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What you need to understand is that when Cruentus says 'flush with cash,' he means *huge* piles of gold. When you've maxed your warband, bought every hired sword you can, have all the gear you need, and are still sitting on a bunch of gold entering the league finals, you might as well spend what you have left. Our league finals games almost started to look like WFB because of the massive war chests.

I don't like armor either, although I have equipped shooty heroes with shields sometimes. Not every shot ignores armor, and sometimes you roll the 6. And keeping your heroes upright is one of the fundamental keys to the game.

Honestly, I never thought that blackpowder weapons as a group represented a very good value prop either, even with the optional rules. A blunderbuss or two could be fun to bust up mobs a little, and duelling pistols were solid on the *right* character. But otherwise, meh. Cruentus can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we ever saw blackpowder proliferation in our league, which was pretty cutthroat.

 Yodhrin wrote:
Cruentis and The Silo:

Why would you ever bother buying armour at all? In the default rules, armour is bad in the early campaign, bad in the mid campaign, and bad when you enter the final stretch - in early it's too expensive, in mid it's pointless because of how easy it is to circumvent(crits, crossbows, two-handers, flails, heroes and henchman groups with naturally high strength or a strength advance) and because it's too expensive, and late campaign you add widespread blackpowder use to the list - sure at that point it may be a negligible expense relative to your income, but it's still a terrible value proposition.

It's the same problem that the basic rules have with melee weapons; it is always more optimal to go with quantity(no armour + more bodies, cheap weapons + dual-wielding) than quality, when it should be a matter of theme or situational choice.

The way we ran our campaigns, we played for a length of time, tried to get a roughly even number of games for all the bands (if possible), then ran a short elimination tourney (so to speak). When the bands got rolling, they had "lots" of cash, so rather than keep it in the bank, we spent it. Once you've got the weapons and items you wanted, the only thing left to spend them on was armor. And really, it was useful against the s3 bows (coupled with shield, which even if carried, gave you a 5+ save), and useful against slings since we added, I think, a +1 armor save rule (effectively giving lt armor and shields a 4+ save against sling stones). So again, it wasn't major, but gave a little protection against low strength attacks, and even in the end phases of our campaigns, you might still encounter that S3 henchmen group.

We didn't see too many two handed weapons, except on heroes who had strongman and other skills to help it out. It was usually the dual wielding of clubs and hammers. We also didn't see widespread blackpowder. No one wanted to really sit still, except the dwarves. Bows with hunting arrows, quick shot, and high BS were much more dangerous in our campaigns, even at s3.

We found that generally volume of bodies (no one started with less than 11 in a starting band, excepting dwarves), and volume of attacks/fire: slings, dual-wield, blunderbusses were all we usually saw. Like Gorgon said, we were pretty cutthroat. Some people play it like an RPG, and carry heavy armor, and swords, etc., we went the total opposite, although through the games, injuries, outlandish outcomes, etc. all gave us very cinematic and fun games we talk about even years later.

Edit: Yodhrin, you mentioned optimal. Yup, exactly. We had one played who was optimal about everything (and played Dwarves very successfully), and that forced us all into that play style. We didn't want to muck with too many of the basic rules, because it ended up becoming either too confusing, or upsetting things in another area. There used to be a lot of forum activity on the old specialist games, and then fan forums, and all of the tweaks, changes, etc. in the name of balance just ended up being someone's personal opinion on how it should play. We often implemented minor tweaks, and then after playing often rolled it back to the originall rules because it was easier and played better (usually).

All this talk, now I want to play some Mordheim!

 Yodhrin wrote:
Cruentis and The Silo:

Why would you ever bother buying armour at all? In the default rules, armour is bad in the early campaign, bad in the mid campaign, and bad when you enter the final stretch - in early it's too expensive, in mid it's pointless because of how easy it is to circumvent(crits, crossbows, two-handers, flails, heroes and henchman groups with naturally high strength or a strength advance) and because it's too expensive, and late campaign you add widespread blackpowder use to the list - sure at that point it may be a negligible expense relative to your income, but it's still a terrible value proposition.

It's the same problem that the basic rules have with melee weapons; it is always more optimal to go with quantity(no armour + more bodies, cheap weapons + dual-wielding) than quality, when it should be a matter of theme or situational choice.

Like a good rpg-ish system, you make marginal improvements and you stack the deck. You quickly hit the unit max for your war band and quickly realize that most henchmen have a ceiling on their offensive abilities since many can only take weak ranged weapons. Your heroes take armor so that they can shrug off henchmen's attacks with a 4+ save and a 4+ helmet save. You won't stand up to a rifle, but it makes a serious difference against anyone with a bow, crossbow, or S3/4.

Early on bodies and quantity is key, but it's easy to max, and then your money has to go somewhere.

Posting to subscribe to thread.

On the topic of shields I have what is probably a very dumb question (I'm about to get in to Mordheim myself)..

In WFRP, shields are listed as weapons rather than armour so all the rules about having a weapon in each hand logically apply. In Mordheim I see that characters are limited to two hand weapons and two ranged weapons, but no where does it say that the shield has to be equipped (in a hand) in order to benefit from it. In fact, the two handed weapon trait states that a carried shield still provides the +1 benefit against ranged attacks but it can't be used in H2H. So the implication is that the same is true when dual-wielding, and the logical assumption is that when in close combat, if dual wielding actual weapons, a shield on your back doesn't give you that +1 armour save against your opponent's melee attacks.

But.. none of this is in the rule PDFs as far as I can tell. Or is it?

I think it is.
If you have a shield, it always grants you +1 armor against shooting attacks. And in mellee you can hold a shield in one hand to get +1 armor but you don't get +1 attack for 2ccw in this case.
I'm not sure about when you make decision on which loadout you're using in cc. For example, you've got 2 ccw and a shield. When do you nominate that you're fighting with 2 ccw or 1 ccw and shield?

We always chose which weapons/shields were being used at the start of combat before any dice were rolled. Then had to stick with this till the next round. Some characters ended up with double handed weapons and swords + shields etc so it also applied then as well.