When most people think of the Dead of Dunharrow, the word 'horde' doesn't spring to mind. Honestly, that's pretty fair: when your cheapest models are 14 points without wargear, massed numbers aren't an obviously plausible route. This gets even more true once you see the excellent benefits you can get by bringing Aragorn along in the Return of the King Legendary Legion. An excellent combat piece with a 6" banner and free Anduril— plus access to several other powerful heroes— is a hard thing to pass up.
But what if you did pass all that up, and wanted to run pure Dunharrow? How would that even work? As it turns out, it works shockingly well. This article is aimed at opening your eyes to this way of playing, and giving you some pointers towards running the heftiest horde in the game...
Let's start things off by looking at the army I've taken to a couple of tournaments recently, going a collective 5-1-1:
600 points
The King of the Dead 100
28 Warriors of the Dead (13 spears, 22 shields, 1 banner) 452
2 Riders of the Dead 48
31 models, 1 Might, 3 fast models
Let's begin with the eye-sore stat here: 1 Might. This list has exactly one hero, and that hero has 1 Might. It's a pretty brutal spot to be in, and I'm not going to pretend it's not a weakness. However, it's also a much smaller weakness than you might think, because of that first number there: 31 models. That's a perfectly respectable model-count for 600 points, being a little on the high end but nothing crazy. That is, nothing crazy until you realise those models are all D7-8 with Terror and Blades of the Dead (which is generally about equivalent to S6).
A quick bit of math-hammer can illustrate why this is such a big deal. If you can force 1-on-1 combats across the battleline, then you're generally expected to win about half of those (or 15/36 if your opponent has the advantage of Fight value). In almost every matchup you'll be wounding on 3's or 4's, and your opponent will be wounding on 6's or 6's/4's. So if you win about 12 combats then you're probably killing 6-8 enemies, and if your opponent wins all the rest then they're probably killing 1-2. Do that for a couple of turns and your opponent is Broken and crippled, while you still have ~25 models left. Game, set and match.
Of course, the eagle-eyed amongst you will have already noticed the presence of a few assumptions here. First, I've assumed 1-on-1 combats with no banners. When that isn't true, the force with the higher Fight value can expect to win more than 21/36 combats. I've also assumed away the enemy's heroes, an approach which my opponents have generally been unwilling to comply with. These assumptions are far from universally true, so the casualty ratios you can expect are generally far from the 4:1 or 8:1 that the wound rolls theoretically predict. The gameplan for this army can therefore be broken down into a single concept: force your opponent into these 1-on-1, no-banner combats across the line and you will win; fail to do so and things can get hairy. You're basically trying to get as close as possible to the idealised assumptions I've made in order to get the crazy casualty numbers they predict.
Let's start with perhaps the trickiest assumption here: 1-on-1combats. At first glance this sounds achievable, because you probably have numerical parity with your opponent. The challenge is that most enemy armies like to fight in nice shieldwalls with spears behind, ensuring every combat is a 2-on-2fight at best. That method of fighting favours the side with higher Fight values and lower odds of wounding, so it's up to you to disrupt it. Have a look at this photo from my last tournament:
For most armies, that kind of play would be considered reckless at best. You're exposing your own models to getting over-extended and Trapped, and could have your whole force rolled up in rapid succession. With Dunharrow, that's less of an issue. To start with, Terror makes it exceptionally difficult for a lot of armies to counterattack you, so even if your troops end up fighting outnumbered they probably won't be Trapped. Moreover, you're D8: if your models end up fighting alone for a turn or two, they'll probably be alright. And all it takes is those couple of turns of disrupted melee for the rest of your forces to gain a clear advantage over the enemy.
Unfortunately, there's one element of that first picture that I haven't discussed: the whopping great Troll Chieftain, busily smashing his way through my lines. Most armies have some equivalent to this, with a powerful mounted hero or monster that radically outclasses anything you've brought along. Take a moment to look back over my army list and consider how you could take on the Troll. The King could maybe Heroic Strike up and take it on, but only once, and if he loses the Strike-off (from F5!) then he's probably dead or crippled. That's an extremely high-risk option, and one to be avoided if at all possible. In general, I work off the assumption that I can't stop enemy power models with this army, and just have to accept that they'll kill some percentage of my army no matter what I do.
The solution, therefore, is to ensure I'm killing the rest of my opponent's army faster than they're killing mine. That Troll is likely to kill 1-2 models a turn; if I can make sure that I'm killing 5-6 models per turn elsewhere on the battlefield, then my opponent will be crippled long before I need to care about their big scary monster. Same goes for enemy heroes like Aragorn, Azog or Imrahil: kill their armies and let them rampage. This is another reason why you need to be engineering that broken-up melee as fast as possible: it lends itself to higher casualties on both sides than a shieldwall, ensuring you're leveraging your advantages in warrior-on-warrior combat to the fullest.
Finally, make sure you can engage your opponent on fairly open ground. I discussed it a little with my opponent in this game, but I'd have been a lot more concerned if he took advantage of the buildings to make sure most of our battlelines couldn't fight. He could have plugged the gaps between the buildings with his Troll and Captains, limiting the number of our warriors that would be fighting. I'd still have gotten to kill some of his warriors, but my rate of slaughter would have been slowed a lot, while his Troll would have been killing me just as fast as ever. The Dunharrow player wants maximum violence every turn, because otherwise they can't outpace the enemy heroes.
We established earlier that the King of the Dead isn't really up for taking on enemy power heroes. He's only F5/A2 with a single Might point, so anything above a Captain is generally off the cards. So what value is he actually bringing to the army, and how should you be using him? In essence, the King does three things, in diminishing order of importance: he preserves your Army Leader VPs; he has a hefty Harbinger bubble; and he sometimes kills warriors and captains.
