Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Fantasy Adventures => Topic started by: Froggy the Great on January 22, 2018, 03:02:50 PM
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So I've got most of the Lord of the Rings armies made up in 6mm/granny-grating. Each unit is two stands front to back of 20mm x 60mm, so a 40mmx x60mm effective size. Skirmishers are a single stand, and heroes/leaders are on pennies.
I'm looking for a good mass battle system that doesn't rely on individual person casulties and doesn't clutter the table with too many tokens.
Here's what I've found so far:
--Hail Caesar: Excellent game, but there's no index and about 80,000 special cases and modifiers to remember.
--Dragon Rampant: Also excellent, but skirmish based and relies on individual hitpoints.
--Granny Grating Armies: Decent game, it gets a bit fiddly.
--Warmaster: My bases are the wrong size and oh my goodness the sea of text and diagrams and charts and diagrams and charts and my head asplode.
--Mayhem: Seems ok, has some weird roll-high / roll-low inconsistencies.
Anyone have suggestions?
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Basic Impetus (second version now) and the free Impetus Fantasy expansion give an excellent game and will work with your basing.
http://www.wargamevault.com/product/200518/Basic-Impetus-2 (http://www.wargamevault.com/product/200518/Basic-Impetus-2)
Or the GW "War of the Ring" rules themselves (although they are a bit more expensive.....but worth having just for the pictures anyway)
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Hordes of the things is free and a popular choice at the scale.
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Maybe take a look at Armies of Arcana? Aimed more for 28mm/15mm and the casualty removal system calls for removing individual models but you could work around that easily enough with casualty caps or somesuch. Has the significant advantage of a fairly robust build-your-own unit rule set so you can use just about anything the way you want.
Two Hour Wargames has at least one mass combat system as well, and Rebel has Mighty Armies (although that might be too close to Warmaster - simpler though).
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Hordes of the things is free and a popular choice at the scale.
I'm unable to locate a download link. I do see that v2.1 came out a few years ago and the 2.0 free download was removed...
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Yes, HotT isn't free any more. But it is very good indeed - and has some Tolkien-inspired army lists included. It also scales nicely: while it's set up for a 24AP game on a 3' square table, you can happily play much bigger games, generally by breaking down the armies into a number of 24AP or 36AP commands. An advantage that HotT has over many games, I think, is that it's specifically designed to reflect fantasy literature rather than having its ethos largely derived from other games.
I'd also recommend Mayhem, though. Have you played it? I don't recall the inconsistencies you mention, other than rolling high for command points and low in combat. The default option makes the game much less swingy than it might first appear. We've played it in a couple of scales, and it's great. I think manoeuvre is much more of a feature of Mayhem than of many other games, as you can gamble on really pushing certain units forward. The only downside is that no standard profiles are given in the game. But there's a free list included in a download for it (basically, Warmaster armies). And it's easy to make your own. In fact, the unit design feature might really suit Middle Earth, as it'll allow you to have very powerful elves, etc. And the horde rules allow you design orcish units that are poor fighters but effective in very large numbers.
Your basing will work fine in both games, as you have the correct frontage and depths don't really matter.
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I'd have a look at mighty armies. Bases shouldn't be a problem if both armies are the same.
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To The Strongest had considered a fantasy version (To The Strangest, I believe). I don't now what has happened to these. Lord of the Rings is fairly fantasy light, I think any historical mass battle rules would be OK with some home rule additions for the fantasy bits.
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Sword and spear may be one to look at. It's replaced Impetus in our group. You end up with a few tokens around though - to show when things have moved and casualties but nothing more than other games on average. You can also model those as needed to make them look better.
But for not tokens HOtT may be the way to go with that basing.