Volley is quite unfair in lotr sbg.First of all you score a hit (not a wound)on the roll of 6!You can image that an elf army can
lose a volley fire match by other races such as uruck hai or dwarves(especially dwarves)!Am i wrong?

It is possible for non-elves to beat elves in a volley fire situation (though with Dwarves, their range is still typically shorter). Although I can't say I've seen many people use volley fire because you have a better chance with the shorter ranger but better accuracy.

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And basically a volley fire is supposed to be an amount of arrows flying in one direction but not one target, and therefor it makes perfect sense the orcs would have the same chance of hitting as the elves.

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Don't get into a volley fire duel then :/

I think it depends on which race you are using, for orcs it works and if you read the battle report in this months WHite Dwarf it worked for Dwarves against Goblins. With Elves it just encourages youto close with the enemy as soon as you can

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Everything in the game is a manner of balancing your advantages vs. those of your opponent and keeping the scale in your favor. Some general rules:

* If you are the only side that has enough grouped models to volley with, then do it for as long as you can.
* If you both have volley capabilities but you have a range advantage or superior terrain coverage / LoS / Defense, then it's nearly as good as #1
* If you both are equal in #2, then consider similar questions for direct bow fire. If justified, consider 1/2 moves to direct fire range while keeping up volley shots. If not justified then just full rush to direct fire range.
* If you are outclassed / outnumbered / our maneuvered for both volley and direct fire then forget it and get into combat asap. Perhaps keep some archers active on harassment, cover fire, etc.
* If you do volley, try to focus on low defense models (Cav are excellent targets for this).

In SBG there are very few hard rules of what is best (I won't get into my gripe about how some of this is lost in WotR...oh wait...I just did ). My exact same Elf army list may face a Goblin horde in one game that just has so many volley dice being rolled that it doesn't pay to try to out volley them, but if I can get into direct fire range, while staying only in their volley fire range, then I'll wear them down fast. But those exact same lists may deploy on another table in such a way that the Goblins can't volley effectively and are at the mercy of even the random 6's of volley fire. In such situations I would happily sit back and take my chances on a couple 6's for a turn or two if the scenario allowed.

Volley is often a factor of numbers for increased odds. Twelve-model volleys will generally be more effective than 10-model, just because of the odds. Generic, bad-shot Goblin / Orc armies can often out-volley Elves and Dwarves simply because they are so cheap they can have several more models lined up to volley and score a few extra 6's, though defense factors are always critical as well. If your Heroes have bows (as most of my Elf Heroes or Captains do) then use them to increase your odds.

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Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

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This is my gripe about volley fire, it doesn't make sense that they didn't include something about if volleying a group of models X numbers in size or greater, you get an accuracy bonus. I've played where for every 4th model in 3in of the target, you get better accuracy by one, to the original shoot value of the models. This caused a few too many hits for my taste, so next game it'll probably be every 5th model instead. This makes it so that elves CAN out volley goblins in the right conditions.

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why would elves want to out volley goblins? besides VERY situational circumstances, like trying to hit a hero who is out of sight.

Getting into range and hitting on 3s and killing on 5s is much more effective.

Look at Helms Deep in the movie. The elves are lined up in the courtyard, outside of LoS, far away form danger, yet they volleyed over the wall and killed a slew of Uruks. It basically gives the defenders of a castle another advantage in a siege, making it more realistic.

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wouldn't it be a great film if 40 archers killed nothing. -.-

there are also 10,000 more uruks behind them. If volleyfire killed in that amount in SBG it would horrendously imbalance the game. Elves are good enough at shooting as it is, they don't need more help.

As for seiges, why aren't the archers on the walls anyway? They can volley from on top, get more turns shooting and cover from the walls. It's easy enough to swap around to get a shield warrior for when it comes to the knife fight.

In the film, the walls were already packed with Rohan and Elf archers (which then defended the walls when the ladders came). The archers behind the walls were the ones that wouldn't fit. Similar tactic would apply in game.

Volley fire is almost never better than direct fire. The only advantages it gives you are being able to shoot an enemy without exposing yourself and possibly shooting an enemy at greater range. There is a time and place for such advantages.

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Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

http://TacticsInMiniature.com

It was actually one of the most unrealistic scenes in the film.

