From Little Things Big Things Grow: The Challenges of Scaling Armies Up or Down

I’ve written in the past about my 500-point Moria list, focussed on The Watcher in The Water. It has it all, if I do say so myself: numbers, mobility, lots of Might, and a centrepiece model that can either neuter enemy heroes or rip through chaff with equal glee. The force obviously has weaknesses, but it’s very well-suited to 500-point games. However, my attempts to scale it up to 700 points have been a mixed bag. What had initially seemed like an easy task rapidly began to seem very complex indeed, and there were a number of messy defeats before I was able to figure it out. Eventually, I came to the realisation that my whole approach was flawed. A 700-point army is a radically different beast to a 500-point list, and while I’m happy with the force I’ve ended up with, the route to get there was needlessly challenging. I would have been much better off building a 700-point army that was inspired by my 500-point list, rather than treating the 500-point list as a building block to which I could add 200 points worth of models.

                                        The heart and soul of my list, and probably my favourite model in the game (Credit: TMAT)

So what makes the latter approach so challenging anyway? The biggest issue is that a “balanced” 500-point army is really hard to keep balanced when you start adding more points. To take my Moria army as an example, lets look at some of the ways I tried to scale it up and the issues I faced. The base army was as follows:

3 Goblin Captains;

20 Goblins with shields or spears;

Bat Swarm;

2 Warg Marauders;

The Watcher.

Scaling this up to 700 points, the easiest option was to add another big monster like Gûlavhar, or a Cave Drake and another Marauder or something. Either of these options gave me another big punchy thing and a little mobility, and were very simple plug and plays. Problem solved, right?

                                                                                                    Looks pretty solved to me (Credit: Games Workshop)

I tested out the Gûlavhar version, and oh boy was the problem not solved. Or rather, a whole heap of new problems had suddenly emerged to take its place. My horde of Goblins that had seemed so substantial at 500 points was now ridiculously minimal for 700 — I ended up outnumbered by a Rivendell force and got absolutely cut to pieces. Worst of all, the beautiful Watcher/Bat Swarm synergy that had let me gank enemy heroes at 500 points didn’t work anymore; my Goblins couldn’t protect my Watcher from being charged by enemy models and pulled out of combat with whichever poor unfortunate it had grabbed. It was an almost unmitigated disaster, and I doubt the Cave Drake version would have done any better.

                                                                        Lots more of this than I would have liked (Credit: Darkling Door)

My response was to overcompensate, of course. My 200-point detachment was swapped for another 15 Goblins with a Drum and Grôblog to stiffen the line. I’d solved the problem of numbers and morale, and my Goblins did a lot better in the next game. But now I was finding that I had to actually rely on them to kill things, because I had only a single powerful killing piece in my entire army. As it turns out, that doesn’t work too well at 700 points either, so I was back to the drawing board.

                                                 Not the models you want to rely on for killing purposes (Credit: Middle-Aged Strategy Battle Gamers)

What was going wrong? Why was my optimised 500-point army utterly failing to perform at 700 points? The issue goes to the heart of scaling up an army. When building a force for a set points limit, people often like to treat it as a bit of a checklist; we need a decent number of models, enough mobility to win objective games, some damage-dealers, ample Might and a few cunning tricks to let us control the pace of the game. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, and it’s actually really useful (go take a look at The Bare Necessities series on Tell Me a Tale Great or Small for some excellent examples of how this can help with list building). The issue comes when we take a list that ticked all those boxes and scale it up. This is because the sort of numbers/Might totals/hitting power that is acceptable for a 700-point force is substantially more than what was necessary for a 500-point force. If we had just enough models at 500 and we only add a handful more when going up to 700, chances are we’re now going to be outnumbered in a lot of games. 2 Warg Marauders might have been enough mobility at 500 points, but we need more than that for 700. 6 Might was perfect for a small game, but will see you run down by a Rohan cavalry charge in a larger one. The point here is that if you narrowly ticked all of the boxes at 500 points, then you’re going to need to add to all of those categories when you go to 700. You’re going to need to add more models AND more Might AND more hitting power AND more mobility. This can be really hard to achieve by just adding a 200 point contingent, because the game doesn’t let you perfectly divide your new points between all of these categories; you have to buy actual models with actual stat blocks, and kind of have to make do with that. Making a list for 700 points is fairly easy, because you just bring enough mobility/Might etc… to tick all those boxes. Making a 200-point detachment to supplement a 500-point army is really hard, because you have to do lots of things, to a relatively minor extent, in very few points.

