Speciality Elements
By Jon Spencer
I must admit, I've come up with some really stupidly complicated ideas in the past for adding more colour and flavour to HOTT armies, but this is one I can actually see working. That is I can actually envisage sane, well-balanced, humans being actually using it.
The idea is this:
1, when a player designs his army, he may select ONE of the element types to be his army speciality. This represents a troop type that the army and it's backing culture is recognised as possessing an advantage in, either for reasons of training, equipment, tradition, or whatever.
2, the speciality element type must not be Gods, Heroes (aerial or otherwise), Dragons or Paladins. I'm a little dodgy on Blades too, as they seem to come across in the rules as elite troops without any modifications, but for now I'm just playing safe.
3, No more than half the total army AP may be spent on the speciality element type.
4, A player is under no compulsion to deploy any of the element type.
5, Elements of the army speciality type cost no extra, but count as "superior". They may, when in close combat or shot at or bespelled, and +! to their final combat total in any situation where their result was less than that of the enemy. They do not win ties.
An Elven army, or one with advanced weapons, might select Shooters as it's speciality type. An Undead army might select Hordes, a Barbarian army warband, and so forth. I have allowed Magicians and Behemoths to be selected as an army speciality largely from the gut feeling that it is easier to ascertain whenever your Wizards are especially learned and powerful, or that your Hydra are better than Elephants, than it is to tell whenever who's God is better, whose Hero more incredibly lucky, who's Paladins possessed of less of social life.
This rule will be most useful in battles between armies of the Literary or Fantasy traditional type. In a battle between the Kung Fu villains and the Garden Gnomes it would be kind of pointless as the whole battle's a joke (a funny joke). In a battle between Mirkwood Elves and Misty Mountains goblins, however, it would make sense.
The main problems with this rule that I can see, aside from the "even more bullet-proof Blade" problem which is really a long-running balance hiccup in the core rules, are as follows:
It will encourage stereotyped armies where half the troops on both sides are all one type. Other than that It might actually help the game a little if people tried to stop squeezing every troop type they want into one list, I don't know what to say about this. Maybe a player with significantly fewer APs of superior elements might get a free Spear or Horde or whatever ("Hello, we're Neighbourhood Watch, just happened along to see about the noise...")
It makes it more difficult to field an army that's meant to be quite uniform. What do you do if you're Dwarves and you're only allowed 6 Blades? Well, this is less of a problem than the other. What would you rather field or fight, a Dwarven force of 1 Hero, 9 standard Blades, and 1 Shooter or one with 1 Hero, 6 superior Blades, 1 Artillery, 2 Shooters and a Lurker (drunken dwarves who wandered off on their own...). I'm not sure which would be stronger, but I know which is more interesting.
Aw well, no idea is perfect. Open for feedback.