When to start a bar fight: A guide to battleline tactics in MESBG

My Mordor list swarms around a Lothlorien/Númenor list to eke out a win

Most games of MESBG are ultimately decided by a clash of battlelines. Your heroic Dwarves slam into Goblin hordes, either being whittled down or grinding out a bloody victory. Sometimes heroes or monsters do the work, sometimes playing to the objectives can snatch a win from the jaws of defeat, but a lot of the time the game comes down to whose battleline of infantry wins the war of attrition against their opponent’s.

That itself is often determined by who manages to get the engagements that they want across the frontline. And one of the biggest factors there is whether the players involved know if they should be fighting in a rigid, front-to-back shieldwall or swarming forward and overwhelming their opponent. That swarming approach is the 'bar fight' in the title, where everyone is swinging punches in every direction and things are very messy.

In a recent battle, for example, I had my Mordor/Serpent Horde list going up against a Lothlorien/Númenor combo. With Elf Warriors backed by S4 Númenórean spears, I knew that my Black Númenórean/Morannon shieldwall would be quickly ground through if I fought front-to-back. And indeed, the first couple of turns of combat went quite noticeably in Good’s favour. 

The initial engage here does not look good for Mordor

However, by about the third turn of combat, gaps had formed in their lines as some models died or were pushed back while others held their ground. Combined with a small force pouring around their flank I was able to spill my troops through to force lots of 1-on-1 fights; I had myself a bar fight. At that point the fragile Númenóreans began to fall in droves and I could leverage my superior numbers, and within a few turns I’d nearly tabled the Good army. 

The Good lines disintegrate and Mordor capitalises hard

It was a decisive example of breaking up the battlelines being the key to victory, but why was it the right call, especially when I’d normally like to protect my F3 Morannons behind my F4, Terror-causing Back Númenóreans?

Answering that question is what we’re here to do today: when should you be trying to maintain your formation, or when should you be aiming for a fluid, mixed-up melee?

As it turns out, there are a lot of factors that weigh into this question, and finding the answer is more art than science. Still, by understanding these factors you have a much better chance of predicting the correct strategy in a given matchup.

First up of those factors, we have…

Number 1: Spear supports

This should hopefully be obvious, but it’s worthwhile saying that if you’re playing an army with no/limited spear supports and your opponent isn’t then you want to be getting into their backlines and forcing broken combat as fast as possible. And conversely, if you’ve got a nice little line of shields backed by spears and you’re facing Hunter Orcs or Khazad-dûm, then every turn that your opponent can’t get into your backlines is a turn that your whole battleline is fighting part of theirs.

Life is great for Mordor here

Pike blocks are basically Spears+, so the same consideration applies to them. That Easterling phalanx is going to grind through you if you let it line up three models against two of yours, but might crumple if you break up their lines and start peeling off the pikemen.

There’s another reason you might want to do that against Easterlings, and that’s…

 

Number 2: Fight Value

Fight value is progressively more valuable the more dice both sides are rolling to win the combat. If both sides are only rolling 1 die to win the combat then having the higher fight value is a 16% increase in your expected damage output, and an equivalent reduction for your opponent: not nothing, but not the end of the world either. Give both sides a spear support and a banner, however, and suddenly the side with the higher Fight value is winning nearly twice as many combats as their opponents. That disparity continues to increase as both sides bring more dice to bear (which incidentally is why Heroic Strike is great to take out a trapped hero that you’re swarming, and less useful for two heroes duelling each other with no backup; having the higher Fight value is critical when both sides are rolling lots of dice, but doesn't do much when they're not).

Morannons are actually favoured against Elves in one-on-ones, by some margin. S4/D6 is an excellent combo!

So if your opponent has a higher Fight value on their troops than you do (such as my Black Númenóreans were facing from the Elves/Númenóreans) then it’s probably a good idea to try and break up the enemy lines and force a bar fight.

