"What do you want? Army lists or build-your-own?" Topic

In a fantasy game, say warband size or so, do you want army lists for a specific setting?
Build-your-own so you can plop whatever figures on the table?

Generic D&D monsters and you figure the rest out?

Tell me. Not that I'd be working on a fantasy game next year or nuffin'

Build-your-own so you can plop whatever figures on the table.

Both. Like what Vor did and Song of Blades and Heroes does.

I vote for both as well.

I'm with Punkrabbit.
I want both and SBH is a good example. First off, a flexible unit creation system so I can stat up whatever I've got in the gaming cabinet. In addition I want a set of premade statlines, both to quickly get playing, and as a guide for building my own statlines.

I'm not worried about granular balance between units and I play with reasonable opponents, , so the inherent break-ability of unit creation systems in games liek SBH, Open Combat, WarEngine, etc, does not bother me at all.

The only time I don't miss a unit-creation mechanic is in larger and more abstract games like Kings of War where so many army lists are provided that you can find a statline for nearly any unit you can think of.

The chainmail system that sold minis with points cards seemed to work well with skirmish level games.

Another vote for Both!!

I'd prefer an extensive set of pre-made, balanced lists covering many different archetypes of units. Build-your-own rules are A) too easy to break through min-maxing, and B) very difficult to balance on an army/force-list level.

I'll try to explain what I mean with B above. Assume you're designing two army types, humans (swordsmen and bowmen) and gnörks (red gnörks and blue gnörks). Even though a blue gnörk has identical stats to a swordsman, the gnörk only costs half as much as the swordsman, because the gnörk army has no access to ranged weapons whatsoever.

So if you take a single unit from one army list and compare it to a single unit from another army list, one is obviously and undeniably better. But the two army lists can still be balanced towards each other, taken as a whole.

I think it really depends on how complicated the game is.

For simpler, more casual games like SoBH or Open combat, I'd like a "make your own model" kind of system.

for a game like Warmahordes with how competitive and dynamic the balance is in it, oooh. I'd hate to think of the warcasters people could make if they could go hogwild in that.

I think it really depends on the right tool for the right job.