Warhorse More Horse: How Most Mounts are Under-Costed

 

 

Alastair King recently published a great article over on the Great British Hobbit League Blog in which he put forward a case that mounting heroes shouldn’t be an automatic decision. While I think Alistair is entirely right, in that there are always going to be lists that would be improved by not mounting their heroes, it inspired me to dig out and update this article I’d written ages ago on the topic. It aims to look at the opposite side of the coin: why, outside of very specific situations, you should always mount your heroes, and why I think this state of affairs is bad for the game. Hope you enjoy!

 

Dori, how I wish thee could ride (LordDainofIronHills)

I have been list-building a lot recently for Erebor Reclaimed, dreaming of the day I can afford Forge World prices. As a faction, it’s one where your big choices are basically which heroes to bring, because the rest of your army is going to look pretty much the same as everyone else’s. Sure, you might decide to take a Ballista or you might not, you might take a couple of Goats or go all-infantry, but fundamentally your army is going to be a Shieldwall with a couple of supporting elements. Which heroes you take therefore matters quite a lot, and it was in this context that I was comparing Dori with Fili. Both cost exactly the same and have quite similar stats, but Dori has a definite edge. In exchange for a point of Might and two special rules, one of which is useless and the other he gets through the Army Bonus anyway, Dori gains an extra Attack and Weapon Master to vastly improve his combat potential. Fili is effectively a well-armoured Captain with Strike, while Dori is one of the most efficient infantry heroes in the game. Yet therein lies the rub: Dori is an infantry hero, while Fili can pick up a Goat for 10pts. Once I started working out how much I gained from that Goat, I realised that I couldn’t justify Dori over an inferior but mountable replacement.

Urgh, fine, I'll do some conversions (Tabletop painter commissions)

This got me thinking about mounts in general, or at least the 10-15 point horse-equivalents that most factions get. It seemed to me that on a lot of hero models they bring vastly more than they cost, such that not bringing them is almost always a bad idea. Why is Boromir allied into countless Allies of Convenience lists, while Gimli sits on the shelf? Why is Dáin the scourge of many tables, while Durin’s name is normally followed by the word ‘Bane’? Why is Celeborn popularly considered uncompetitive, while Elrond is a top-tier model at 35 points more? You guessed it, one of them has to walk while the other gets to ride. In fact, when you look at the heroes that dominate the competitive scene, almost all of them are commonly seen mounted, while efficient but slow heroes like Dori get left behind.

The face of no mount options (TOWtRTA)

What is it about this simple wargear option that has such a disproportionate effect on competitive play? To figure this out, let’s take a look at the three things that mounts provide: mobility, damage output and durability.

The first of these is pretty self-explanatory. If you’re on a horse, you move 10” per turn instead of 6”. That’s like permanently benefiting from a better version of Heroic March, while still being able to charge. It’s not quite flying, and it can be a bit annoying in difficult terrain, but it’s still a pretty big boost. Lots of casters take a mount purely for this reason, in fact. Saruman doesn’t really care about the charge bonus, he just wants to be able to move fast to line up sick Sorcerous Blasts. If you’ve paid lots of points for a combat hero, then you want them killing stuff for as many turns as possible. Something that makes you spend less time slogging across the battlefield towards your next target is then probably worth 10pts by itself. This is especially true when you consider what that extra speed does to your ability to get around behind an enemy battleline or onto an objective. If this was the only thing that horses did, I think people would still field them on a lot of hero models.

When you've already spent 225 points on a model, you want them killing stuff quickly (Games Workshop)

However, that’s almost the smallest part of what horses do. Much more significant, to a lot of heroes, is the incredible boost to their damage output. Because MESBG is a game with much higher Defence than Strength values on most models, the killing potential of a model on foot tends to be pretty low. Even someone like Celeborn, who has Lord of the West for an effective 4 Attacks, is unlikely to kill more than one model per turn when he wins the fight. Unless you’ve got Burly or some crazy special rule your odds of doing more than one Wound is very low against enemies that can back away.

