodyguard cav at this tournament (in which case, I would prefer a solid Might store to stay in the game): far better to have the Might and choose not to use it, than to need the Might and not have it.
• Average to above-average model count. I've run super-elite hero-heavy armies before (my Erebor Reclaimed force a couple years back featured only 24 models at 700 points, with five of them being heroes--but that doesn't really count, because Iron Hills Warriors aren't your typical warriors). My experience with Angmar in the Spring really sold me on having a solid number of models. I also think the choice of scenarios, on balance, favors having more models than less: Hold Ground (450 points) is a more-models-than-you-in-the-center mission, To the Death (600) awards a ton of points if you can break the enemy without breaking yourself, and Fog of War (750) may require me to be in several spots at once on the opponent's side of the board at the end of the game (which may be a problem if I have low-courage troops and am broken). My goal was to shoot for 20+ models at 450, and 35+ models at 750. Anything at or above that level--coupled with a few combat heroes to do the work--should be at least competitive in all three scenarios.
• Have at least one incredibly fun model. I checked with Tiberius (who's TO'ing this event) about the power-curve of this particular tournament, and he assured me that I could get as competitive as I wanted with these lists (in his words, "this is the GRAND TOURNAMENT, after all"). Having said that, I did want to include at least one "fun" model who's a joy to play with on the table--something along the lines of Aragorn, or Bolg, or Glorfindel (all of whom I play-tested at various points over the past few months). At 750, I figured I could probably afford whoever I wanted (even Sauron)... but scaling an army built around a big hero, and accomplishing everything else I wanted the list to do, proved to be a bit more challenging.

With these general goals in place, I set about the task of list-building in earnest. And boy, did I build lists... most of them got recorded in the "Notes" app on my iPhone, and I literally have forty-five notes dating back to December 2020 filled with different lists ideas. Most notes contain 6-9 different lists (because again, it's an escalation event), so that's easily 200+ lists that I wrote down at various points over the past four months (God only knows how many more I thought about, and didn't commit to digital paper).

To be fair, some of the lists I jotted down were never really in the running (my "Wee Three Kings?" list, for example, featuring the Goblin King, the Witch-King of Dol Guldur, and the Spider Queen... though it did come in at 52 models, which isn't bad for a convenient alliance that featured a banner, four cav, a decent number of hunter orcs, three Mirkwood Spiders, and a Bat Swarm). But eventually these six lists rose to the top... and then fell by the wayside for one reason or another.

Option 1: Men of the South (Waaaaay South)

The first army I really wanted to run involved Corsairs, because I played an evil horde at TMAT's last tournament and really enjoyed it. The problem with the force was three-fold. First, I initially built the list assuming we were playing at 500, 650, and 800, and I really liked how the Corsairs scaled at that points level (basically, I could get to 50 models at 800 points and have the Knight of Umbar on Fell Beast as my third-banana multi-use combat/magic hero, along with Dalamyr and Delgamar plus a Bosun). 

Scaling the lists down to 450, 600, and 750 proved more challenging than I thought, and I could never settle on something else that I really liked. This list is the closest I got to locking things in... 

While in retrospect this looks pretty intimidating, there were three things I couldn't "fix" in these lists. 

Math: Should I Boost My Roll to Win This Duel?

Good morning gamers,

In our last post on dueling math, we talked about how to make a spreadsheet that computes your probabilities of winning a fight, given two sets of combatants. We talked about how to scale the number of dice being used - and even applying certain dueling penalties to your models. When we got to increasing your dueling rolls (usually with Might, could be with other rules), we decided to call it quits and start a new post. That's where we're picking up today.

Part 5: Handling Dueling Penalties and Boosts Better

It turns out that computing boosted dueling rolls requires re-thinking the way we've done the previous computations, since we can now have numbers going both up and down (and, of course, the reductions and boosts can be totally different). We also know that penalties are applied before Might is spent, so nothing can get below a 1 - and nothing can be higher than a 6. We know that reasonably we shouldn't see more than a -2 penalty applied to dueling rolls AND we shouldn't see more than a +5 applied to boosting rolls (to boost a 1 to a 6), so let's assume that (from a configuration perspective) this is what we need the tool to do. 

