At long last, I am back. Yet again, real life intervened and I was unable to work on the blog last night. To be honest, though, I've hit a major stumbling block in my work.
The baseline stat block.
Now, the baseline stat block is easy to see here. I'm not sure what the exact GW policy is on posting their stat lines is. I'm going to err on the side of caution for this. However, it does mean that the BASE elf is +1 M, +1 WS, +1 BS, +2 I, and +1 Ld. That's a huge upswing from the human baseline in Mordheim. Going by the upgrade chart for one off games, each High Elf would be a 105 crown model. That's stupid, crazy stupid.
However, I did figure something of a cheat out. I took the 'baseline' of three different henchmen to figure out a easy solution. The three I used were the 'mercenary warrior', 'dwarf clansman', and 'orc boy'. Taking their base cost from WHFB and compared it to the cost of each henchmen in Mordheim. I figured out a handy dandy little cheat. Its roughly x5 the points cost in WHFB to the cost in Gold Crowns for Mordheim. Which means the standard High Elf model is 55 points, which is a tad more reasonable.
However, that still a huge amount either way, 105 or 55. That's an issue. A huge issue. Even a small warband would be prohibitively expensive. That's before adding costs for things like special skills or enhanced stats for heroes.
There's two solutions to this problem.
1. Reduce the cost, but keep the stat line the same. This could be potentially game breaking. It would make High Elves possibly an over effective warband.
2. Reduce the cost, but reduce some or all of the baseline stats. This is problematic since you might as well play a human or other warband with HE models.
So right now, I'm wrestling on trying to have it both ways. I'm trying to figure it out. Right now, I'm leaning towards giving them the improved iniative and the higher movement, but leaving the rest at comparable to the rest of the warbands. It still bears thinking about. By next week, I should have a probationary view of the stats that I want to use.
I've just had a look back over a couple of HE and DE warbands done by others including GW themselves, and the starting cost for an elf in all of these is 35gc. If you would like copies of these warbands to have a look at, send a message to "mark beardmore at gmail dot com" (minus the spaces) and I'll get them too you.
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