It is possible, however. For my Moria list, I allied in a Spider Queen and a dozen Wargs (swapping two Captains for Durbûrz to make it legal). I’d increased my numbers (tick!), my Might stores (tick!), I’d gained another killing piece (tick!) and my mobility was way up (double tick!). I’d lost my army bonus, but I almost never find it useful anyway. How regularly are you trapping a F3 enemy? It’s definitely a thing that happens, but half the current meta darlings are F4 or up, and it’s hardly reliable against the other half anyway. So I’m fine with giving it up to make my army work at 700 points. But I felt like I could do better. Several test games showed that while my army wasn’t bad, it was still missing a little something.

                                                                                        The solution to many of my woes (Credit: Games Workshop)

As it turned out, I’d fallen into the second trap of building up an army: by taking my 500-point army as a base, I had assumed that everything in that army would make it into the 700-point list. This seemed to make sense; after all, everything had been performing a valuable role at 500 points, so why wouldn’t it at 700? But the list-building assumptions that got those models into the smaller list weren’t necessarily the same in the larger one. The Marauders had been absolutely necessary at 500 points, because any list without mobility is going to lose in some scenarios. Now, on the other hand, I had heaps of mobility, with a dozen Wargs and a Spider Queen giving me all the objective-grabbers I could ever need. I love Warg Marauders, but all they were adding to my list at 700 points was a bit more damage output. Swapping them and a couple of Wargs out, I could afford myself a Dweller in the Deep, and suddenly my force was looking way more dangerous. My mobility was still way up from where it was, I had 3 scary models instead of 1, and I had another way of threatening enemy heroes. My battleline also had a big base to guard its flank, and the army was feeling strong. A few more test games have confirmed that this is definitely a better force than its previous iterations. I’ve missed the Marauders, but I’ve loved the Dweller, and I’ve adored the mobility and freedom that the Wargs and Spider Queen have given me. The list is 4/1 at the moment, and that loss came principally from a couple misplays and some horrible luck (my Spider Queen rolled snake eyes on her first break test on the turn she would have won me the game). I think I’m still slightly overspending on mobility and may swap a couple of Wargs out for a few more Goblins, but I’m largely feeling pretty happy with it. 

                                                                        Definitely worth the trade (Credit: Chickhammer)

While I think I’ve managed to avoid them with this list, there are other challenges that can arise when you scale up a list. I normally prefer Cave Trolls to Dwellers at 500 points, because things like Resistant to Magic just aren’t that relevant at low points values. If my opponent wants to spend 1/3 of his points to Immobilise my Cave Troll every turn, I’m so down for that. In larger games, Wizards are much more prevalent, so the Dweller is a safer bet. Similarly, things like massed bowfire are much stronger at 500 points because no one is bringing Blinding Light (half of why the Rangers of Ithilien are broken at 500 points and irrelevant at 700). The meta is different in bigger games, and your force can’t hope to play exactly the same way and still succeed.

                                              Every 500-point player died inside a little bit at this news (Credit: Games Workshop)

There are similar issues in scaling lists down, but they tend to work in the opposite direction (surprisingly enough). To get down from 700 points to 500, the natural tendency is to cut one discrete chunk. If I was doing that here, I’d probably end up dropping the 185-point Denizens contingent and a few Goblins, not realising that I’m now desperately short on mobility and low on numbers. I’d have a second big monster in my list, but a whole heap more vulnerabilities in objective games.

What I hope I’ve shown here is some of the difficulties inherent in building up from a small army to a bigger one or vice versa. While I am fairly happy with the force I’ve ended up with, it would probably have taken a lot less test games to get here if I’d just started out by building an army inspired by my 500 point list, rather than adding stuff to that list until it worked. The final note I’d like to leave you on is a pragmatic one: sometimes you just have to accept that a list doesn’t function at a certain points level. My Moria list couldn’t be as competitive at 700 points as it was at 500 points without bringing allies and dramatically shifting the tone of the list. My beloved Glorfindel/Gil-galad tag team just doesn’t work at 500 points (it has literally 14 models). Rangers of Ithilien clearly have their preferred points limit. A list is normally designed for one specific size and sometimes there’s no point trying to make it fit another size just because it’d be really convenient if it did.

                                                                                        Your day will come my friends (Credit: Nicholas Ryan)

As always, feel free to shoot me lots of angry comments if I’ve gotten things hopelessly wrong and the only way to list-building nirvana is through hundreds more test games. I'd also love to hear what you'd do with this Moria army to scale it up, especially beyond 700. Is the Watcher just a bad model and I'm a bad person for liking it? Let me know in the comments, and hit that new subscribe button if you never want to miss a chance to disagree with me.