Pretending to be developers: fixing the Uthuk Y'llan

By Budgernaut, in BattleLore

3 minutes ago, Telethia said:

I would like to prevent Bleeds from activating on double attacks just to make sure YA's aren't hard countered by this.

I think with my first wording, they are still good.

"A bleeding unit may not attack and move (including advancing) in the same round. If a unit has already moved or attacked, it may choose to suffer 1 damage to remove this restriction for the remainder of the round."

A Yeoman Archer that uses Double Shot will attack twice, but it is not both moving and advancing in the same round. This means a Roc that chooses to move but NOT attack, can still use Mobility at the end of the round without taking damage.

You're correct, I didn't see that as a problem with your wording, I just wanted to clarify that it was not my intent.

I had a couple games with my brother this weekend. He's played BattleLore: Command and we've played once as Daqan vs. Uthuk on Vassal, but this was the first time he played Undead. He won all of our games this weekend. As a result, I thought of a new custom rule and wanted to run it by you.

All units with a condition marker (poison, bleed, stun, blight, panic) have a movement value of 1.

This rule was introduced with the blight condition. I found it to be a very powerful effect, especially when combined with the synergy of the Undead faction (weak units can't attack Death Knights, for example). The more I thought about it, I realized that is one thing that makes Stun so powerful -- a stunned unit can't do ANYTHING! So what if panic, bleed and poison markers did the same thing? It makes a lot of sense, thematically, as well. If you're poisoned or bleeding, it's going to slow you down. If you are panicked, you are going to be moving forward very cautiously.

The one problem with it is that the Skeleton Archers become rather inferior compared to other archers, but I think that's fine because they still do cause the blighted unit to be considered weak (which prevents them from attacking Death Knights or ordering that unit with the command card that orders 3 units that are not weak). Also, Skeleton Archers are still minion units, which means they can be manipulated by Necromancers and be resurrected with graveyards.

If I try this rule out, I will definitely not be using the other buffs to archers. I want to see how this does first. I've had enough games with the Warband of Scorn units that I think I'm about ready to start playtesting Uthuk buffs.

On 8/6/2017 at 3:05 PM, Budgernaut said:

All units with a condition marker (poison, bleed, stun, blight, panic) have a movement value of 1.

The only issue I see here is that for bleed that also penalizes the Blood Sisters since they bleed friendlies. I feel like they would still need some small boost to compete.

Other than that, it would just need a lot of testing. It might make barghests more used although if it doesn't then I think this change is mostly a buff to Uthuk since stun doesn't care about this and Daqan don't have other condition tokens.

Condition markers causing movement reduction to 1 would quite eliminate Battlemage's of Daqan. Shielded would be very poor with that affect ;)

7 hours ago, phalgast said:

Condition markers causing movement reduction to 1 would quite eliminate Battlemage's of Daqan. Shielded would be very poor with that affect ;)

Sorry. I meant to write "negative condition," with the parentheses denoting which conditions are negative. You're right that it would otherwise ruin Battlemages! :)

I have some suggestions for condition markers:

Stun: Obviously very OP. What if to balance things, Stun were a special case, where the condition marker is removed after a round (or two)? So, instead of having to pay Lore to remove it, it were just a temporary condition that was removed on its own after a set time. It would make a bit of sense, too, since, unlike bleeding or poison, stuns tend to wear off.

Panic: This one is a bit underpowered. How about changing it so that it causes damage, as well as still causing retreats? Or it causes them to retreat twice instead of once for every Morale result, or maybe, as well, makes it so they cannot be Supported (they would treat friendly units behind them as impassable terrain)?

32 minutes ago, bottercot said:

I have some suggestions for condition markers:

Stun: Obviously very OP. What if to balance things, Stun were a special case, where the condition marker is removed after a round (or two)? So, instead of having to pay Lore to remove it, it were just a temporary condition that was removed on its own after a set time. It would make a bit of sense, too, since, unlike bleeding or poison, stuns tend to wear off.

Panic: This one is a bit underpowered. How about changing it so that it causes damage, as well as still causing retreats? Or it causes them to retreat twice instead of once for every Morale result, or maybe, as well, makes it so they cannot be Supported (they would treat friendly units behind them as impassable terrain)?

I don't think you are playing panic right. It forces the panicked unit to suffer damage when the panicked unit rolls morale results. So the panicked unit cannot cause retreats from morale results AND suffers damage for each morale rolled. It's not underpowered at all.

Oh, I see. Sorry. I thought that it caused damage when other units roll morale results against the panicked unit.