To begin with, let's take as our case study a duel between Angbor the Fearless (who gets a -1 penalty when he doesn't roll a 6) and a Morannon Orc Captain with shield. To compute Angbor's dueling probabilities, we will be setting up an extra set of numbers near the box that pre-computes the dueling penalties and boosts we're willing to make:

On the right side of the 6x6 grid, we have greyed-out numbers that apply the penalties and bonuses that we specify in our configuration section for the vertical character. You'll see something similar below the 6x6 grid for the horizontal character. These tell us what value we would ROLL in order to get the final result on the left-hand side (so Angbor's value for "1" on the left shows a "2" on the right side because the 2 will be degraded to a 1 with his broadsword). Similarly, he has no value for a 5 - any 5s will become 4s and any 6s will remain 6s.

The greyed out cells work as follows: =<original_value> - <dueling_penalty> - <boosting_bonus>. If you're thinking, "Wait, why am I subtracting a negative number and subtracting a positive number? I want my negative number to make my number go down and my positive number to make my number go up, right?" Well, yes . . . that's actually what we're doing, but it's not intuitive. Let's look at an example to make it a little clearer.

Suppose you suffer a -1 penalty from a two-handed weapon. Assuming you don't have Might to boost your dueling roll, you will end up with a 3 whenever you would have rolled a 4. In our system, to figure out how often you get a result of a 3 as your final value, you want the grey number to become a 4 in the line that the 3 is displayed in. Since the penalty is listed as a negative value, we need to subtract the negative from our original value in order for it to get increased properly.

Similarly, if you boost your dueling roll by +1 (usually with Might), all rolls of 2 will become a 3 after you boost it. So if we're trying to figure out how often we get an end result of 3, we would want the grey number to become 2 (which, again, involves subtraction).

Two of the greyed-out cells do special things: the one in the "5" slot has to check to see if both the dueling penalty box is set to preserving 6s AND no Might is being used to boost - when this is the case, it returns 0 (since you will never have a situation where you end up with a 5 high). In all other cases, it works just like all the other cells. Similarly, the cell in the "6" slot has to check to see if the dueling penalty box is set to preserving 6s - if so, it's set to 6. Otherwise, we use the exact same formula that we used in the previous boxes (original score - penalties - boosts).

Okay, so let's assume that we now have the right values being calculated so we know what our expected values are supposed to be. How do we translate these new values into our 6x6 grid? Well, we update our cells on the left and top sides of the grid - here's how . . .

Math: Am I Gonna Win This Duel?

Good morning gamers,

We've posted a few articles from a guest author named Sharbie who's taken up writing on his own blog - and his stuff is good (you should check it out). Sharbie had a set of two articles written earlier in the year that talked about the Cave Drake: the first covered how good he is in combat, while the other covered some additional maths based on comments that were made (including one of my comments, I'm proud to say). My question was based on a scenario he provided about how someone like Elrond would fare against the Cave Drake in a one-on-one contest. Ignoring how likely you are of getting a one-on-one duel against a Cave Drake with Elrond (he's going to have bodyguards - or he should), let's assume that Elrond does find himself alone in that kind of fight? How do we figure out how likely either side is to win?

The answer to that question (the math behind it) is the topic for today: if I know how many dice I'm rolling and the Fight Value of my models, how can I build my own spreadsheet to figure out the answers to the questions I want to ask? Assuming you want to use Microsoft Excel (or a Google Spreadsheet or some other similar spreadsheet tool) and you want to learn how to fish (so to speak), read on.

Before we dig in, I must add that Rythbryt did a post on some of this a while back in his series on Heroic Strike - if you want to check your math results in this post against something right, you can look there to compare. We'll give examples to illustrate,  but check against those if you don't believe me. Today we will be less concerned about explaining the numbers (though we will) as we are how to compute the numbers from a mathematically sound perspective.

Jay Clare's Top 10 Slayer Heroes - Tiberius's Take, Part 2

Good morning gamers,

Hopefully by now, you've seen both of Jay Clare's articles on his top slaying heroes for both the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil. You might have also read Rythbyrt's posts on the reranking of Jay's lists (Good, Evil Part 1, Evil Part 2). You might have even read Centaur's articles on the worst slayers for the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil. I've already written my reranking of Jay's list for the Forces of Good - today we tackle the Forces of Evil. If you thought this would be an "I already laid out my methodology, so let's dig in" kind of post (like I did), think again . . .