The first of those is most important because generally you aren't touching your opponent's Army Leader unless things go massively in your favour. That means that if the King is killed then your opponent will be up by 1-3 points that you can never get back. This is not a great situation to be in, so avoiding it is critical. That means that generally the King is best off hiding safely behind your lines.
Second, the King brings you Harbinger in a nice 12" bubble. Given that your whole army causes Terror and strikes against enemy Courage, that's pretty excellent. In general you want as much of the enemy army as possible to be sitting in that -1C bubble of doom, frustrating their charges and increasing their vulnerability. However, never be afraid to pivot the King to one flank in order to keep him safe. Yes, you'll miss that Harbinger effect on the other flank, but you'll be missing it everywhere (and missing your Leader VPs!) if your opponent breaks through and kills him.
Finally, the King sometimes kills some warriors. Once your opponent is committed and you're pretty confident that they won't be able to get a big hero into the King, then you can take advantage of his F5 and A2 to rack up an extra few kills on the frontline. The biggest benefit of this is actually something Pippin can attest to: the closer you are to danger, the further you are from harm. A King on the frontlines is often harder for enemy combat heroes to reach, as chances are by this point they've hacked their way through your lines and are now behind the rest of your forces. This means that your King is blocked by both your own and your opponent's models, keeping him safe from the big choppy enemies. You can also sometimes take advantage of his F5 to help you gank enemy F4 Captains, but this is something you only want to do with plenty of backup.
Having just spent all this time talking about how anemic the King of the Dead is, readers might be forgiven for wondering why I haven't just brought Aragorn along. The Return of the King LL is just there, after all. Aragorn would certainly add a lot to the list: a serious combat threat, a 6" banner, 3 Might plus Mighty Hero, free Marches... the list goes on. For these reasons he was always the first thing I added when I used the Army of the Dead, and I definitely appreciated the things he was bringing to my force when I did. However, the reason I ultimately cut him from the list is simple: he's too vulnerable.
That may seem grossly unfair to Aragorn at first. He's a scary combat character with good stats and plenty of Will, Wounds and Fate to keep him going. What's so vulnerable about that? The issue was that he was opening up weaknesses in my list that it's otherwise immune to. The most gaping of these is magic. When I was taking Aragorn, he was the first target for every spellcaster my opponent could find, and often spent most of the game Paralysed, Transfixed or otherwise incapacitated. Without him in my list, I can basically just ignore enemy casters as they harass the King of the Dead or flail uselessly at my battleline.
More surprisingly, Aragorn was also making me a lot more vulnerable to enemy heroes and monsters. This may seem counterintuitive, given that by cutting him I've given up all home of being able to kill a rampaging Troll or Boromir. However, I've also given up any good targets for them to kill. There are a lot of models in the game that have very good odds at killing or crippling Aragorn, and by running him I put myself in a tricky position. I needed him on the frontline killing things, but by placing him there I was opening up my list to losing its Army Leader and best killing piece to a single bad turn of dice. In contrast, the 11 Warriors of the Dead I replaced him with would stand no chance against a Troll Chieftain, but would hold it up all game while still helping massacre the enemies around it. I was losing my best way of killing enemy heroes, but I was also taking away the most efficient way they could do damage to me.
You definitely can run Aragorn in this list, but I think if you take him you want to run Legolas and maybe Gimli as well to back him up. This lets your heroes mutually support each other against big enemy models, and means you don't have one single model that's vulnerable to enemy heroes, shooting and spellcasters. At that point your gameplan changes from 'kill the enemy with Warriors of the Dead' to 'kill the enemy with your heroes while holding their flanks with Warriors of the Dead.' That's still a perfectly reasonable plan, but it's a fundamentally different list.
Of course, there are matchups when this style of list would do a lot better than mine. At my last tournament I ran face-first into an Ent force, and watched them stomp their way through my army pretty effortlessly. If I had four Striking heroes in the list, that would have been a very different game. In general, horde Dunharrow doesn't like to see enemy lists without any soft targets. Slaughtering Orcs while I tie up a Troll Chieftain is one thing, but it only works when there are Orcs for me to kill. If every enemy model is one I'd like to just tie up, then I'm in trouble.
One final note on matchups before I leave you: enemy Courage value and auto-passing Courage tests. People often assume that a list with a Shaman or lots of Elves is automatically a hard matchup for this style of list. That's true to a certain extent; Terror with a Harbinger is a pretty powerful tool and you definitely notice when it's not having an effect. Ultimately though, it's also a very unpredictable tool that can never be relied upon, and is more of a spicy bonus when it comes up. This list wins games through having a wall of D8 models that kill your opponent faster than they die. That core functionality of the list is still there when you're facing Goblins with a Shaman, and it's still there when you're facing Elves. If your opponent has lots of warriors for you to kill, then it's probably a good matchup no matter what their Courage value is. Unless those warriors are Beornings, in which case it is a bad matchup after all.
I hope you enjoyed this article about a unique army style that plays totally differently to more traditional lists. I've found this faction one of the most enjoyable I've ever used; it's so refreshing not to have to worry about Might or the precise movements of my heroes. As long as the King is safe, it's full speed ahead for everyone all the time. Give it a try, you might be surprised by how well it works.
Until next time, may your matchups always involve plenty of C2 Orcs!
Just getting into MESBG with the Dead men and this article was the very thing I need, thank you!
ReplyDeleteQuick question - how do you split your horde in warbands, and any specific tips for that?