Hi,

this week-end, my friend and I have planned to play a big battle. We decided to change from standard battle scenario and choose to play an Assault scenario that you can find in Space Marine Battles book.

The battle field will be 120*180cm and we'll play on the short side with a big fortress (that I'm building), trenches, bunkers, ruins.

Assaulting army will be a 10000 points one and defending army will be 5000 points.

I don't know if 5000 points for defender army will be sufficient to balance the game. Usually, scenarios are made for 5000 points battles, I don't know if in such a big battle points ratio will be balanced.

Would 6000 points or 7000 be a better limit for defending army ?

we always played
attacker 150%
defender 100%
I would say that this is well balanced
since we saw different winners(attacker and defender)
This gives you
Attacker:10000
Defender:6650 rounded

I've never found much problem with a 1-2+ ratio in an assault scenario. After say 5-6K you can include enough stuff to play a decent game as a defender, with the right fortifications/objectives etc. As for balanced, I care not for such things but I would advise you pay particular attention to objectives and conditions. You might want to think of staggered reinforcements for the attacker. Arriving on a 4+ or only so many points allowed to appear each turn due to some sort of off table bottleneck, like a bridgehead.

Haven't done it for a long time but our experience tallied with Ulric, give the defender 2/3rds not half. Also, some armies are pretty killer on offense and some awesome on defense so you probably need to factor that in too.

Thanks for your advices

Saturday: Chaos + renegade IG + titan support will defend, SM + loyalist IG (Elysian & standard IG) + titan support will attack. On Sunday, it will be the contrary. We decided to allow aerial support for attackers. Fortress is automatically equiped with few AA batteries.

About objectives, I think we'll place some objectives in bunkers and a big one (that could count 20 points) in the fortress

We did not do this(factor it)
but my experience is like Zap´s
e.g. Squats and Ig are both good for defence
while SM and Eldar are superb to do a fast attack

We played a lot of attack/defence battles with:Orks, Eldar,SM,IG and Nids
in all variants and sizes
We even played a battle with an alliance cosisting of Orks Eldar and Nids VS Ig SM and Titans
one of the bloodiest and funniest battles at all

We also tried different Objektives
without objektives, with normal objektives, with a few but valuable, with only 1 or 2 but if the enemy captured one the battle was finished(never happend )
and with objektives which get more valuable as longer as you hold them (1st Turn 5 VP,2nd Turn 10VP,3rd Turn 15VP)

We also gave the defender a lot of bunkers trenches etc. to dug in.

These battles were always funny and bloody
good luck for your battle Scream

Yeah, they might not end up perfectly balanced, but they should be lots of fun! If I remember correctly we had all the objectives in the defenders zone but they couldn't get points for objectives until turn 3 or maybe 4.....or something like that

Interestingly, armies like Khorne and even Orks actually worked really well in defense. World Eaters sitting on an objective on first fire are bloody hard to shift and Cannons of Khorne are scary against the massed attackers. Not so good for their deamon engines though . The whole Bad Moons and Goffs clans sitting on objectives blazing away supported with lots of the decent Ork tanks and Pulsa Rokkit batteries was tough too.