Methodology: Categories and Weights

If you read my first article, the methodology used to rank each model was based on seven categories: hero slaying, troop slaying, survivability, mobility, empowerment, impact, and cost. While I could have limited myself to Jay's list, I wanted to take a more expansive approach, so I did what I did for the Forces of Good:

I evaluated 125 profiles for the Forces of Evil.

From Smaug to Sharkey, I walked through each hero, evaluated them, then questioned whether I gave them the best possible evaluation. There were roughly 50 fewer applicants this time around (far fewer named heroes in the Evil batch than the Good batch), but that didn't make the competition any less fierce. After many iterations and changes in the framework, I finally have a list I'm happy with. I will say that I didn't evaluate war beasts, siege engines, or warrior models, so if you're expecting Mumaks to dominate my scores in our podcast, you're in for some disappointment.

Overly Pedantic Stats: The Ten WORST Slayers (Evil)

 Hey Reader!

In our last post we looked at the top ten worst slaying heroes for the Forces of Good. Since Rythbryt has taken his look at Jay Clare's list of the top ten slayers for the Forces of Evil and then did his follow-up post on the top three in greater depth, in the same vein as our last post we will be looking at something completely different: the absolute WORST evil slayers in the game. 

In this post we continue by looking at the stats to find the "top ten" worst slayers for the Forces of Evil. These models fall under the same parameters as our last post: the models must be capable of dealing wounds (which actually doesn't prevent anyone from making this list - I guess that makes sense for evil models?), the model must be a hero, and all troop types (siege weapons, monsters, etc.) are on the table. As you can imagine, no monsters made this list.

We will be looking at five categories for this, as we always do: hero slaying capabilities (to show how well you kill heroes), troop slaying capabilities (for how well you chew through armies), defensive capabilities (for staying power to keep killing things), support capabilities (for making it easier for people to kill around you), and mobility (to get into range to kill stuff, be that at range or in melee).

So with no further ado, the literal WORST evil killers in the game!

Overly Pedantic Stats: The Ten WORST Slaying Heroes (Good)

 Hey Reader!

We were blessed a few months ago with Jay Clare's thoughts about the best slayers in the game, and I've really enjoyed seeing everyone's take on it. Whether that's Rythbryt's analysis or Tiberius's analysis (both of which have good math and metrics behind them), or comments in Facebook groups and on YouTube, I've really enjoyed seeing the love shown to so many models in the game, and that just speaks to the quality of the models that have been made for our game. 

So a huge thank you to the team at GW for making all of this possible, :)

But some models suck at wounding, and since literally NO ONE asked for that, we're going to use some overly pedantic stats to bring to you the absolute WORST slayers in the game, starting with the Forces of Good.

We have two rules for this competition. First, you must be capable of wounding, so no, Frodo of the Nine Fingers, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, and Goldberry will not be doing a three-way tie for #1. You must be capable of wounding, but not be very good at it. 

Second, you must be a hero to be considered: we will not be looking at warrior models for this competition. This means we will be considering siege veterans, but the model must be a hero in order to count for the competition. No surprises to anyone, no monsters made this list, but we have left it open to hero monsters in case one of them was somehow atrocious at killing things.

We will be looking at five categories for this, as we always do, but a little different this time (as cost doesn't play as much into this equation): hero slaying capabilities (to show how well you kill heroes), troop slaying capabilities (for how well you chew through armies), defensive capabilities (for staying power to keep killing things), support capabilities (for making it easier for people to kill around you), and mobility (to get into range to kill stuff, be that at range or in melee).

So with no further ado, the literal WORST killers in the game!

Overly Pedantic Stats: Improving Isengard

 Hey Reader!

Welcome back to the blog! In our local tournament meta Isengard has been having a bear of a time with it, struggling to win at tournaments for the past several years. Whether this is because of poor rolling, difficult scenarios, or list building is unknown to me, but I figured there's only one of those that I can fix, and that is the list building element for tournmaent goers.

