The Road To The TMAT GT 2022: Tiberius's List

Good morning gamers,

Well, we're preparing for the GT this weekend and today we're going to talk about the armies I thought about taking and what army I decided to take. I should mention that while there are five lists here that could have worked well, it was always going to be one of two lists.

The Tournament Format

The tournament this year will feature the veto system, with each round coming from a different pool of the Matched Play Guide. The pools will be the control pool (#2), the slaying pool (#4), and the get-somewhere pool (#5). Each round the players will take turns vetoing a scenario from the pool, leaving only one scenario to play that round.

The tournament is also set for 800pts and 2:15:00 rounds, so there's enough time to finish the scenario if the players play quickly. We've never done an 800pt event before, so this will be a new one for us.

That's it for the preliminaries - let's look at some lists!

List #5: The Vanquishers of the Necromancer LL

Yep, they're the hot new sauce - and while Gandalf might be required now, at 800pts neither the most recent list building rule that Gandalf needs to be in the list nor the demotion of Galadriel to a Hero of Fortitude change anything (except that Galadriel is less likely to be issued a Heroic Challenge). Yes, you can't cast Sorcerous Blast, Nature's Wrath, and Wrath of Bruinen after you've been charged, but you still have plenty of melee combat potential and spells like Immobilize, Panic Steed, Renew, and Banishment can be game-changing and are still fair game when your models have been charged. 

Based on the THREE objective-scenario practice games that I played, I learned that . . . I have a lot to learn about playing objective-based games with these guys. Knowing that at least one scenario would require me to do this, I'm putting them back in the box and will bring them out for a tournament in the future (and learn how to use them better).

• Saruman the White [ARMY LEADER]
• Gandalf the Gray
• Galadriel, Lady of Light
• Elrond, Master of Rivendell with heavy armor
• Radagast the Brown

In Defense Of: Ted Sandyman

 Hey Reader!

Today we're continuing the In Defense Of series, and Tiberius asked me to jump in and chat about Ted Sandyman, as we're finishing out "Ruffian Month," and the In Defense Of series wouldn't be complete without referencing one of the models I referred to as one of the ten worst evil slayers in the game. We will start by looking at why people tell you not to take him, then we'll discuss why you should take him, and then close out by discussing how to make him work effectively in your army list.

Why NOT To Take Ted Sandyman

Was planning on painting these guys this month, but
I've been working on stuff for the tournament. April, though!

Most of this comes down to profile: if you're going to get a hero, you should be getting someone that will be useful to you, either by providing a useful special rule to aid your team (like the Goblin Scribe, who sucks at everything except one thing: flooding your enemy with free guys), or calling useful heroic actions (like captains calling Heroic March), or having good stats (like the combat heroes and wizards have).

Ted has none of these: he has no special heroic actions, which means you can use his 1 Might Point to call a Heroic Move (or maybe a Heroic Combat if you happen to be in a fight you like with, say, Sid Briarthorn or Rowan Thistlewood), but other than that, he's not helping on that score. He has no auric or helpful special rules (beyond the one that limits his warband to F1 S2 models), unless you count Resistant to Magic which is more of a personal bonus than anything else unless you happen to fight a wizard with an area of effect spell.

And as a hobbit, it's not surprising when I say that he has bad heroic stats: for +15 points you could get a Moria Goblin Captain who is +1 Fight, +1 Strength, +1 Defense, +1" of movement, +1 Wound, +1 Might, and access to Heroic March - almost a straight +1 across the board over Ted in every category (in exchange for slightly better shooting with a S1 stationary 8" throwing weapon and Resistant to Magic).

That's bad.

Quest of the Ringbearer: Pop-up Bree, Part 2

Good morning gamers,

Before we get into the meat of this post, I just wanted to note that we recently passed 1 MILLION page views on the blog (if you trust the Google analytics). From all of us at TMAT, thanks for reading the things we post - it really does keep us going!

