spuds4ever wrote:
General Elessar wrote:
whafrog wrote:
I have yet to play a game with siege weapons, are they that effective?
In my experience they're next to useless, but I'm interested to know why Mor-galad took a trebuchet.
They can be good if you're playing big points' battles like that. I used the war catapult and it was fairly effective at 400 points.
Thanks for the opinions and I do see that there are obvious weaknesses with our army list but let me rationalize a few of our choices. The Engineering Captain is an essential part of the Trebuchet. The ability to make a "wide of the mark" hit turn into a direct hit with Might is awesome. For that matter, being able to might up any close calls can easily make the siege weapon pay for itself inside of two turns. Additionally, we suspected that our opponents would have flying models so we would force them to make a choice between two undesirable options. Either they would have to quickly try to eliminate the crew (which would leave them susceptible to being surrounded and eliminated by our foot soldiers) or advance slowly with their rank and file while we rained missiles and chunks of building down on them unmolested.
As for Gandalf the White. I know He's a lot of points but look what he has that Saruman doesn't:
1. Strengthen will means the Stormcaller can have 5 will in two turns instead of 3;
2. Sorcerous Blast +4;
3. Cast Blinding Light;
4. Glamdring (read: 4 S5 attacks when he wins the charge.);
5. 12" movement, very handy for putting that Sorcerous Blast right where you want it;
6. Narya effectively gives him 6 wounds which makes him an obvious choice for the body guard rule.
I think that at this points bracket he's a great choice for this army. Saruman has the better range but is not nearly as versatile.
Here's a bit of context:
The entire goal of the army was to be heavy on Cavalry. From reading our opponents blog we new that his army was weak vs. horses. Neither of us have (or desire to have) a Rohan army. All the the Tower of Echelion Heros were out of the question since we were allied w/ Lothlorien. With so much up side and a mere 70 points (slightly less than 6% of the army points total) more than a mounted Saruman, Gandalf convinced us that he would win the day. Putting him on Shadowfax fit with the desire to field more horses. The presence of Shadowfax seemed to further justify the presence of 6 Galadhrim Knights. Not only do GK keep pace with the White Rider but they can also win fights (F5) while leaving the wounding to the lances.
@ Noddwyr: You made the point about putting Legolas on a horse to lead the cavalry but that begs the obvious question: who leads the archers? I guess you don't have to have a shooting hero to call a heroic shoot or move but then somebody has to be over there with them for them to call it.
In your list, you successfully wind up with 13 more figures but all of them are D3. That to me is just giving the enemy a better chance of breaking you. Typically, I agree that strength is in numbers but I do think that there is a point when you can commit to an additional 6 cavalry and expect that it will pay off.
Concerning the bow limit, we went heavy on the cavalry on the Minas Tirith side which limited the amount of bows they could bring. The the hope was that the Trebuchet would make up the difference.
The list is a compromise between a few different things: the goal we had to accomplish, the models we had painted, and what we thought worked well together.
I'm sure that a battle report will appear from our opponent on his blog sooner or later and you judge for yourselves the effectiveness.
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