I’m going to try and pull off a mega battle (maybe 6-8 participants) at my FLGS. Any advice on keeping things semi-organized or keeping things moving along?
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Keep things simple and communicate.
There is a lot going on and at least one person will be distracted at any given time.
Maybe on their phone, or looking up a rule, fixing a model, finding dice that fell off table, finishing a combat and not paying attention to the rest of the table, etc.
Check that everyone knows the next phase has started. It’s a polite way to remind people to get to it.
It is surprisingly easy for one side of the table to get into a different turn to the other.
I recommend scenarios that are easy to see the game state.
Control gets confusing on big tables and objective makers under units get forgotten.
Invade and Loot Token scenarios are best IMO.
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@WhosThisThen has experience of running large battles I think and might be able to offer some advice.
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The 3 kinds of deployment are quite different.
Although the regular and the diagonal one result in a deployment zone of equal size, you can’t use all of your zone using the diagonal one.
The areas at the two angles not 90° are too small.
And if you place units in the back are of your deployment zone, they won’t play a big part.
The deployment zone switching long sides with short sides offers the biggest deployment zone (48*24 instead of 72x12), but several units will be in second or even third row.
And you should decide if all units of side A are able to move through every unit of A (for example Orcs and Goblins vs Elves and Dwarfs on Side B) or if Orcs should not be able to move through Goblins.
But I would recommend to treat all units of one participating side as belonging to one army for moving.
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“It is surprisingly easy for one side of the table to get into a different turn to the other.”
This sounds hilarious afterwards and frustrating when playing.
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Experienced mega battle KoW player here. Have been doing annual battles of 12-15k with the family for the past 4/5 years, and many ~6k games for years before that. At the start of this year we upped the ante and went for a 31,000 points (about 200 units) per side game. All so far done with 3rd edition but I think some of the changes in 4th (ignoring units whilst carrying out a charge against the same enemy) will be useful.
My top tips:
- Set up the night before if you can.
- Print your army lists and staple them together if they are more than one page.
- Generally have one person more or less lined up against another player. For example Player A controls all the units within the 4 foot of table assigned to them and they are facing off against one other player.
- Use the standard deployment. 12 inches of deployment still gives you enough room to deploy your army at least three units deep. For most non-horde armies, 1,000 points can fit within a 12” by 12” square. Sure it might not be optimum but you’re there to have fun, not play the most optimal KoW game ever.
- You will likely need 7 or more turns. I think 9 is a good number to have for larger games.
- Try to keep the entire battlefield on the same phase as best as you can. Sure, if your elf army is still shooting a few units, and the allied melee only orc army 6 foot down the table wants to go to combat, go for it. Make sure that the start of the next turn does not happen until everything is completed.
- No nerve checks from shooting on the first turn. Nobody wants to have their dragon focussed fired upon before they get to move it. Nerve checks from turn 1 charges are completely fine.
- Limit the number of war engines. I think one per 1,000 points is still more than enough. I’ve played against a battery of goblin war engines too many times to enjoy it. In a large battle there is always going to be some height 3+ unit that they will be able to shoot at (see above point about focused fire and no nerve checks on turn 1).
- Objectives - if it’s a large game have a variety of win conditions to fight for.
We usually have some very large hills available to us and have used these as a singular objective each. Very similar to Dominate, count up the US on the hill at the end of the game.
Loot tokens or objectives across the middle of the table are a good shout too to force armies to move towards each other. Some minor changes to loot tokens help such as; you cannot drop them which means enemies have to come get them off your unit, if you are carrying a loot token you have to be given a charge order if possible.
We’ve also had an army general assigned to each army or side. If they die thy become a loot counter, have also theorised about the generals scoring points for every unit they kill in melee.
As mentioned by DarkBlack above, visual objectives (like our large hills) are great. - When working through all the combats do them all from left to right (or right to left), in a mega battle it’s far easier to just work across the board resolving every combat rather than jumping around doing the exciting ones first. Sure, there might be the occasional combat where you want to kill an inspiring unit, or go for an overrun. Feel free to skip to these but don’t stray too far from where you’ve got to down the line.
- Have fun. It’s a mega battle and meant to be a bit of silliness. Count how many double ones are rolled, trying to keep track of which units are unstoppable and are killing more than their fair share of enemies.
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Finally, it’s good to have someone dedicated as the “game master” , someone who is not playing en who keeps track of everything. For instance, if you agree that 30 minutes per turn is the absolute maximum (should be easy), someone has to tell that “fiddler” to stop as everyone is waiting for him to finish the final placement of that single unit.
In larger games it’s possible that one guy keeps up the pace to a drag, dimishing the fun for everyone. If you agree beforehand that the pace of the game is important, the game master can talk to people about the 150-shot elf armies that will take 20-minute shooting rounds every turn. Yes, it is legal, but no because of this you cannot run this army in this battle.
The game master is also in charge of the narative including any narative rules which may or may not be balanced.
For intance, we played a massive siege @ örb wars. The 3rd edition Siege rules game the attackers a 25% point advantage, which the game master axed to ~10% because he thought that was fair. As the game master, he could make this ruling and in hindsight, he was right. The castle was an advantage, but no more than the 10% (roughly 600 points) instead of 25% (1,500 points)
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We did an 8k aside one 2v1 (4th player couldn’t make it!).
Used normal deployment zones and played Control and a fixed objectives scenario.
Did blind deployment using a screen of box lids (and a large space marine cut out the LGS had! Definitely quicker than unit by unit placement, plus it adds quite a lot of guess work and jeopardy into things.
It Definitely helps if teams are actually multiplayer(!), otherwise echo @WhosThisThen comments.
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