Project 500 - Redux

[happyjosiah]

About 4 years ago, a member of the site who has only 14 posts came up with what I thought was a fantastic idea. You can read the original concept here: http://www.heroscapers.com/community...ad.php?t=19472

Essentially, the goal was to create a whole bunch of 500 point armies that were reasonably synergistic/thematic/fun but also contained no duplication of figures. In other words, if army #1 has Microcorps Agents, no other army will also. This allows for a single, mostly-complete Heroscape collection to have a pre-made army selection.

I have not been strict in adhering to the 500 point limit (armies range from 490 to 520), but these should ideally be balanced against each other regardless.

In the case of the initial Project 500 thread, these armies were to be used in a tournament with new people. However, I found the idea appealing for a different reason: I often play with casual players. These are people who like the game and know the rules, but don't know/care enough about all the interactions to draft intelligently. This allows for pick-up-and-play.

I used the original Project 500 as a template, and made some modifications. Some armies, such as Elf Wizards and Samurai Peasants practically build themselves, while others are a bit less cohesive. Regardless, every army should feature both range and melee, high-powered units should be balanced by low-powered ones, and, where possible, the army should have a theme.

I've used all every figure up through wave 9, including promos. It is a simple matter to add a Wave 10 army of 3x Granite Guardians and 2x Quasatch Hunters if desired. I kept it to 36 armies though for ease of randomization, and because I do not have those figures.

There are only 4 units that do not appear in armies here: Obsidian Guards, Dzu-Teh, Marro Drudge, and Dumutef Guard. These can optionally be substituted point-for-point after armies are selected. However, they are too terrain specific to warrant inclusion in an army at all times.

You will notice next to the point value of each army that there are two numbers. The idea with those is that you can roll a red d6 and a black d6 to randomly assign armies.

You will also notice that the first 10 armies are highlighted in pairs. These pairs can be squished together to make 1000-point (or 1015-point I suppose) thematic armies that should play reasonably well against each other also.

I am open to any suggestions for rearranging in ways that make more sense, and this is by no means the only way it could be done. If anything stands out as glaringly too weak or too strong, it may be worth bringing up if you have a fix for the issue. However, some armies being stronger than others is a necessary evil for expediting a casual game of 'scape, so it's not worth being overly picky about. Hopefully someone else will find this useful when playing with a group of new players as well. Thanks!