The Changing Game

This weekend Games Workshop is finally releasing the stats for all of the LotR SBG models.  Sadly they are doing it in five books.  Happily, from my point of view, they are not changing the main rule book.

The good news is that I no longer have to carry around an arm full of White Dwarfs.  This is an eternal problem, as old as White Dwarf, but at least for awhile we will have everything we need in these five books.  This also means that Legions of Middle Earth is now irrelevant.  It's few uses are superseded by the new books.


The bad news, from where I'm standing, is that it looks as if horde armies are a thing of the past.  The new composition rules force you to take a hero for every twelve troops.  Each of these warbands can be taken from a different list and all evil armies can ally with ally evil and all good with good.  The thing is this; I like to run armies with only a couple of heroes and a ton of dudes.  It's a very different style of play to what everyone else at the store runs.  I do well with these armies and they are, to me, more challenging to play.

I'll have to wait until this weekend to see what the new rules bring in but I'm going to have to drop quite a few troops in order to buy the extra heroes I need.  My current list is short at least one Chieftain.  I'm also not sure I'll be able to keep the Nazgul in, which is a shame since I have really enjoyed playing him.  This will also change my Gondor army, since I ran it with 56 models but only two heroes.  The good news there is that the Ithilien list has some cheap heroes I can bring in.  My Rohan list will not change much at all since I always ran it hero heavy in order to get the heroic moves the weak Rohan cav needs to survive.

Everything above is based on the assumption that points/stats don't change too much.  The examples in White Dwarf had no changes to price.  They don't give stats.  Of course this is the same magazine that had a Nazgul leading a non-Nazgul warband.  If that is legal then my life is easier.  If not, then WTF WD?

It will be interesting times building some new lists at any rate.