Has anyone watching this forum played around with adding more asymmetry to each faction in the form of custom order cards for each faction? I like tinkering with home-brew variants and this seems like an obvious one. It could be a fun way to change things up a bit.

I haven't seen anything like that before. It could be interesting. I'd love to hear more of what you are thinking. Would these be additional cards that may double-up on some of the initiative orders? Or would you alter the existing order cards to make them different for each faction?

I don't have any solid ideas specifically. Giving factions a mix of advantages/disadvantages was my main idea. But I don't have anything specific in mind right now. I was just wondering whether it would be thematically fun to remove the ability for the Waiqar to build strongholds and harvest resources, and give them a different way of going about those things that give a more thematic "undead army" kind of feel to it. Something mechanically that would make the feel more like they are a blight on the land.

I feel like maybe the Latari or Daqan could be able to recruit heroes with a bit less effort. Don't have any cool ideas for Uthuk right now though.

A wacky rule for the Uthuk would be that if you have to destroy units due to food limits during winter, the units in that hex get to draw an additional card during combat that season -- because they are cannibals. Okay, so only the Obscenes are known to be cannibals, but still, it's something disgusting and sinister like the Uthuk Y'llan.

I wouldn't ever implement that rule, though. I don't get enough plays with the normal rules, so I'm not about to go adding variants, though I certainly don't mind discussing them.

There's always solo play!

I've been tinkering with a few ideas. On the whole "resolve battles with Battlelore" topic that everyone talks about at one point or another, I was thinking that the resources icons on each hex could be used to define the terrain type during the battle, a like how it works in Conan. Food icons would be plains with river terrain, while I think forest would be obvious and mines would be hilly. Defender would get to decide where the battle takes place among the choices on the tile, and this would dictate how the map is built out.

I would shrink the size of the map for battle resolution, and remove the usage of order cards in an effort to keep the time it takes to resolve a battle to 20 minutes or less.

I haven't taken the time to read through how those Runewars-BattleLore hybrid games are supposed to work. I really should. Too bad BGG is down right now. The thing that always concerned me was figuring out how many troops to recruit. I feel like an 8 vs. 2 battle is fine with the Runewars battle mechanics, but if you setup a BattleLore game where one side has 4 times as many units as the other, that's just not going to be fun for anyone.

But I like your thoughts on figuring out how to setup the battles. For me, I would just have each factions scenario cards shuffled into a deck. When a battle starts, you draw the top scenario and use that. Actually, that's a terrible idea for many reasons. Nobody should do that. First, it means you may play multiple different scenarios at a single area. While I think that could be realistic if we consider the areas as really large plots of land, it takes away a sense of location. It's probably better to assign a scenario to a hex once and then it stays that way the rest of the game. But that doesn't solve the second problem. Some scenarios highly reward specific units, and you may or may not have those units in that area. It adds way too much variation, in my opinion. So to reiterate, I really like your thoughts on using resources to setup the map.

I suppose if you reduced the size of the BattleLore board to 2 sections, that would be fine since you're omitting the command cards.

So I was thinking you'd have some kind of processes for setting up the battle like the following:

1) The defender picks the terrain type in which the battle will be fought, picking from one of the available resources types on the tile.

2) A smaller battle board is placed, and each player is given 3 BattleLore terrain tiles, the type of which is determined by the terrain that was chosen by the defender.

2.a) I'm thinking you'd probably want a small mix of terrain tiles, so there is some slight variety. If you are fighting in forest for example, each player gets 2 forest tiles, and 1 random of another type.

3) Starting with the defender, each player takes turns placing 1 tile on the board (some specific rules would need to be made for placement restrictions).

4) Starting with the defender, each player takes turns placing a unit in their starting area.

I would change the BattleLore system in the following ways to make resolving the battle faster:

-Create a custom, and much smaller hex board. 6x4 hexes sounds like a good starting point. Would need to ensure that it could support the maximum of 8 units on each side.

-Remove command cards and lanes from the game. Units would get activated either one at a time, perhaps in the initiative order that they are represented in Runewars, with the attacker winning ties.

-Only one or two "rounds" of battle should get resolved. Then strength points are added up and the army with less "morale" breaks and retreats, very similar to Runewars.

-I like the idea of supporting heroes (or commanders) in the battle being the source of Lore cards. Not sure how this would work exactly. But thematically the idea would be that a hero leading an army would determine how many Lore cards are drawn for the battle, and how much Lore would be available as a resource. There are obvious problems to work out here, like what happens when you draw only Lore cards that cost a lot to play, and don't start with enough Lore, but your opponent drew better. But I'm hopeful that something relatively simple and quick could be figured out so that you could make use of Lore cards during a battle.

I think getting a basic system working and functioning is the easy part. The hard part is changing all of the other parts of both Runewars and BattleLore that now need to be adjusted because the core gameplay has changed. Things like Runewars Tactics cards that no longer make any sense because battles are resolved completely differently, BattleLore unit abilities that aren't useful because the battles are so fast and there aren't any lanes on the board anymore, etc. Making all those tweaks and adjustments is probably 95% of the work, and I would only be interested in it as a community effort similar to the current effort to create a Latari faction for BattleLore.