Not really, if you send a volley over a wall with 10,000+ guys just outside, you're going to hit with almost every arrow. My point is that the more densely packed your opponent is, the more likely you are to hit them.

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If you really wanted to make the game look like film then Legolas would be auto-killing everything instead of just autohitting and Berserkers would have 3 or 4 wounds because that's the only warrior Legolas didn't autokill (hell, he kills Saruman with a single shot in the film)... I think Legolas might then cost about 500pts. Good luck

Also, by film vs game terms the Helms Deep should be played with about 3500 points vs 100,000 points. Effectively a ratio of around 1:30 in points. Guess what - sieges in LotR SBG are usually played with ratio 1:2 or 1:1.5. Therefore you have 2 options if you want to follow that logic:
- Give the elves auto-hitting and killing with a 1:2 ratio, making the game unplayable because you pretty much auto-win
- OR Use the 1:30 ratio, so for every 1 elf on your wall, have 300pts of enemies. So 10 elves vs 3,000 points of evil? Good luck

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I was just using the movie as an example, I WAS NOT saying the game should be just like the movie, just that it should be more realistic. If you shoot 10 arrows in the general direction of 10 guys, you WILL have a better chance of hitting than if you did it at 1 guy.

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Well then in that case we should follow that up in normal shooting rules too, not only volley fire and give huge bonuses to all archers - If an army is made of 50 models then you pretty much can't miss if following that logic.

I'm pretty sure that 10 arrows would be affected by wind more than 100 would. Also the distance - if out of 100 there were 30 that went over or under range, then there would be still 70 that went roughly on target, or 7 in case of the 10 shots. After that majority would be stopped by shields going up (obviously Uruks are too dumb to put their shields up in the film and it wouldn't look so cool if they did). The chance of stopping 7 arrows with shields is much bigger than the chance of stopping 70 - how do you include that in the game? Add some sort of arrow-shielding rule that applies only to models with shields? Would that rule slow them down too? And would you have to declare at the end of the move phase which group is doing that?

Changing a single rule leads to a lot of complications if you want to balance it or follow it up.

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Not really. You're just making it much more difficult than it has to be.

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A lot of new players to SBG look at ways of "increasing realism" when they're past the initial learning curve. Often ranged fire is where I see most suggestions (though I think Cav changes and using a model's Fight value as a direct modifier for the roll to determine who wins the Fight are other popular ones).

It really boils down to the fact that SBG does not try to represent reality. It's an abstracted game system that is designed to be learned easily and have a fast paced game play without bogging down in mechanics, tables, multiple dice rolls, etc. It tries to bring the feeling of the films and stories to the table in a way that's accurate enough to create a believable experience but remain at its heart a "fun game". Any change made to "increase reality" in one area or another will often have consequences in other areas and overall may not really add much to the game experience. SBG has been around for a long time and evolved several times during that, with the biggest changes coming between the RotK rules and the OneRing book rewrite and I think GW has it pretty good at this point. If you are looking for something "more" there are probably a few really good Historical rule sets that try much harder to nail the reality aspect which can be adapted to Tolkien style play. I have played (and still do enjoy) some pretty complex cardboard-counter-based wargames that can take several minutes for each turn due to the complexity of unit management, movement, targeting, damage, etc. But for the style of play SBG tries to represent I think GW has it just abstract enough for speed and fun while retaining enough "reality" to pull you in and provide a depth of tactics.

/soapbox

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Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

http://TacticsInMiniature.com

I agree that you have to keep things simple to keep it from being boring, but I think that ranged fire is one of the few, if not only, areas that can be enhanced to be more realistic without breaking the game. Making it more realistic makes the 1/3 archers rule make more sense. I read somewhere that GW wanted archery to be a weak aspect of the game so that players would concentrate on close combat, when in real life, archers could turn the tide of battle quite easily. The 1/3 rule would then balance it and represent that not that many people were trained to be effective archers.

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While I would agree that, in real life, the powerhouses in European wars went from being the fully armored knight to the archer, with the advent of the English longbow, I personally am not of the mind that the generic shooting rules should change. This is due primarily to the fact that, in all honesty, the current shooting rules are plenty deadly if properly used. Particularly if the one you play against seems to ALWAYS use them right. *sigh*

If there is anything I would change, it would be how obstacles work, but generic shooting, I think, is fine.

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"...in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”