I was wondering as a new player what are the pros and cons between this two set of rules? the old rules were so bad that GW had to changed? to me, the limitation that gave me the warbands is that if I want more troops I have to spent points in a captain or hero while in the other book is one hero and as many warriors as you can. I haven't played with the old rules but sounds more epic for me

I think you got the point in your very answer. Not everyone was happy with LOME setting, since it allowed players to spam tons of troops even at low points games.
Warbands put a limit to spamming and added what I think is a more strategic approach to game. More troops means more heroes and more heroes means more might. Plus, games are less time-consuming (at least in my experience)

but in the end, I can't say that warbands are better than Legion. There are those who like it and those who don't.
Personally, I'd have the warbands with the allies limitation of Legions, something close to the DCHL's Nova rules.

Legions had a really dumb model number restriction. It was possible for a Lorien army to have Haldir and 70 elves in a 700 point list, while a Moria army could only have the exact same number of models. Warbands keeps spam armies to the armies that are supposed to be spammed, like orcs, goblins and the like while preventing elves from being spammed.

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While I fully admit the current rules set itself is an improvement in some areas, I have always had a serious problem with the warband FOC that came with that.

I doubt "gamers" will view this the same nor have the same feelings I do, but I got into SBG strictly from a few viewpoints. 1 being able to create as accurate as possible "true to lore" armies that are themed to what is historically known by tolkiens writings. 2 focusing on what would be classed under smaller conflicts with unknown heroes such as captains. 3 build up points in the main storyline.

For an example I built my lothlorien army and dol guldur army focused on the final fall of DG, when the galadhrim chose to fully and finally destroy it for good, and also parts of the white council, this gives me a lot of options for situations like...elrond or the others traveling through mirkwood before they all met up, I think it's fair to say there would have been scouting troops and mini battles that happened between the white council confronting and driving sauron out, just as there was a period of time that lothlorien fought the forces of DG before the white lady destroyed it.

You are VERY restricted doing these sorts of things with warbands, to the point it's either impossible or outright stupid from a lore perspective.

Now I will be the first to admit that SBG itself is in no way able to handle some of the truly epic battles that took places over the 3 ages in middle earth, and to get around some of this we can sort of imagine that say our "1500 point" army that is hero heavy with some odd 50-70 models or so is that "main focus" point with hundreds or thousands of bog standard troops fighting all around us, I can accept that...and use my imagination.

What bothers me is that I should not be forced ( and this is tolkiens world and middle earth after all...so this is the exception in other situations I would not care ) to have some utterly absurd and stupid army of 12 guys and a captain, because that would truly be what would be around a warband at it's close to smallest size ( maybe 5 and a leader I dunno ), it's just unrealistic and so broken with the lore itself that GW dropped the ball.

In the books you literally would have had say Boromir with maybe 10-20 citadel guard as his bodyguard elite, a ton of minas tirith soldiers and some vets perhaps, along with his bro and rangers in osgiliath as the "main army", the MT troops probably were in the hundreds at least and at the lowest perhaps 100, you might have had a captain or two as backup in case one of them died but you sure as hell did not have 12 guys and a captain in those 100 troops +.

I can maybe see some of the elves being a bit lower size in troop count to reflect their more elite nature, but armies in general were def in the 100s and 1000s with only a sprinkling of "command" type heroes.

Not only that GW really dropped the ball in some areas over actual lore and who can ally with who, you can actually make somewhat more themed lists with warbands in terms of lore, but then it becomes lore breaking with the stupid 12 man rule limit. An example here would be pre warbands...moria could not take mordor uruk hai, but they actually WERE in moria and were there as sorta bossy backup. We can do that now of course but it was stupid and hardly op if they could have back then.

Yes I understand this was partly done because of people abusing model count, and yes SBG is sorta intended to be a skirmish game also....but it creates a sucky situation for those of us in my thinking camp over why we play and the fun themed true to lore armies we wish to create.

I'm the real world, you do NOT have high ranking military leaders leading thousands of men. You have a chain of command where the general tells his colonels what to tell their captains what to tell their lieutenants what to tell their sergeants what to tell their troops what to do. It is impractical and inefficient to have more than about a dozen people under your direct command because anything larger than that and communication starts to break down. The 12 per leader is not only perfectly reasonable in terms of the game, but it is also fairly realistic.

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Disagree in this example, middle earth is not the real world. We sadly don't have sgt's we only have captains and heroes to lead. The 12 guy limit I would bet money also comes down to real world marketing ( splitting the boxes ), considering those 12 used to be more around 8 every time due to the 24 3x load out options back in the day.

I don't think GW put much thought into the actual lore itself and what is historically known with ME. It's a game of course but it's situations like this which are silly.

I think warbands was one of the best things to happen with SBG.

Both the game and Middle-earth revolve around heroes. They are a big part of what makes it special, not always the big heroes (Fatty Bolger for example plays an important role). I don't see how the warbands system makes it hard to create themed lists (most of the time), captains mainly blend in with the Warriors they lead. So if you wanted Boromir with his elite guard of 20 you could easily include a captain or Beregond and make it from 2 warbands. If you wanted to, it would be fairly easy to convert a captain from one of the elite troop types.