So I cracked out my overly pedantic stats spreadsheet and gave myself an afternoon to just look at what they had and how the models stacked up to see if people are making suboptimal choices when building out an army, and what I found astounded me.

As a quick reminder, we're looking at models and how they rank in five categories: offensive capability, defensive capability, support options, mobility, and cost (with low scores indicating a high cost, and a high score indicating a low cost).

I.  Best Statistical Heroes for Isengard

Not surprisingly, the best hero in the Isengard list is Saruman (3.4), who sports a horse for good mobility (and actually decent melee prowess on the charge, as you get F5, a two-handed staff, and access to magic before the fight begins) accompanied by a wide range of supporting and debilitating magic. What does surprise me is how many Isengard armies I see that don't use Saruman. Naturally if you are running a legendary legion you will not be taking Saruman, but I've also seen vanilla Isengard armies that run only uruk heroes (mostly to save points and build out numbers, all while taking advantage of that F5 S5 combo), and while they are good, Saruman is far better than all of them.

The next two heroes are also not necessarily surprises: Lurtz and Thrydan Wolfsbane (tied at 3.0). This also explains why these legendary legions perform well: both have good heroes that are very good at killing things for a relatively low cost. Naturally I think these guys bring less to the table than Saruman, but on their own they will make good contenders as your army leader. Naturally Thrydan is best in the legendary legion, though backing him up with F4 uruks is also very competitive, so don't shy away from bringing this guy.

Jay Clare's Top 10 Slayer Heroes - Tiberius's Take

Good morning gamers,

A few weeks ago, Rythbyrt did a re-ranking of Jay Clare's Top 10 Slayers list for the Forces of Good. The MESBG community has had a lot to say about Jay's article (both here and on the rest of the interwebs), so I thought I'd provide a different way to evaluate the heroes on Jay's list. While Rythbyrt highlighted with pictures a lot of heroes who could have made the Top 10, I'm going to skip that and just focus on Jay's guys (most of them made my Top 15, so I think it's a pretty good list).

Methodology: Categories and Weights

Like Rythbyrt, we're looking at seven categories, but we're applying weights to them in order to make the two "Slayer" categories stand out more. I also decided that my ability to evaluate these heroes couldn't be done objectively if I took a subjective, feel-based approach (there are some heroes that I just want to see do well). Why didn't I feel like I could be objective?

Because I evaluated 178 profiles for the Forces of Good.

Yes, you heard me right - I evaluated heroes as powerful as Treebeard and as weak as Rosie Cotton. I did NOT evaluate Frodo of the Nine Fingers or Lobelia Sackville-Baggins because they couldn't wound anyone, and therefore are not slayers (somehow I doubt they would rank well even if they could). I could probably make a list of 50 models and say, "Yeah, I think I could rank these 50," but invariably, I'd miss someone, have to fit them in somewhere, and then look at the list at a later date and say, "Well, I know from experience that this hero is really good at killing things - I need to make room for him on the list." The iterations would never end and each time I'd probably feel like I got both closer to "what felt right" and farther from "what felt right". So to avoid all of that, I turned to math (and let whatever iterations fall where they would - for the record, I'm not happy with some of my rankings, but that is what it is).

5 More Ways to Waste Might Points

Good morning gamers,

Last time we did this, we talked about the five things that I thought were the biggest waste of Might in MESBG. In October 2020, the Durin Show did an analysis of what was written, so since they seemed to eat it up, we're doing it again! 

Side-note: if you haven't checked out the Durin Show, you should - their discussions are brilliant. 

The situations I'm going to cover might be a bit less controversial this time, but a little controversy is good for getting us to re-think our innate assumptions about this game we love, no? Before we dig in, let's review the principle that we'll be following in this discussion:

Might is too precious of a resource to waste.

If you agree with this sentiment, everything we're going to talk through will make (at least some) sense. If you're like me, though, knowing that something is a waste doesn't make it any less tempting, so naturally, there will be exceptions to everything. :-)

Let's get into it!

Overly Pedantic Stats: Best Elven Faction?

 Hey Reader!

We're back with another episode of Overly Pedantic Stats, and this post was prompted by the fact that I'm revisiting Rohan, and as I started thinking through the Helm's Deep legendary legion, it got me to wondering whether it was worth it to purchase Lothlorien models, as I've never run Lorien before.

