Man O' War and you...

[Eternus]

Ok, I for one am keen to foster support for this venerable but neglected specialist game on this site. With that in mind, and to carry on what started with Ironmonger's thread I ask you ol' sea dogs the following questions about your experiences of Man O' War:

Firstly, what fleet or fleets to you have, and why did you pick those fleets?

For me, I have a Dark Elf Fleet, a Dwarf Fleet, an Empire Fleet, a Chaos Dwarf Fleet, a Chaos Fleet, and a Bretonnian Fleet. I started out with a combination of Dark Elves and Nugle Chaos, which was one of the fleets used in the battle report from White Dwarf issue 160. This was my first contact with the game, and I loved the report, the look of the Nurgle ships, the destructive power of the Reavers, and the sheer awsomeness of the Black Ark. This was the start of my Dark Elf and Chaos fleets.

Of my various other fleets, the Chaos Dwarfs were inherited when my brother went off the hobby early on, the Dwarfs were inherited from my dad after his mid life crisis ended, the Bretonnians were bought because I didn't want an Empire fleet at first, prefering to avoid the most common fleets, and finally, I went for an Empire fleet to give a home to all those plastic War Galleys that came in the boxed game.

Next question. Which fleets do you enjoy playing with and against the most. I like using the Dark Elf fleet and the Bretonnian fleet, because they are both very different in the way they work on the table, and both potentially lethal when used to their strengths. The Bretonnians are really fast and heavilly armed, but reliant on wind and vulnerable from certain angels, and the Dark Elves ignore the wind almost entirely and have monsters instead of ships, which in itself is cool enough.

The fleet I like playing against is the High Elf fleet, because it is a challenge when played well, and I hate High Elves of any description.

I also wanted to ask whether people stick to the scenarios in the books when playing or make up their own, and also whether people stick rigidly to the fleet lists of 1000 points or play whatever size takes your fancy?

Anyone else wanna share?

[Roguebaron]

I have dwarves, chaos dwarves, brettonian, empire, chaos and sea monsters painted and high elves, skaven and the vikings unpainted. I loved playing the dwarves with hords of monitors just becuse of the turret fun, brets had great broadsides and gave different tactics. The chaos dwarves with some large shark support was also a lot of fun with their wicked large ships. I had a friend who played dark elves and have since lost touch so I never bought that one, and hated trying to sink the ark, that thing could take damage.

I play whatever size fits the minis we feel like using. I kinda take out a pile, and make sure both sides are equal. I don't have a lot of chaos dwarves, so those tend to be small games, my empire, bret and dwarf fleets are all rather large, so we can play well over 1000 points.

[dobbo]

Just got back into it after buying the original game a few weeks ago. I have only had two games so far, both of which consisted of 6 galleys a piece. Really good fun, I'm looking forward to getting the rest of my fleets up and running. So far I have got about 1250 of Empire, 1000 Bretonnian, 850 High Elves, plus a Black Arc. Got empire and brets as I like the look of the galleons, great ships. Got the elves because I like killing elves.

Here's a gaming tip to anyone thinking about playing surfaces, I went to fabric shop and bought a 1m by 1.5m length of blue felt for £2.99, it looks great works a treat with the baseless minis.

[Ironmonger]

I play Brets and Dwarfs mainly, but have essentially all fleets. My opponent most of the time has Chaos Dwarfs. I'll have to post a battle report up on youtube sometime soonish.

I tend to play whatever takes my fancy, but think the 1000 point set up works best for a quick 30 minutes to an hour game. Magic makes things both more interesting and take longer, so be aware. Fliers should also be tweaked to be allowed for points above the limit (i.e. both players get 75 or 150 or whatever points worth of fliers above the standard point limit), and the rules should read as they "attack simultaneously" with the ship/crew.

Really good to see some more interest on here for this, IMHO the best GW game developed, up there with Warmaster! Cheers!

[Spiney Norman]

I have a large Empire fleet (up to 1800pts), a chaos fleet (1300pts) and chaos dwarfs (900pts). I also have a small norse contingent (Kingship and 3 longships) which I ally in variously to make up fleet sizes. I also have 2 squadrons of griffon riders, 2 great tauri and 3 lords of change, but almost never use them due to a general dislike of the flyer rules among our group.

