Once More Unto the West

Back again with a mid-week post as I decided to take a slight painting break after some inspiration struck me. I was watching a Battle Report recently, as I often do when painting, and was quite struck by what I view as a fundamental misunderstanding of how competitive armies function in MESBG. Of course I will say as a caveat that I am a newcomer to this game, still, but I also have two decades of wargaming experience and much of that translates between games. I'm not saying I am correct about all of this but they're my thoughts/opinions and I don't see these topics frequently or ever addressed through the few competitive sources of information this game has. The Lack of a Fixed Point Value Stunts Competitive Growth I have to imagine this has been discussed to death by the community but not having a fixed point value for games, or at least a fixed range, is a problem for developing a competitive meta. Now that's not all bad since one thing metas do is stagnate, that...

My second game of the weekend was against Isaac and his Army of Gothmog force. Isaac has quite a few armies at his disposal but decided to play this one as he wanted to see how it would stack up against all the bodies I was bringing. So far I've only had one other game against Isaac, my very first demo game a few months back, but I think we are both more competitively minded so I was really looking forward to this match. As always this write-up is intended to help me improve my play and provide entertainment, not tear anyone down. Discussion of mistakes and the like are not intended to be mean-spirited so please don't take them that way. :]   Lothlórien and Survivors of Lake-Town - Convenient Allies Galadriel (Leader) 2x Guard of the Galadhrim Court 6x Wood Elf Warriors w/ Elf Bow, Wood Elf Spear 10x Wood Elf Warrior w/ Wood Elf Spear Bard the Bowman w/ Horse (Proxied as Elrond) 6x Lake-Town Militia w/ Axe, Bow 12x Lake-Town Militia w/ Axe Hilda-Bianca (Proxied as Gandalf) 4x L...

Well the time has come for me to dip my toes in some of my favored waters: writing Battle Reports! Before I get into the nitty-gritty, a few things. For one every game is very different regarding how to effectively do Battle Reports for it, at least I think so. MESBG has the challenge of a potentially high number of Turns where also very little "happens", this makes it difficult to take accurate notes. There's also less movement once the lines clash so things can look like they aren't really changing, which is boring as a reader if not handled well. For these games I did my standard method of taking photos at the beginning of Movement and then at the end of Turns while also taking bare-bones notes on my phone. I don't think that worked out perfectly so in the future I'm going to bring my laptop for notes and also try to take smaller, more frequent photos to add some spice to the view of the action. Once I'm comfortable with what I'm getting then I'...