We have our annual grand tournament here at TMAT coming up next week and for this tournament, I decided I wanted to bring my Bree board to the event. Naturally, having 17 buildings on the board wasn't going to happen (Army Leader brawl during Contest of Champions in the Prancing Pony, anyone?), but I did want the board to be finished and about 8 buildings on the board (2/quadrant). If possible, I wanted to get all of the buildings done so I could say, "It's done" - and I also wanted things IN the buildings to make them more interesting. So today, we're going to see what I did!

Board Construction

Bree - multi-functional for Matched Play or Scenario Play . . .

The board is basic - two 2' x 4' half-inch sheets of polystyrene (cut from an 8' x 4' half-inch sheet of polystyrene) that can be arranged in two ways (one with the Prancing Pony in the center of the board, one with the prancing pony left off and the rest of the town kind of staggered). While not ideal for modular play (would have been better as four 2' x 2' panels with nothing overlapping the edges), the board is designed to be used in the Escape from Bree scenario (which is why the Pony spans the middle) and does have a lot of alleyways for moving troops around. Frankly, I like it.

As I mentioned in the last post, I wanted the buildings to be removable and easily storable - and part of the removability was to have their bases affixed to the board. I glued the bases to the board with PVA and used a collection of works from William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to keep them flat as they dried. Some warped a bit, but on the whole, they came out just fine. Each was cut with a knife to make floor designs and then sprayed with Kona Brown spray paint.

The ground texture was caused by a mixture of rolling a foil ball across the surface and spraying textured spray paint over the top. I've put rocks and other grit on boards before and sealing them up is really difficult. Both of the techniques I used this time either indent the board OR adhere directly to it. Because I knew I was going to be spray-painting directly onto the board (instant death for polystyrene), I decided I was going to leave the plastic layer that came with the board on it as a layer of protection for the polystyrene. It seemed to work pretty well. Everything then got sprayed in Kona Brown (I went through two cans getting the board and bases set).

Finally, a few of the buildings were going to be heavily used by animals or feed for said animals, so I put some dull grass flocking in some of the areas (glued with watered-down PVA) and then sealed it with a sealant spray. I didn't want this stuff flaking off, so the seal helped make it rigid.

In Defense Of: Sid Briarthorn

Sid Briarthorn up front as Rowan and Sharkey argue about
directions. Bill and Worm clearly side with Rowan.

 Hey Reader!

Today we're continuing the In Defense Of series, and Tiberius asked me to jump in and chat about Sid Briarthorn, as I've started tinkering with Ruffians and finished painting up the model! We will start by looking at why people tell you not to take this model, then we'll discuss why you should take it, and then close out by discussing how to make it work effectively in your army list.

Why NOT To Take Sid Briarthorn

So, like all of the heroes from Sharkey's Rogues (and The Chief's Ruffians legendary legion), Sid is not a "power hero" in combat: at F4 S4 with 2 Attacks he's barely hitting the baseline for, "this guy will feel like he's better than your average warrior," and by that I mean "he's tying an Uruk-Hai Berserker in fighting stats" while costing 25pts more than one of them. Add onto this the fact that he's only D4 with 2 Wounds and 1 Fate, and he's not a survivable hero either.

And while he's cheap, he's surrounded by other cheap heroes, so he's the "best answer" you have to big heroes that the enemy fields (other than throwing tons of bodies at the problem and hoping it works), which also kind of puts him in the precarious situation of attracting the Elendils, Aragorns, and Azogs of the world because why not remove a Stand Fast hero that is also a banner? And with his combat stats, he's very easy to kill.

Furthermore, Sid suffers from the general problem for Sharkey's Rogues heroes: no cavalry. Unlike Arwen and Eowyn who have a horse to make their S3 more reliable at killing things, Sid has to rely on...I guess trapping people with overwhelming numbers from buddies? And maybe Heroic Strength, assuming you can win the fight in the first place? Add onto this the fact that chasing people down with Sid is not easy and you are highly susceptible to archery, and you've got some built-in issues with getting killing power out of one of the most killy heroes in the faction.

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!