Its a source of great frustration to me that its not possible to make a 1K fleet of chaos dwarfs without either buying 4 chaos rewards or using the Kingship for the last 100pts.

Empire was the only fleet I bought while the game was still in print, both my chaos fleets were more recent ebay aquisitions. I have all the ships from the Empire fleet inc the hell hammer and iron fist from the Sea of blood expansion. From the chaos fleet I'm missing the slaanesh ships of the line, as they're somewhat rare and expensive to get hold of on ebay and I have all the ships from the chaos dwarf fleet.

There are 5 of us (including myself) that play regularly, one guy with Dark Elves, one with dwarfs & High elves, one with Empire and one with Dwarfs & Skaven, the only fleets that aren't represented in our group are orcs and brets.

We most commonly play 900 or 1000pt games as some of the guys only have smallish fleets, but we also play 2 on 2 games with allied fleets for larger engagements.

We mostly use the credit-card sized templates laminated with wipeable markers to record hits and crew etc, its much more efficient than fiddling about with a million and one counters we just use different coloured dots, red for blaze, blue for damage, black for crew, and green for nurgles rot.

[Hubman]

When the game was current I only played Dwarfs and had enough models to do a 1300 point fleet if I bought 5 MoW cards and selected all of my models.

Nowadays, with the wonders of Ebay my Dwarf fleet has grown to include a second Dreadnought, 4 squadrons of Monitors (instead of two) and I may have picked up an accidental extra Ironclad. Oh yeah, I also have squadron each of Gyrocopters and War Balloons. Dwarfs were my first fleet. I liked the models since I am interested in military history and the Dwarf fleet is heavily influenced by American Civil War ironclads. The friend who introduced me to the game played High Elves and my WFB army at the time was HE too, so it was only for the better that my main fleet was something different than HE. Since I would never collect Dwarfs for WFB (their playing style doesn't suit me, although I like them as opponents), I really enjoyed this opportunity to do something with Dwarfs.

In recent years I have expanded my Dwarf fleet but more importantly obtained entirely new fleets. I got my Empire (29 or more ships for my largest fleet), Bretonnia and High Elves over a relatively short period of less than a year. All fleets number over 20 ships and all have enough variation and models to play 2000 points easily, maybe even 3000 points. I have flyers for all of my fleets, though I'm not completely sure since some fleets have two types while others have one. I selected these fleets because I generally play "good guy" armies in the GW universes. For WFB I have just about all the "good" armies (except Dwarfs of course, plus the neutral Lizardmen) and for MoW I also wanted all the "good" fleets. What also helped is that all of these fleets were in the original box and were relatively well balanced, with Dwarfs being the weaker of the four.

I also have some Dark Elves including a Black Ark, though I intend not to play them myself. Who knows, I might put the DE up on Ebay, give them to a friend who'd play them or keep them so that whenever an opponent wants to play them, he can use mine.

It's been a long time since my last game, but back then we usually played a two versus two, with "good guys" versus "bad guys". I usually paired up with the HE fielding friend and together we were nigh unbeatable in our own circle. We'd have 1000 points each, so 2000 per side. Everybody could field 1000 points but very few went above. However, considering that the vast majority of my games were 2 versus 2 that was no real problem. We barely used flyers: I seriously hated them! Flyers suffer from dramatically bad rules plus they altered the scope of the game just too much. I recall an article I published in our newsletter arguing against the inclusion of flyers! I simpy have them for the sake of completeness. Likewise, I never cared much for the monsters which I felt were too influential in a battle.

Dwarfs remain my favourite fleet. Of my other fleets, I have no clear number two. As for opponents, I always enjoyed Dark Elves or Empire. Chaos Undivided is extremely difficult to beat. Going one on one with well-played HE is also a pain in the rear, since I usually cannot get close and even Dwarf armour is bound to buckle in the long run.
There are several fleets I've barely played against simply because no one in my group collected them.

