ADVANCED RULES

DEFENDING BARRIERS

This entirely new section includes both the bits from the Move Phase and the Combat Phase, and places them together for ease of reference. This way, if you use barriers in your games, you'll find all the rules you need in one place, and we don't clutter the main rules if you don't use barriers. There has been a change in the rules regarding defenders that are attacked by enemies from both across the barrier and on the same side of the barrier as the defender. These rules have been simplified. Now, such situations are treated just like a normal multiple fight, and the defender loses all advantages of being behind a barrier.

COURAGE

This section contains what is probably the most important changes to the rules! The All on His Own test is gone. The reason for its removal is simple – players very often completely forgot about it. That's normally a signal that a rule is not very intuitive or necessary, and we decided to terminate it.

We made one other major change to the Courage rules. In previous editions, when a force was Broken (a term that means "reduced to 50% of its initial strength"), every model had to take a test every turn. Most of the time, this test would result in models running backward and forward for many turns without achieving much – a lot of time and dice rolling for nothing! Also, the Retreat rules were quite complex and easy to misread or exploit. I killed two birds with one stone by changing the rules so that if a model fails this test, instead of retreating, the model is removed as a casualty! This rule represents the warrior completely losing nerve, turning tail, and leaving the battlefield in a hurry. As you probably have guessed, this change makes for a faster and more decisive game end, which highlights these tests as very tense affairs indeed and makes the leadership of your Heroes even more vital than ever to keep the troops fighting.

To get rid of the Retreat rule, I also changed the way Terror works. Now, if a model tries to charge a terrifying enemy and fails the test, it freezes on the spot and does not move at all.

Rules for Defending Barriers have been moved to their own section.

HEROES (MIGHT, WILL & FATE)

Might and Fate have not changed, but Will has become more useful. The thing I didn't like about Will was that, if the enemy force did not include a Wizard, Will was completely useless. Thus, it became difficult to assign Will a points value as we created characters. Thus, in order to make Will valuable in all circumstances, we've added a further use for it, which also compensates for the more lethal consequences of failed Courage tests. As well as casting/resisting spells, points of Will can now be spent to modify the score of Courage tests in exactly the same way as Might can be used. Will points can even be used in combination with Might points. Thus, Will gives Heroes a better chance of passing those important Courage tests and continuing to lead your troops by example.

WEAPONS

The most important difference with this section is that, from now on, all models are armed with hand weapons. Models will count as unarmed and suffer the -1 penalty to their Fight value only when their profile specifically says they are unarmed.

This rule also makes warriors armed with two-handed weapons more versatile, as their controlling player can now choose to have them fight with either their two-handed weapons or their single-handed weapons.

I have also made Volley Fire a little more difficult to execute, as now you need 10 models to form a group large enough for volley fire. Also, the receiving player starts to allocate any hits now, making a large group of firing models better than a small one (with the old rules it was better to fire with two small groups). You will agree that, this way, it's more realistic. The more warriors firing the volley, the higher the chance of hitting the intended target.

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