I am also on the Warband Band-Wagon. Like Maggot said, it still allows for thematic purpose but there is something else at play. I feel, in my experience, that the Warbands initiative has been a balancing maneuver. Gone are the days of people who take a couple awesome heroes have to rue the day they face the inevitable warrior-horde of Moria or what-have-you. I'd never see a lot of small, elite armies because the weight of 100 wounds and 100 dice was too much to handle in x points. Having a "hero-tax" keeps the power of hordes down significantly while still keeping them viable. Goblin/Orc warband horde was really powerful in my old meta.

When it comes to talking about thematics, I will refrain from rehashing previous posts and offer just some of my modest visuals. In a minas tirith army featuring Beregond and some captains, I always imagined the captains being some of the friends of Beregond that he may have talked to within the book. I imagined them being exactly what they were, the unnoticed and thankless heroes of middle-earth.

If you do not want to use nameless captains, armies like Minas Tirith can run Madril/Faramir/Damrod and cheaply support 36 models already. All three characters are thematic for the defense of Osgiliath while being pretty close the the nameless price-range of points.

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Part of the problem stems from the fact of how SBG works, realistically...the game is not really designed for accurate middle earth battles, and while WOTR was fun...it's not quite accurate either in some areas.

There is situations where the current SBG warband rules are great, I'm not against them outright, what I'm against is the restrictions and problems it creates for SOME themed armies.

Playing sbg as a skirmish game, with actual themed warbands...say orcs, or a few traveling rangers with maybe some elves thrown in there, maybe some dwarves or so on, there is a lot of cool little skirmish themed forces that work perfectly for this. I can easily imagine like a few rangers traveling to rivendell or mirkwood, encountering a patrol or scout group of high elves or some dwarves at the inn, traveling along roads or in the wild and encountering 12-24 orcs and battles happening, this would have happened plenty of times in tolkiens world.

Where SBG becomes a serious problem is when you do hoard but themed armies, indeed a hundred or even hundreds of goblins or orcs should be a problem and tough to deal with, but with how sbg works it creates other kinds of problems, it's not really realistic that heroes in WOTR can just wade through troops like nothing, but it's not really realistic that in sbg normal troops can do some of what they do, I think if they had done something where troops are "decent" but able to be killed off in hoard situations without being bogged down it would have been better or if they had some kind of advanced rule for hoard situations to speed up combat and reflect that more.

SBG is a great skirmish game and I love the game, but when I look at old sbg and hsbg there is still things that could be done to make a bit of a hybrid mixture of wotr and sbg for those kinds of big epic battles.

300 models to me would be an entry level "real battle" and anything under 100 is about right for a real skirmish. In cases with moria though and others I think having some kind of rules where you can take a true goblin hoard ( say 200 of them ) but dumbing them down a bit or tweaking things so it plays fast would also help.

I'm not a power gamer in fact I really am about themed armies even in other gw games, but with middle earth there is a mentality I have towards in respect and reverence and quite a few others feel the same way, I'm not against recreating battles but I like to keep things as accurate to the books and history there as possible, so for those like me there are indeed issues with the warband current setup.

Have you ever played with more than 100 models? I have and it is a nightmare. We're talking hour long turns, ten hour games. Have you ever tried a 2000 point battle? If not, you maybe should try it before you say it becomes the norm. The game is meant to represent a scaled down version of a battle. If just a basic army required you to buy more than a few and a couple heroes, no one would play this game because it would be WAY too expensive, which is what happened with WotR.

_________________
"Leave Sauron to me."
If you're in the Raleigh, NC area, let me know.

Not 2000 points of SBG no...I think there may have been a few people on one of the SBG forums who has done 2k and 3k though and said it was ok - to having a blast playing that big, but in all fairness I would say people doing that probably know the rules like the back of their hand and are able to slightly increase the speed of play.

I would not want to play massive battles every time either. SBG is not really optimized past 1500 points. The situation is an interesting one considering this is GW we are talking about. They love people to buy armies and big armies, considering how popular LOTR was on release, them picking the game up, and their greed...I'm still a bit puzzled as to why they made it so that about 1500 points was a good top limit on average. 1500 points pre WOTR was really not a big money pit for anyone, even today as much as it sucks with the 12 per box split at the 24 original price, oop ebay prices too...sbg is still a very cheap game for GW itself.

WOTR prices sucked in a lot of ways for those wishing to do truly grand sized armies, but even now it's cheapish to get into and have an entry to moderate sized army, hopefully they bring back the trays sadly I only have 3 of them. I think wotr prices may have affected sbg a little bit but again it's still quite cheap compared to fb and 40k by a long shot, my VC army alone is about 700 bucks and that's around 2500 points with almost 100 skeletons...

Again I think current sbg warbands for skirmish works just perfect, it's ideal for that I would say, I would truly love for the possible next edition if they including some hybrid rules for larger battles but not quite wotr scale, I dunno what will really happen in that area. Interestingly enough there is quite a few people out there who got into SBG in a collecting/diorama perspective, I've known of people with hundreds of troops who don't play and just love doing up display tables of those things.

I dunno I just wish there was more of a middle sweet spot for some of those battles vs skirmish and the bigger wotr matches. It's difficult for me because of WHFB 8th and being used to big blocks of troops which reflect more of a real army is all, and middle earth had plenty of epic scale armies and battles, obviously there is a point where some of that is just impossible or unrealistic but I would say anywhere from 200-300 model sized battles should be doable even with sbg...like with moria or orcs, but make rules where they are faster to take down or speed up that play without being forced to do wotr rules.