Guest Article: Brotherhood Without Banners Units (Part 1) by Warfactory
Welcome Bannermen,
As you have already seen Brotherhood Without Banners will soon join the A Song of Ice and Fire: Miniature Game. We are excited to be announcing that many of your beloved characters will be featured in this upcoming release!
To commemorate the release of our latest faction, we have decided to collaborate with our close partner, Warfactory, to publish a series of articles on this faction. They would breakdown each unit and card in this faction, giving you an in-depth analysis of the faction. Without further ado, we will leave you with the Warfactory Team then!
Dzień dobry!
It's an honor for us to be here. We're both excited to be part of it and proud that our previous articles on Warfactory page earned us a privilege to be officially featured on the A Song of Ice and Fire page. Please bear in mind that despite being organizers of some of the biggest ASOIAF tournaments in the world, we are casual players at heart. If you are a veteran in competitive play and see better uses of these units and abilities, we would love to see what strategies you come up with in the comments section!
Where was Lord Beric Dondarrion? (…) How many men were with them? How many knights, how many bowmen, how many men-at-arms? How were they armed? How many cavalry? How many were wounded?
That's a lot of questions from the Tickler. They are good questions though. Every general should learn about their enemies, and, yes, you probably guessed it, today we'll be focusing on the Combat Units in the Brotherhood Without Banners starter set.
Let's begin with the Peasant Levy. Before we delve deeper into their stats and abilities, let's take a quick look at the back of the card. Yes, we know you love the lore, but have you seen how much they cost? 4 points! It is not often we see such low-cost units and such units are always a great option in the Brotherhood’s arsenal. It opens a lot of list building possibilities and allows you to add elite units without compromising on the number of activations in your army.
Ok, given the cost and we know we probably shouldn't expect too much from them, right? Well, you will be surprised!
The Attack profile is indeed far from being impressive at first and the best we can say about Defence 6+ is that it will make us immune to Sundering (yes, we know that joke was old even before Doom of Valyria...). The Morale however, is a lot more than you can expect from mere peasants.
This profile seems more fitting when we begin to understand this unit's role on the battlefield. Peasant Levies are not designed to kill or hold entire enemy lines, but rather to support other units.
Gang-up is one of their abilities, adding extra dice and +1 to Hit, it is something that would be heavily utilized in games. Considering that we can field more combat units because of their low cost, situations where two our units fight with one enemy unit should not only be common but it should be one of the key parts of our strategy. Even two units of Peasant Levies fighting side-by-side would boost their offensive potential (from expected 2 hits to 3,5 hits if we exclude other abilities and charge bonuses and Weakened tokens). That's a lot. But obviously we want to pair them with units with higher damage outputs.
Disrupt is another amazing ability as it improves the survivability of not only the Peasant Levy but allied units too. Do keep in mind that you still have to watch out for ranged attacks and direct hits!
Overall, we feel Peasant Levy will be a must haves in every Brotherhood army. Mastering their use will require some time though. They would require precise positioning to make full use of them. Remember, they are support units and are perfectly shaped for this role.
And those sculpts! We believe that every Lannister player would love to add some of these miniatures in their Poor Fellows units (we know we would love to). The progress made in the years between the release of those two units is simply amazing.
We will be back with the next part soon where we cover two remaining units from the starter set.
Have a great week ahead, Bannermen!