We almost always played pitched battles. In a few instances, we played scenario's. They could be fun, but I've found that -just like in WFB- scenario's tend to only work in certain conditions, such as a specific fleet matchup and selection, certain minimum terrain etc.

That's it for now!

Kind regards,

Hubman

[cornonthecob]

I'd like to try Man O war but I'm a big fan of ogres.

[Eternus]

I'd like to try Man O war but I'm a big fan of ogres.

Hmm, maybe come up with some rules for an Ogre fleet using Orc vessels, but much easier would be to have special rules for using mercenary Ogre crew counters in other fleets. Chaos and Skaven fleets have different special crew types, so shouldn't be difficult.

[BigRob]

I'd like to try Man O war but I'm a big fan of ogres.

Thats ok, Lizardmen didn't get a look in either

[red_zebra_ve]

How come there is NO MOW section in the forum???? Grmblllll

Have ± 2000 pts of Bretonnian, DE, HE...and pirates. Working on my Skavens.

[Eternus]

Well, I am now in the process of painting up my Man O' War fleets, though this my be slowed a little by moving house soon.

Here is the first sample, some simple Wargallies:

[Spiney Norman]

How come there is NO MOW section in the forum???? Grmblllll

Have ± 2000 pts of Bretonnian, DE, HE...and pirates. Working on my Skavens.

Yes, somewhat inexcusable as for some reason WHQ has its own forum...

Still who knows, perhaps the MoWesque game out next month will change things somewhat.

Is that a 2K fleet for Brets, DE & HE, or is that 2K points for all 3 combined?

I'm currently painting up some new ships for my chaos fleet, I managed to bag a trio of plague crushers quite reasonably on ebay to add to my ever growing plaguefleet.

[red_zebra_ve]

Is that a 2K fleet for Brets, DE & HE, or is that 2K points for all 3 combined?

That is 2K each, painted and ready to battle. Plus Monsters and Schmitt renegades.

I have also a complete dwarf collection still in boxes (ebay was my friend!)
and several Imperial, Chaos and Chaos dwarves ships to assembly and paint.

[yabbadabba]

I have Empire, Dwarves and Norse. The Norse is the smallest and I think that is 4 Kingships and 12 Longships.

I love playing my Dwarves against Dark Elves. Too many players like sticking in their Black Arks and when they go down, they go down!

Btw a so called friend nicked my copy of Sea of Blood. Just because I am here and a little lazy, has it been put up online as a Pdf yet?

[BigRob]

As far as I know, none of the PDFs have been released by Games Workshop.

There was an epic and awe inspiring website a few years back that had al lthe PDFs, scans of every card and token, hundreds of excellent pictures and so much more.

Yeah it vanished, can't think what would have caused that

[yabbadabba]

As far as I know, none of the PDFs have been released by Games Workshop.

There was an epic and awe inspiring website a few years back that had al lthe PDFs, scans of every card and token, hundreds of excellent pictures and so much more.

Yeah it vanished, can't think what would have caused that

People abusing the IP rules

Cheers Rob. The only thing I am missing for my Empire is the Ironfists, so it might be conversion time

[BigRob]

The ironfists never really showed up in stores or games as I recall (can't think why, they are not that bad....) and I've only ever seen a handful on eBay and such places.

Must have been a "dropped mould" like the buchaneers or something. Surely not too hard to whip some up out of plastic wargalleys.

[yabbadabba]

Ironfists were direct only if I remember right. I remember seeing them in the back of WD but not on the shelves.

Yup, I have 6 unassigned war galleys so when it comes to putting the Empire fleet together, it will be conversion city time

[Spiney Norman]

The ironfists never really showed up in stores or games as I recall (can't think why, they are not that bad....) and I've only ever seen a handful on eBay and such places.

Must have been a "dropped mould" like the buchaneers or something. Surely not too hard to whip some up out of plastic wargalleys.

I was lucky enough to get a trio when they were on sale, but I think they are pretty easy to whip up by combining some plastic wargalleys with Warmaster mortars.

[Geep]

I thought there were 2 releases of the ironfist- one much larger than the other. I never thought they were rare (I got some when a heap showed up on eBay about a year ago).