Tell me about the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. What went worng and what went right...

Tell me about the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game. What went worng and what went right? What about the Hobbit SBG?
I heard that these two are actually the best GW games systems but I don't know if it's true or just a meme.
Why GW doesn't emphasize on the LotR/Hobbit marketing? I also don't see any equivalents of warhammer start collecting boxes for these games

The games were good but relied entirely on the movie hype. When the hype died down for the LOTR trilogy people stopped being interested, and the Hobbit movie didn't help.

I always found the miniatures to be sub-par for GW's standards. Thus i was not interested.

Lotr is not their property so they can't do as much with it as with 40k, and it doesn't help that the hobbit movies blew chunks and their hobbit version of the game was also not as good as the previous edition.
I wish they'd reuse those rules for more games, they were already used in their legends of the old west and high seas historicals but they'd fit anywhere that wasn't massive battles.

GW should have bought the rights to Star Wars, not LOTR. That way we would have a Clone Wars/Old Republic wargame. Just imagine playing Epic Armageddon in Geonosis.

They nearly doubled the prices once, this killed it completly around here.

This. At their original price these figures were very reasonably priced. When they kept the same simple models and started selling them at the price of their normal models, it just became a bad deal.

Models, designed and basically everything relied on the movies.
Which sucks after the first, and the hypoe died fast.
Too bad, I played since day when it came out but bailed a few years later when the hype for the game died out.
Would have worked a lot better as a standalone game with his own illustrations, art and design.
REading books with only photos from the movies is painful.

As far as the actual game went, it was super broken and exploitable.

The average result needed to kill something was 5, 6 or even a 6 followed by a 4. (Power 2 bows vs armour 8 dudes). Even games with 20 or so miniatures could take up to 4 hours. The good guy factions generally had an edge, because of their superior combat skills (which meant they would almost always win melee by either rolling higher or rolling a tie) but things like Mumak were impossible to deal with.

When my friend and I started to annoy one another, he only played Dwarfs with shields because they were armor 9 or some shit and I only played Harad dudes with bows, because they didn't need to roll wounds on 6's.

But at least it's not Age of Shitmar.

Would you really want that written by Matt Ward?

I've played the game and collected models off and on for the last 15 years. Never played competitively, only some narrative scenarios and point matches with a friend (who has long sold his collection). So I can't tell you much about the competitive scene.

It's a pretty good and fun system, pretty simple to learn and flowing pretty nicely (until you start going over 50 models per side, then it really bogs down). But GW ruined it a few years after the LOTR films due to a couple of reasons:
- Stat creep: newer models were clearly designed to be stronger and better, which did not Always reflect properly in their point values (morannon orcs, black guard of Barad Dur, Abrakhan Guard, etc.)
- Price hikes, as already pointed out, combined with a switch to "finecast" for the newer, very overpriced" models
- The introduction of a second system "War of the Ring" (40k apocalypse for LOTR), which was not that well designed and required tons of models more to play than LOTR SBG. It was a blatant cash grab and excuse to sell more models.
- And after a couple of years, GW pretty much abandoned its LOTR range and just sat on the licence to deny other companies the possibility to make Middle Earth miniatures. At one point it even looked as if they wouldn't renew the licence, but then the Hobbit movies happened. But in the time in between a LOT of players dropped the game. Not all of this was GW's fault of course, it was to be expected that in the years after the movies interest in the game would wane.

Then the Hobbit days began, but I missed out on that period.

>someone who has never played the game.
you're a fucking idiot.

Superior combat skills aren't as valuable as high strength, it's why the uruk-hai are better soldiery than the elves.
High defense is also needed since there's no armor saves in the game.

continued

As to why GW doesn't support it more, I believe they simply keep their licence to deny the Middle Earth miniatures market to competitors.

Now, to be fair the last year things have gone into motion again with a new rulebook and releases of models through FW. This is due to the creation of a new Middle Earth team in their specialist games department (the same group that has revived Bloodbowl and made the recent boxed games).

Apparently, the plan is to rebrand the Hobbit SBG into a Middle Earth SBG in the near future.

Ward is better than the worst EU writters, even if he wrote shitty fluff it was never Sun Crusher-tier. Besides, he wrote LOTR and it was a good game.

consider how good the LotR game was, mechanically?

absolutely

>which was not that well designed and required tons of models more to play than LOTR SBG
War of the ring would have been an excellent 6mm game. I guess they were just shy of going back to that scale after discontinuing epic/warmaster.

