Warrior Ancient and Medieval Rules

I love tinkering with lists and constantly build lists for different armies.
However, in my opinion it is much easier to have two lists which are
designed for specific threats. The real decision making comes with creating
one
list that is well rounded and capable of defeating any other list it meets.
Now you can't get all the elephant killers for one list and knight killers in
another. One list has to be flexible, dynamic, and well thought out. This is
much harder. This is why people really like two lists, now they don't have
to decide which of two units to take, because they don't know what they will
meet.
I have Midianites and have played them in a number of tournaments. They
are a one trick army and one that is beatable. They can't melee, have
terrible morale, slow movement, and being irregular C can't counter worth a
dang.
Infantry with missile weapons shoot them to pieces. Most players put down
four woods and then they don't even have a line of sight. Their biggest
strength is they scare people. They are fun to play if I can expect to get a
couple of match ups with knight armies or close formation infantry. But they
are
no fun if I know every player has an army designed just for my army and
those like it. I love knight armies that have no knights when fighting
elephants
and players like me. It certainly is not difficult with many of the knight
armies or those that can get lots of cavalry in one list and infantry
shooters in the other to design lists that kill other cav and barbarian trash
with
one list and stomp elephants and armies like the Midianites with the infantry
shooters.
When you allow two lists there are lots of armies no one will bring.
There are other armies that people who are more interested in a challenge than
winning that may show up, but they are at a decided disadvantage. Many
armies can't build two lists, so those players are all at a disadvantage from
the
get go. So for my two cents, one list opens up the field to many more
armies. With one list you did not see the two list armies disappear, you just
see
some of the more unusual armies.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

[Mark Stone]

--- On Augaust 11 Mike K said: ---

>> Everybody thus has more choices to make, and learn more about
>> building armies and putting them into play. Better players make
>> better decisions and this is reflected in tournament performance.
>>
>> Frank
>
> You're right -- it should create more opportunity for good and bad
> pre-battle organizational decisions that affect overall performance
> and therefore a widening of tournament results (though the structure
> of the scoring system still has the greatest effect on the
> distribution of results) as well as a greater expected reward for
> time and skill spent in raising and drilling the troops, so to
> speak.
>
> Mike

Mike's post about versatility was a very good one; it'd be interesting to go
down the list of top finishers at the NICT and see how those armies measure up
by these criteria.

But I think that Frank has really hit the nail on the head here. The more
command decisions players have to make in a tournament, the more the tournament
results tell us about players' ability to make command decisions. It's simply a
richer, and therefore more accurate pool of data with two lists rather than
one, and I'd think that ought to be an overriding consideration.

Which leads me to wonder why it isn't. I suspect that Warrior players (and
probably historical miniatures players in general) fall into two broad
categories: those who enjoy tinkering with army lists, and those who do not.

I've certainly known _many_ players, some of them quite good, who fall into the
latter category. They don't like building lists, or thinking about lists, and
regard all of that as an unfortunate annoyance that must be dealt with in order
to be able to play the game. Then there are those (I'm guilty of this one here)
who can endlessly review lists, writing up armies they'll never play, just
because army list construction is, for them, enjoyable in its own right
(currently I have spreadsheets for 37 different armies; of those, I have
figures to field about 14 of them).

I'll hazard a guess that there's a tendency for those most interested in
historical play to lose patience with army list tinkering, and those most
interested in open tournament play to enjoy army list tinkering. I'm sure there
are exceptions both ways, but I'd bet those broad tendencies hold up pretty
well.

I do think there's a clearly preferable way for open tournament play to be
handled -- two lists -- but that's just one person's opinion.


-Mark Stone