Bits and pieces collected from The Chronicler’s Corner, the MG Home Notes and other sources.
Movement
First a note about movement in general, in a matter that most newbies are incertain about:
You can move into a province if you have any movement points left, a meagre 0.1 points being enough. Meaning that it is generally the best strategy to save a diagonal move until last, thus getting an expensive move nearly for free! Note that the term ‘move cost’ that appears per province on your print-out should not be interpreted as being a minimal required entry cost for that province. It is the ‘basic terrain cost’ of a province used to calculate the actual movement cost by multiplying it with the direction multiplier of 5 or 7. This base terrain factor is modified by the placement of rivers, coastlines, roads and spells #226 and #227. So: the required entry cost of (for example) a forest province at the end of your movement is 0.1, not 1.3 (base terrain cost) and not 6.5 or 9.1 (total move cost).
Flying
* The universal terrain cost for any flying force will be 2.5 horizontal/vertical and 3.5 diagonal. Barriers of Nature will still stop you.
* Ranger only gets adds to land movement (p. 15), NOT to flight.
* Cloud castles can move over Sea and do profit for roads. They can never move more than 25 points, so Forced March or the Charm Movement spell can’t change that.
* You can in one turn only move in one way: fly in the air or walk on the ground, not both. The Movement Mode for flying being code 4, the codes for ground movement being 1 to 3. This also means that a flying force cannot fly with Stealth or Forced March. Charms of Movement work on both ground and air movement (except for Cloud Castles).
* The Movement Bonus for Ranger [+8] and Thief [+4] only apply to ground movement, mirroring their ability to find sneaky shortcuts through wooded areas and the like; these bonusses do not apply to flying, simply because “there are not that many trees and bushes to jump around at 10000 feet altitude…!” (designer Edi Birsan).
* Drowning is not possible in the game. So when you fly, and end your movement in a sea province, or when you teleport into a sea province for that matter, there’s no problem; in both cases “you will just float around a bit, like a duck…” (Edi).
* NON flying mounts in your possessions will add dead weight to the flying capacity of the force. If you have flying mounts in your possessions they will provide Lift Capacity or flight carry capacity.
Fleets
* When in a fleet, characters and all their possessions, including mounts[! a wardrake could be very heavy!], are counted as Cargo Weight, not as soldiers. This applies even in the case of characters assigned to combat slots. This avoids many problems as under the new Net Distribution Method (see below) of fleet weight, the cargo capacity of the whole fleet is taken and compared to the weight of all the cargo. Mind you that soldiers are still figured on a slot basis as they are critical in the fleet combat computations. Meaning that when soldiers are in a certain slot, you need a ship to be assigned to that slot to carry them (which is thus not necessary for characters).
* Population counts as cargo, and can be transfered (T9) between fleets while at sea, in the same way it has become possible to transfer items (T6) or characters (T11) between two fleets at sea. Also note that the L1 order can be used in a sea province.
* Transfer of Ships with a T6 order: the T6 order allows for the transfer of ships from one slot to another in a fleet. This is a special condition of the T6 order which many players over look. As soon as you start a T6 order and the first item to transfer is a ship then the order code asks for a SLOT number in the ‘A’ parameter. If you just want to toss ships around from force possession we would recommend that you start the transfer order with anything other than a ship and everything will go as you expect.
* Fleet cargo: fleets will operate for cargo weight allocation on a net basis. The fleet total cargo carrying capacity will be used to compute if the fleet can carry the total weight of the cargo. Cargo does not need to be assigned pn a per slot basis, unlike with soldier or men allocation, as the latter are tied to the battle program and the modifiers for the ship types in those slots.
* Fleets moving accross the sea count as ground(ed) movement (see above; there is only ground(ed) vs air move, not a third movement type for sailing). This means that fleets can move normally, can go forced march, or go in stealth, like legions on land. In other words: sailing is no movement mode, but just a matter of different terrain. Of course, Charm of Movement on fleets are possible.
* Note that the LPE map may be somewhat confusing as how you can sail. Recently, my faction (DD98) sailed THROUGH half the continent of Tarvan, via lakes and through (what looked like) landbridges. For what is confusing is that the LPE map depicts the shoreline in the sea province, instead of in the land province in which it belongs. Rengenier Mulder summarized it like this for the LPE:
–You can sail diagonally from sea to sea
–You can sail diagonally from sea to land, or land to sea
–You can NOT sail diagonally from land to land
–You can always move horizontally and vertically.
–It is irrelevant how you had entered the province earlier [i.e. the coastline at one end makes the whole province coastal].
“In other words, in Legends, you can sail through Panama even though there is no canal!”
Net Weight Distribution
* Under the Net Distribution Method of Weight, you can have several characters profiting from one single flying mount, simply by assigning that mount to the force. As long as the gross lift works, all the characters can be carried. In other words: the flight carry capacity of characters and mounts in possessions translate over to a FORCE’s flight capacity. Therefore if you had for example The Sky Chariot with a carry capacity of 32,767 as the mount for one character in a force, he would be able to give the force a general flight capacity up to his weight capacity. The reason this was done was so that when you have a flighing force, another player could not teleport in with a single ‘grounder’ and thus anchor the force because that one character could not move [the famous ‘invisible anchor technique’ of the good/bad old days]. The only restriction on the ‘Net Concept’ is that soldiers mounted on non-flying mounts will still ‘ground’ a force. “This avoids the odd concept of airborne Troll Soldiers on Warmammoths being air lifted into battle, which we found somewhat repulsive…” (Midnight Games). However, under this force net CC method, soldiers will be helped carrying their equipment, if the foce has enough free CC (wagons etc.), meaning that their racial strenght is not as strict a limit for types of armour etc. as first meets the eye: a little fairy could wear a huge metal armour and still run at full speed…. The rational for this odd phenomenon is “that the soldiers stow their kits in wagons while on the move, but quickly re-arm just before battle” (Midnight Games).
* Forces will move on a ‘net’ weight base: Excess weight carried (alias: Encumbrance) of characters and soldiers will be given to the force. This means that a character that is dead without a mount, and thus able to carry zero, will not slow down a force that has excess carrying capacity to drag him along. This will also greatly reduce the effects of the ‘invisible anchor’ in which case a hostile encumbered character tries to stop a large field army. Soldiers who are encumbered will also no longer slow the force as their encumbrance will be carried by the force. And if the soldiers have excess carrying capacity then they will be used to carry the encumbrance of the characters/force.
This article is reproduced with kind permission from “Aayko’s The Legends Corner”.