Those numbers obviously go down a lot if you forget to give him a sword (Games Workshop)

Horses totally shift that math. If Elrond is mounted and charges into two Orcs with shields, he’s not only more likely to win the fight that Celeborn, he’s vastly more likely to Wound them both. Instead of throwing 3 dice to Wound with a reroll, he’s throwing 8! This means that a mounted hero’s damage output is genuinely almost tripled on the turns that they’re charging. Assuming that you charge every second turn (a conservative estimate because you’re also much faster than the infantry you’re facing) that’s well over a 50% average damage increase for an A3 model. This >50% increase is true regardless of whether you’re burning Might to get to charge more than half the time, and it just goes up if you do have Might to spare. If you could buy a 10pt upgrade for your 150pt hero that simply said “roll 2 extra dice when making Strikes,” you would take that on every single available model, yet that’s actually a smaller increase to your average damage output than a horse. While a mounted hero is slightly more prone to overkilling enemies than one on foot, they have a vastly improved capacity to trade Might for tempo with Heroic Combats. An A3 foot hero like Gimli will fail to kill a single Orc that Shields almost 50% of the time, so there’s a huge chance that a Heroic Combat will be wasted (or require the expenditure of extra Might). A horse increases your odds of killing that Orc to a full 75%, making it a reasonable way to translate Might into kills. Even better, your damage output isn’t actually increased by 50% every turn, as I've been saying; instead, it’s doubled on the turns you get to charge. That means that you can frontload Wounds in the turns that you move first, which are normally the ones where you’re facing models you really want to kill. And of course, you’re more likely to be throwing these Wounds onto a vulnerable opponent because of the extra mobility given by a horse.

Here's that damage output we were looking for (The Grey Company)

Finally, if that ludicrous increase in offensive efficiency wasn’t enough, a horse even makes you more durable. Ranged attacks that hit your expensive model have a 50% chance of instead hitting your 10pt mount, and close combat enemies are likely to direct their Strikes at your horse a lot of the time. This effectively makes a mount a 10pt Wound with a slightly lower Defence than your hero— often an increase to your defensive efficiency as well. While you don’t want your horse to get sniped out from under you, that’s not actually a bad situation relative to a hero on foot taking those arrows to the face. This is a less significant benefit than the damage output for most models, but it’s a nice extra bonus.

Admittedly, a horse still isn't guaranteed protection (Black Gate Magazine)

To counterbalance this enormous list of advantages, we have a couple of tiny disadvantages. Your hero becomes slightly more vulnerable to spells like Sorcerous Blast and Black Dart (although realistically, if they’re expending an average of 5 Will points to kill a 10-point horse with Black Dart, you’re feeling pretty good about the investment), and the larger base can make it easier for enemies to swarm you if you misplay. A mount can also make your hero slightly more afraid of enemy archery— although again, as I mentioned earlier, a horse actually makes your hero more resilient overall. You can’t shield while mounted, but that’s generally more useful on warriors than heroes anyway. Theoretically, the big disadvantage of mounts is that they make your hero more expensive, but as we’ve covered, the increase in damage output, mobility and durability vastly outweighs this.

So what’s my point here? Well, first of all, take a mount basically whenever you have the option. Unless you’re really planning not to engage in close combat and don’t care much about the added mobility, they are such a huge boost that they’re always worthwhile. Even if you’re planning to stand the hero in the middle of your infantry line, the horse only has to let you kill one or two extra enemies to make its points back, and that’s pretty-much always going to happen. Alastair has made the point that this shouldn’t be an automatic decision, and he is right. There will always be situations in which an army will be subtly better with foot heroes, and matchups in which you wish you didn’t bring those horses. But honestly, those matchups are incredibly rare. Lists with plentiful Sorcerous Blast or Nature’s Wrath are probably the only time when the points aren’t really worth it, and even then some good play can let you get value from the mount regardless. Occasionally you'll get the perfect combination of factors that make your own list one which would benefit from unmounted heroes, like the Dwarven force Alastair listed (arguably). But for every one of these, there will be hundreds where you'd be better off scraping together those 10 points. I agree that you should never make any listbuilding decision automatically, but I think that mounting your heroes is worthy of at least a very strong rule of thumb.

