Middle Earth Battle Companies - Week 3: Rules & Realisations

So, first question. What has been the main issue we found with the Battle Company rules? The simplest and perhaps most important is the cost of purchasing additional war gear for your heroes and warriors. Normally you would spend influence to buy a bow or shield, and they would cost 1 influence point. Now this itself is perfectly fine and does not cause an issue. However, with elite companies such as Stephens Rivendell or my Iron Hills, the problem became the rating that we rely on to know who gains bonus influence and free re-rolls during the matches would be one-sided against our armies. What was an issue was that even though, say Elliot had 8 re-rolls and gained 6 bonus influence points, he would still lose many members of his company and must spend said influence on reinforcements. On top of that, because our armies were elite, we could buy upgrades like horses and lances/war spears for the same cost as everyone else. Simply put, we didn’t find it balanced when a horse/war goat costs the same as standard war gear for a regular orc. The war gear options for Rivendell and Iron Hills made our companies far superior so quickly that every game felt like a catch-up. Realising this, we have decided to reset the battle company's campaign to bring in some additional players. Making numbers even and reworking some of the rules to benefit all players involved.

 

 

Firstly, let's begin with some rule changes we would like to implement. As referenced in my last point, mounts, and war gear costs for more elite armies such as Rivendell or Iron Hills will be increased. Now they sit at 2 influence points that can potentially be dropped to 1 influence depending on if the players control certain regions in Middle Earth. We are looking at bumping the cost of mount up from 2 influence points to 3/4 influence points.

Another change we are looking at implementing would affect mounts directly. Similar to heroes and warriors, mounts would have to roll on the injury chart to see if they return, miss a game or even die. Additionally, this would link back to our last rule change, making horses, war goats, and other mounts much more valuable.

Finally, what this means is the blog posts will be delayed till we reschedule the new campaign. I believe that some of us will change our companies. I will be going to the Gondor path and I’m very much looking forward to using them. Another reason for the delay is that for the next two weeks, many of us will be playing in two tournaments in back to back weekends, the latter will be the tournament we host every 3 months. Be sure to keep an eye out on our Fellowship Facebook page, I will be posting updates and pictures on the day, so it's sure to be good fun. I’d like to end by thanking everyone for reading these posts each week and I hope to have a much more coherent and fairer blog post update in the next couple of weeks!