Blabbering: More Halfling Thoughts

I had written previously about the gutting of my halfling force from 2nd to 3rd Edition and then also on the coming renaissance for them. As usual, I am very late to the party. Mantic's halflings arrived a while ago, so let's take another look.

At the conversion to 3rd Edition, the League's halflings only had Knights and Archers and Braves and Sergeants. They had dropped a lot of entries, meaning I could only run about 1k of the 2k+ collection amassed in 2nd Edition. I recently sat down with EasyArmy and my old hobbying spreadsheets, and redid the math revolving around my collection. 

The League looks to have gotten some slight updates to unit stats, but no new halfling units. The Archers and Knights are still generic, and not further revised up to Poachers or Wild Lancers. Three units still doesn't make an army, especially when Thunderous Charge 1 is the only real damage improver. While I think these could still do work in a League list, I think my halflings are going to need to secede.

The new Halfling Master List gives me back my spear blocks (Spearspikes) mounted scouts (Wild Runners) and Volley Guns with the Halfling keyword, all super things! The Archers and Knights of the League are promoted into Poachers and Wild Lancers, gaining a bunch of key words and special rules, making them better, if a little more expensive. From the old collection I'm really only missing out on three things: the Iron Beast (it's there, but now needs a Titan-sized base, and I don't think my old one will will look good rebased); the ASB's; and the old windy mounted Sorcerers I had. Now I can field about 1700 points of the army or so without characters, which from around 2k in 2nd, isn't bad at all!

At a glance, the newest Halflings look to remain basically in-line with the Beta list, at least for the units I am interested in. They are still pretty speedy, which I'm still not entirely thrilled with. I'm also still not quite sold on the steampunk / aeronautics aspects (the Tinker subfaction), but it does give them something pretty unique for Mantic to go in on for modeling, so I can definitely forgive that so long as I have some generic units to run in my learner lists. 

Overall, my collection is in a much, much better place now. I am even scouting around now for  potential replacements for my Iron Beast, so I gotta say I'm pretty happy with the update. I got some leads on running some learner games over the last few months too, but have just not had the time to nail play dates down. Hopefully some games will be coming with the new year!