This list would make you regret your ten points. And turning up to the game, probably (@simonwarhammer)

However, what I would like is for this to be a less obvious decision. The game is substantially limited by the power of horses because a whole number of quite powerful and interesting characters are crippled by their inability to ride. I would love for heroes like Dori, Durin, Celeborn and Gimli to be worthwhile including, even though they can’t take a mount. I would even love for heroes like Boromir that can take a mount to not always want to. If you want your hero leading infantry, then they should actually be better on foot.

Bring back this model! (@hobbitarn)

How could this be accomplished? One way would be to nerf the rules for mounts to make them less obligatory. Games Workshop could take away their extra Attack, or make their Knockdown more conditional or something like that. I’m hesitant to go down this route because the cavalry rules have worked pretty well for the last two editions. More significantly, any change made to them would also affect mounted warriors, who are far from overpowered. Instead, I would address the issue of horses costing too little by simply making them cost more. Most pieces of wargear cost five times as many points on a hero as they do on a warrior because a hero can get a lot more use out of them. If we applied that same logic to horses, then they would cost somewhere between 25 and 30 points (except for Fell Wargs, which would be hilariously overcosted at 40). At that point, they’d still be worthwhile buying for your primary damage dealers like Boromir, but would no longer be auto-includes.

They would be prohibitively expensive on casters and support models though, so I think it would actually be better if the cost scaled with number of Attacks. A Wizard or Ringwraith would still get a mount for 10pts, a Captain would get one for 20, and a powerful attacking model would have to pay 30pts for the privilege. It would leave mounts viable for most heroes, but would mean that they weren’t such a crazily good deal that an inability to get one made a hero uncompetitive. Even better, this would be fairly easy for Games Workshop to apply if they do launch a new edition. Because wargear costs aren’t actually universal (they’re written in for each individual model that can take them), they don’t need to introduce some fancy rule change, they can just alter individual numbers to fit. If the change seems too harsh on Rohan heroes, give them a 5pt discount. If you think a Fell Warg should cost slightly more than an ordinary Warg, then make it 5pts more expensive on A2 and A3 models. The increase in price creates more granularity, and thus more scope to adjust the price of mounts by small amounts. An armoured horse possibly wasn’t worth 50% more than a normal horse, but is it worth a 16% increase (going from 30-35)? Yeah, definitely.

Also, could we give Easterling armoured horses an impact hit? Please? (TMAT)

I’d also like to respond to another proposed solution to this problem, which is to make foot heroes cheaper. While this could certainly make foot heroes viable, the difficulty is how this would play out for models which could be mounted but aren’t. Under this model, they’d effectively have some amount of cost baked into their profile as punishment for being able to take a horse, whether or not they ended up doing so. You’d end up in the same place as under my proposed solution, except anyone who could take a horse would be absolutely forced into doing so. Gimli would be a winner, but foot Boromir a loser.

The overall goal of increasing the price of horses would be to make taking one a serious decision about which reasonable minds could disagree in non-niche cases. If buying a mount wasn’t such a flat upgrade, then characters who can’t get one would be more interesting and characters that can would be less pigeon-holed into doing so. It’d probably kill off hero spam Théoden’s Riders, but honestly, will anyone be sad to see them go? It’s been a good run for the cheap cavalry heroes. Let’s give someone else a chance to shine.

Please, no more, I can't play another game against them (Warhammer Community) 

What do you think? Are horses a bit of a trap, or are you tired of mounted heroes dominating the battlefield? What changes would you make to improve the situation? I’d love to hear from you, here or on Facebook.

Until next time, may your heroes always get the charge!