SFR, Inc.

[Indrid Cold]

Watching tutorial videos online, I've noticed that many people seem to set up their armies with roughly half of their points in the home army, half in the horde army, and one lone guy in the frontier army.

I assumed that this is the "best" starting setup, but maybe it's not.

Is there a starting army setup that is generally considered ideal? Or does it really all depend on the terrain type/terrain numbers?

[DScottOBrien]

its mostly done in an attempt to gain first roll or terrain choice advantage, since the rules state that during set-up you can have no more than half your units at a terrain, and must have at least one unit at each terrain as well. this makes the setup an ideal tactical strategy if you want the choice of frontier terrain or the first attack.
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D Scott O'Brien
Dice Junkie
Anal-retentive rules scrutinizer

[ddicerc]

It depends on your army. At Nationals this year, Jonathan Braun played a Frostwing missile army and wanted to control the frontier as part of his strategy. He conceded the horde roll, placing just one unit there, in order to choose the frontier and hopefully sweep off opposition for his archers. This isn't uncommon for missile armies. The way you deploy your forces is part of the strategic thinking of the game.
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Steve "DDice" Braun
The Diceman's Gaming Pages: http://ddicerc.weebly.com
2014-2015 U.S. National Champion
(Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse...)

[cliffwiggs]

Steve, in your example he still did the 15/14/1 split.

It is a min/max strategy that sometimes backfires on you. The idea is that one common minimizes your potential health loss at that terrain while you can maximize your damage and save capabilities at the other two terrains.

However, you are giving up early control of one terrain and it will take you two full turns to get a significant amount of units there. For example, you put one lone unit at my flatland home and my amazon runners there roll an initial 6. Because of the Amazon racial ability, you'd better RUN and keep them off that 8th face, but you will only get there just in time.

So I have seen people do more of a 10/10/10 split or maybe 15/7/8, but not very often. a larger army will usually defeat a smaller army, so people are scared to potentially have the smaller army.
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Multiplayer Champion Gencon11/Battlefest Champion(tied) GenCon10/World Champion GenCon07/National Champion Origins05/Intermediate Champion GenCon02/Novice Champion Origins99

[syntaxerror111]

One other consideration for the split is that you only get 2 marches per turn. If you evenly spread your army between 3 terrain you only get to act with 2/3 of your dice each turn.

Even if the game allowed one march for each army present, I imagine little would change because of the points made earlier. Has anyone tested playing with more than 2 marches per side (but never more than one per army)?
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-Fortune favors the bald

[Indrid Cold]

I was curious about this subject because there seems little incentive to place an army in the frontier on the outset.

There is an incentive for the home army (you get to choose the terrain) and an incentive for the horde army (better odds on the horde roll at the beginning), but less of an incentive for a frontier army.

[cliffwiggs]

[shoesan]

[cliffwiggs]

[shoesan]

Ahh... Ok. Wasn't thinking about 3 or more players.
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Shoe