Now, in the last iteration of the game (and I've mentioned this in the past on this blog), I thought that the Galadhrim were a terrible model, failing to be as cheap as wood elves, as resilient as high elves, or as deadly as mirkwood elves. But with the newest iteration of the game where 1) the Galadhrim now have heavy armor instead of just armor, and 2) you can only get wood elves in a Lorien list or a Gildor Inglorien warband for Rivendell, I was curious to see how good Lorien is now.

And that meant it was time for overly pedantic stats analysis. We'll be looking at five elements of the army: killing power (both in melee and at range), duel winning ability, resilience to damage, mobility, and overall cost. Inasmuch as magic factors into these rankings (Blinding Light helping with resilience, Nature's Wrath helping with killing power as it deals wounds and traps targets that are on the ground, etc.) we have also considered magic, but do not have a dedicated "Magic" category, and that will highly favor the fleshed out army lists over the less fleshed out lists.

We will discuss each of them in order from weakest to strongest, looking at the following factions: Rivendell, Lothlorien, Halls of Thranduil, and the Helm's Deep Legendary Legion contingent of Galadhrim.

Overly Pedantic Stats: Improving Minas Tirith

 Hey Reader!

Welcome back to the blog! I spent some time tracking the performance of Minas Tirith armies at our tournaments over the years, and it didn't surprise me to find that pure Minas Tirith armies (and even allied Minas Tirith + Fiefdoms armies) didn't perform well in our meta. So I got to thinking, "Why is that? Gondor is such a strong faction with so many options and lots of heroes to round them out, so why don't they win more often?" I can't chalk it up to lack of skill because the players who have used them performed well in other tournaments, so I my puzzlement grew.

And that's when I cracked out the overly pedantic stats spreadsheet, because that's what nerds do.

And would you believe it - I found some answers that might help. The purpose of this post is to help you think through how you can improve your Minas Tirith game purely based off of stats: strategy will matter as will objectives, but since those are intangible variables we won't be factoring those into the stats. Instead we will be looking at small changes you can make to increase the overall effectiveness of the profiles in your army to set you up for success.

And with that, join me in my descent into overly analyzed math.

Overly Pedantic Stats: Are Hobbit Armies better than LotR Armies?

 Hey Reader!

I'm beginning a new series on this blog centered around "overly pedantic stats," wherein we assign statistical values to different characteristics of a model to determine how strong the innate stat block is compared to other factions. We do not factor in skill level of the player, army composition, formations, or scenario, but instead just look at the raw stats of the warriors and heroes to see how good they are vis-à-vis each other. 

We looked at five different characteristics for every hero and warrior: offensive capabilities, defensive capabilities, utility abilities, movement values, and cost. Each model was ranked on a scale of 1-5 in each category, and then was assigned a final overall value for the model. This overall value will not be used in today's post, as we are instead looking at the overall score by category for each civ, to see how they line up. We can then use these stats to determine the relative strength of the models in each faction in the game.

One use case for using these stats is answering the question of "power creep": are factions that were released later in the game (found in the Armies of The Hobbit book) stronger or better than the earlier factions that were released (found in the Armies of The Lord of the Rings book)? Let's find out.

Top 5 Ways to Waste Might Points: One Gamer’s Opinion

Good morning gamers,

In this series on heroes, we’ve covered an exhaustive reviewof the Dwarves in Thorin’s Company (and which variant is better – the Thorin’s Company ones or the Erebor Reclaimed ones) and revisited a taxonomy on Isengard heroes that we did a while back. Today, we turn to the use of Might, one of the most important resources you’ll have to manage in the Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game. Some of the thoughts I have in this article have already crept up in some of my other articles, but I think they all bear repeating in one central place. And if you’re going to talk about heroes for a month, talking about Might is probably a good thing to add to the conversation.

The guiding rule we’re going to following today is this:

Might is a scarce and important resource – don’t risk wasting it!

If you accept this rule, everything I’m about to write makes sense (even if it galls us to have to admit in a game). While the purely analytical side of me agrees wholeheartedly with this, I often find myself drawn to violate the following five rules (so naturally, I’m going to caveat exceptions to all of them). :-) Okay, enough blather - let’s get into it!