Ward didn't write the core rules for LOTR. He did write a lot of profiles throughout the years though.

Working on the main book with alessio was his first rules writing gig with the studio.

My poor gobbos I bought in middle school will never find somebody to play with. Also their shields kept breaking off.

They'd should have made it 25mm warmaster instead of a Fantasy wannabe.

The "main book" you mentioned is probably "The One Rulebook", the hardcover one with the ring on the front cover. That's only the 4th edition of the core rules, though.
The game was originally designed by Priestly and Cavatore. But Ward progressively took over much of the rules writing for the game, so I do agree with you taht he's been important.

wasn't he credited in the original rules as well? Or am I just misremembering

This so much.
I liked the Movies, i bought a whole army.
When the prices went from 14.99€ for some goblins to 24.99 and more it was like a revelation to me: never buy from Geedubs ever again

>green skin
Worst GW meme right here.

they do support it. they've had two new army releases in the form of Iron Hills Dwarves and Gundabad orcs. A new rulebook due out in about a month and new battle companies coming right after with the next project being a return to Pellenor fields. Don't talk out of your ass.

>forge world

and? that's only 1 and a half armies and out at least a dozen. budget and you'll be fine.

I would love to see other things from Middle Earth get models. They have the license from WB of all things, so they could even take the opportunity to throw in characters from Shadow of Mordor and other derivatives. You are right that they are stuck with things from the movies, which is kind of disappointing.

>shadow of mordor.
get the fuck outta here. they're not stuck with the movies at all. they've got the entire appendicies to go through yet. and they're allowed to create their own stuff as long as it's deemed appropriate to the licence.

>shadow of mordor
Way to make age of sigmar sound appealing.

It's a good game, even though the models are very expensive you don't need many and can build a 600 point army for between £40 and £50 (600 SBG points is the equivalent of 1500 to 1750 of 40K or something.

It had lots of success when the films were coming out but GW's neglect and the critical failure of the Hobbit meant that it never held onto it's fan base (also a lot of it's fans weren't really wargamers, SBG was often their first and last experience and they were probably there more because it was Lord of the Rings).

Don't know if it's GW's best game since I like 8E 40K but it's an excellent skirmish ruleset and has won awards for it.

GW doesn't shill the SBG as hard because it conflicts with their other games, eventually GW will loose the rights to the SBG, could be 2 years could be 20 but they will eventually stop renewing the licence. For this reason they prefer to divert people to their two flagship games, or their one flagship game these days.

Overall it's an excellent game and as soon as FW re-brand it the middle-earth SBG I'll be jumping in with some Easterlings.

>easterlings
Those pikes are too fragile, they should have just kept those as metal and sold the rest as plastic.

My first introduction to the plastic crack that is GW. I still have my Isengard army in an army case somewhere.

Yeah what I'm doing is drilling all the spears and swords out and replacing them with historical metal spears. That way I'll get like 8 per box instead of the 2 plastic ones.

The newer ones are significantly better, especially since Forge World took over.

Not only. They raised the prices and halved the models in each box.

to be frank, you need so few models for the game it really turned into a non issue. the 24 boxes were absurdly good value when you realised just two boxes were too many models for a standard army.

I agree, for the price of one 40K or AoS army you could probably buy two good and two evil armies for the SBG.

Or half a FW one. Then again only the dumb unfluffy shit is retard expensive there so it evens out.
If you buy the goat riders, the ogres, those stupid fucking trolls, or dwarf crossbowmen then you're in the wrong game. Chariot is okay though, they need more love than just Khand.

I think I priced up my 600 point Easterling army and it was £65 for the entire army which included nearly the entire range.

even the forge world ones aren't that expensive in comparison. remember this is a small point game. and things like the iron hills are a point expensive, elite force. they're tiny on the table

hey, nothing wrong with the goat riders. if any sort of cavalry should exist for dwarves, it would be goats.

The whole point of dwarves is that they're very tough but not flexible, adding cav really goes against that.
It would be like Harad getting a heavily armored but slow unit.

it doesn't make them that flexible. they're still slower than horses and wargs which means they're still getting out maneuvered.

fpbp. Priestly and the other designers said as much; they wanted to make a good game, without any baggage that WFB would bring. They made it, it was good, it sold when the movies came out, then it stopped selling and store owners freaked out because they overpurchased thinking the gravy train would go on forever.