Other combat stats can have the opposite effect, however, such as…

Number 3: Dice per fight

If you have more dice to bring to bear in each combat, then that advantage becomes progressively more valuable the more fights there are. The three ways that pans out are with multi-Attack warriors like Hunter Orcs or Iron Guard, with banner effects, and with plain old numbers.

In the first case, even the most elite warriors are pretty scared of facing a Hunter Orc: their two dice mean they’re dramatically more likely to win the combat than a warrior only rolling one, and then having two dice to wound just compounds the issue. On the other hand, a warrior with a spear support is often okay facing down two Hunter Orcs, because they’re much more likely themselves to get the critical six. If your troops have multiple Attacks then you’ll benefit a lot from broken combat; if your opponent’s are, then prioritise maintaining that battleline at all costs.

Things are looking much worse for Mordor here

Similarly, a banner is more useful the more fights it affects, and the less dice players are already rolling in those fights. In my game against Lothlorien/Númenor, I’d taken out their banner with a cheeky Black Dart and had Suladân in the centre doing Suladân things. That meant I had the banner reroll in every fight, which became dramatically more useful once it was affecting 20 one-on-one fights rather than 10 two-on-two fights. If you have a big banner effect and your opponent doesn’t, then consider breaking up the battle into lots of combats in order to really leverage that advantage.

Suladân's banner is getting huge value on all these fights here

Finally, Jeremy from the Green Dragon podcast is fond of saying that no upgrade in the game is as good as a second model in the fight. Two Orcs beat one Elf quite reliably, because they’re rolling twice as many dice to win the fight, twice as many dice to wound, and may well be trapping the enemy to double that again. Numbers make a huge difference once the lines are broken up and messy, but are often easy to neutralise for opponents who can maintain a solid formation. Two Orcs beat one Elf easily, but 40 Orcs may well lose to 20 Elves if the latter can guard their flanks and maintain their shieldwall. This is especially true because the side with more models often suffers less from broken combat because they have the models to both tie up the enemy’s front and swarm around to their spear supports, while the more elite army has to choose between protecting its rear and pushing through to its opponent’s.

This whole time we’ve been assuming that you’ve got the same warriors on the front and back of your battleline. But that’s not true of quite a lot of armies, including both the Lothlorien/Númenor list I was facing and the Mordor/Serpent Horde list I’d brought. As such, we should also be taking into account…

Number 4: Backline matchups

A classic competitive build is heavy infantry backed by cheap or fragile spear supports. By supporting your Iron Hills Dwarves with Laketown spearmen, you can fit in a lot more troops while retaining that F4/D7 frontline. The downside of this, however, is that it means the list ends up with a soft underbelly that can crumble once an enemy pushes through to it.

To an extent, this happened in that Lothlorien/Númenor game I keep going back to: the Númenórean spearmen lacked the D6 and F5 of the Elves, so once I could get into them the pace of attrition picked up dramatically. That was especially true because my backline wasn’t especially vulnerable; it was D6/S4 and its F3 didn’t matter against the Elves, and the lack of Terror was hardly an issue there either. Incidentally, the flexibility that comes with having D6 spear supports is one of the key reasons why a Morannon backline is generally better than a Mordor Orc or Haradrim backline for Mordor builds. It doesn’t fit in quite as many models, but it has a lot more flexible about how it uses them.

My backline are perfectly willing to be on the frontline: the enemy Númenóreans are not

These factors are all important for giving your warriors favourable engagements, but there are more fundamental strategic questions than how to most efficiently kill your opponent’s warriors. First amongst these is…

Number 5: Speed of slaughter

Battleline-on-battleline combat is slow and grindy, while broken melees produce a lot of casualties on both sides. That conclusion comes from two premises: first, that when two spear-supported models fight each other the maximum casualties are one model per turn, whereas when those same models clash in one-on-one combats the maximum casualties are doubled; and second, that swirling melees produce a lots of traps on both sides, and traps dramatically increase casualties. So two neat battlelines grinding into each other will take quite a while to produce a decisive outcome, while a messy clash of warriors will start snowballing much quicker.

That naturally begs the question of how you know whether to speed up or slow down the fight (i.e. by breaking up the lines or by holding a tight battleline). The first factor that can impact this decision is what you want to happen in one specific part of the board. If you have 4 Warriors of Minas Tirith trying to hold a chokepoint against 8 Orcs, then you’re probably looking to slow things down to tie them up while you get an advantage elsewhere. In contrast, if you have 12 Warriors of Minas Tirith against those same 8 Orcs, then you want to swamp them to try and get kills fast, because you’re probably outnumbered elsewhere. That’s especially true if those Orcs are defending a critical objective or the enemy Supplies, for example, because that means you want them dead as fast as possible.

The Orcs break their formation to destroy an enemy Supply early, sacrificing models but putting me critically ahead on points

More globally, as well, are you looking to win this battle in the warriors or the heroes? When I’m playing Angmar I often just want my Orcs to survive while Gûlavhar and the Witch King win the game; in that case a battleline may well be the right call, even against a foe that outfights me and has good chances of slowly grinding me down. After all, I don’t care if the Elves are generating a 1-2 model attritional advantage every turn if Gûlavhar has killed all their heroes by the third turn of combat.

Angmar maintaining a neat battleline to allow their heroes time to rip through the Gondorians

On the other hand, in that game against Númenor and Lothlorien I had Elendil to contend with, and absolutely nothing that could realistically stop him. As such, I was basically on a clock before he hacked his way through my lines and slaughtered Suladân and the Witch King, so my warriors needed to put in work fast. Hence, breaking up the battlelines and getting high casualties happening right away.

It was only a matter of time before Elendil did awful things here, so Mordor needed to get the damage done quickly

Finally, the choice to fight in battlelines versus swarming the enemy also has implications on where models can physically get to, which leads us onto the last factor…

Number 6: Positioning

What heroes each side has brought along can make a big difference to whether or not they want broken fighting. The most obvious example of this is spellcasters, who love to have nice solid battlelines in order to stay safe, mobile and casting. Fragile buffing characters like Malbeth or a Shaman also quite like the security of having a solid wall of dudes between themselves and the scary enemies. And if your Army Leader is someone who doesn’t really want to be fighting, then a shieldwall in front of them is the best way to make sure they don’t.

Galadriel is much happier when she doesn't have to fight enemy heroes, actually

On the other hand, lots of captain-level heroes are actually quite keen on broken fighting, because it gives them a good chance to go into a single warrior every turn and take them out. Scary combat heroes that want to be threatening Heroic Combats can also quite like it, because it can give them lots of scope to take out or burn resources off the enemy heroes. It can also be harder to Heroic Combat into two enemies in broken combat though, so there are pros and cons for them in these fights.

Perhaps the most significant factor in influencing the decision to shieldwall or spread out, however, is one we touched on a little bit above: objectives. Enemy models can’t physically pass through a shieldwall, but may well be able to do so once the lines are broken up.  If you’ve managed to get to the middle first in Hold Ground, then it’s absolutely the right call to form your shieldwall and try to physically block off your opponent. And on the flipside, if all the objectives are on the other side of your opponent’s troops then a swirling melee is exactly what you want, because it gives you the best chance to slip your troops through the gaps and onto the objectives.

I needed to break through the Good lines quickly to get to the objective hidden behind them

Overall, there’s a lot to weigh up when deciding how you want to take on your opponent’s warriors. And there’s no single correct answer, with most armies changing their plan depending on the matchup, scenario and terrain. My Mordor/Serpent Horde generally prefers to maintain its neat ‘Black Númenórean at the front, Morannon at the back’ formation, but had to adapt in order to take on the superior battleline of Elves backed by Númenóreans. Angmar generally wants its Orcs just dying slow, but sometimes they need to swarm and try to get some kills.

It’s a hard skill to master, but knowing how to plan your engagements (and when to risk a bar fight) is a critical part of MESBG strategy.