Arena Rex Forums

This is just something I have been pondering after my games recently.

The trend as I see it seems to be that in the games I play, you play a game, you fight, and one player outplays the other, and reduces their opponent to one gladiator, while they have two or three gladiators left.

At this point, the last man standing kicks into action, and goes nuts. He seems to always take down whatever models are left on the other side, until there is only the last man standing left there too. So you have two last men standing facing each other.

Of course, the one who became last man standing first tends to go down at this stage, so the player who outplayed his opponent does end up winning.

I just tend to be left with a feeling that we could have ended the game X minutes earlier, because the actual victor seemed to be to have been decided at the point when the first last man standing was activated. And whatever game is left at that point is just the death throes of the LMS, thrashing about throwing dice, kicking and screaming while he goes down.

Does anyone else feel the same way? Do your games run like this too, and if so, do you enjoy the "LMS" stage of the game?

I feel like I could maybe try this as a game variant... instead of the victory condition being to be the sole survivor, the victory condition could be to reduce your opponent to last man standing. It would definitely make for faster games, and since I don't find the LMS stage to be that interesting in terms of gameplay, I feel like it would focus on the part of the game that is most tactical and interesting.

Of course, this might be a problem with mounted pairs and multistage models, since they get the LMS rules while having more than one card left. Hmm. Ponder.

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What you describe has happened in my games more times than not, coming down to a one-on-one at the end. To me this isn't such a bad thing, as it can create interesting narratives for the finale of the match. (Such as the epic last stand of Urbicus in one of my games...) However, I do see your point with being able to enter rage mode and and take out several gladiators, when prior to the Last Man Standing rule, that player has been clearly outmatched. Maybe something like a turn limit kicks in once you enter Last Man Standing. For example, once you trigger the rule, you have say 3 activation's to try to "win", before the match is over and you lose?

I agree that it's not really a terrible thing. It is clearly the intent of the designers that the LMS goes into rage mode, and I can see the simple appeal in it. It's just my personal feel that the rage mode phase doesn't really add anything to the game and has little tactical meaning, it's just rolling dice to see how much damage you can do before you expire.

To put it differently - If I go into LMS mode before my opponent, and I somehow end up winning, then I wouldn't feel like I earned that win by being a better player. I would feel like I just got lucky with my death raging LMS.

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I like it. What I find really advantageous about it is that it rewards spreading the fight around more and not trying to alpha models off the board. One of the non-intuitive things in the game is that an opponent with 3 models left is attacking me next turn with the same number of models as a player with 1. This makes kills less powerful than they appear.

I played a game recently against Legio where I took out Aquilla and was down to Luca and Gaius. I slammed Luca into the spikes a couple of times and got her exhausted and down to 1 health. Next activation I could have finished her, but it was better to leave her alive and kill Gaius (doubly true with Gaius) at which point she flipped to LMS and... prompty got knocked back into the spikes and one shotted. That was actually my most one sided game and I think its probably just a better strategy.

When I win outnumbered in LMS its usually due to the same strategy. I actually won a game recently where I denied the opponent LMS entirely. I was spreading damage around and had him down to 2 when he got me down to my last guy. That guy one shotted the first guy, moved and killed the other just because they were both pretty heavily wounded.

I like the LMS rule. It makes it so there is a chance to the very end that you might pull off a crazy victory if the dice gods favor you. That is part of the appeal, to me, of dice-based combat... there's always a chance. The "best" player doesn't always win... sometimes the bold player does.
We know the LMS rules going in. We know the danger that an LMS model poses when they enter Rage mode. I think part of outplaying your opponent means taking those factors into consideration and strategizing around it.
- Do not leave a two-stage model for last with both stages remaining.
- Do not leave Gaius Pallidus for last with his healing ability (like I did at the last tournament).
- Do not leave your last opponent at full health... especially if your own models aren't particularly strong hitting... or are at low health themselves.

If I manage to get you to LMS and your Rage mode model defeats me, I think part of the blame is definitely on me for not properly mitigating the LMS risks. You definitely earned that win.

I agree that with LMS the game CAN devolve into an anti-climactic back-and-forth dice chuck fest... but I think that's up to the players to counteract with their strategies. I think removing the LMS rule and just ending the game when a player has a single model remaining on the arena could be a perfectly valid way to play... I often run objective based scenarios myself where the goal is something other than killing all the other guys (well, I use "often" here loosely as I don't get to play as often as I'd like these days)... but I still think there is merit in having the LMS rule in place when you absolutely positiviely have to kill every last gladiator on the floor.

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The other important thing to note; often what actually allows the LMS to win is careful conservation and usage of Favor dice, particularly on defense. A lot of what happens when a model goes LMS depends on the game state the opponent created prior to triggering LMS.

Yeah, I can see the point in playing both with and without. Without, I guess a lot of people wouldn't find it satisfying to play without an alternate win condition but also without fighting to the death.

LMS fighting, death rage mode, doesn't really appeal to me, even though obviously favor and stuff like that matters... but I'm not sure I would like not having it either, I suppose. If I only had one guy left, and he didn't have LMS, then the last few turns would just be my opponent taking him out at their leisure. I imagine that is why they made the LMS rules in the first place - to make that "mopping up" end phase a bit more dramatic rather than dull.

Maybe I can get my opponents to try an in between model - where the LMS rules apply, but the LMS can only go to fatigued, not exhausted. So he can still activate every turn, but can't power attack left and right.

What I would really like I suppose are more win conditions that aren't just fighting to the death. We used a King of the Hill scenario a few times and I think that does a good job of avoiding that "mopping up" phase entirely, since the game will end by scenario before that.

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You can only attack without repercussions if your opponent feeds you one model at a time. There's no reason to go after the LMS without backup.

I guess of non-"fight to the death" victory conditions, in the rulebook we mainly have the condemnation scenarios, where you win by defeating a specific model on the other side. I haven't tried this yet, but sounds like fun. I would quite like conditions that work for three player games though. That's probably a subject for a separate thread though.

I know that "fight to the death" games seem appropriate for an arena game, but I still tend to like having something to make games a bit less same-y.

I imagine that in my little group, we will try the normal LMS rules a few more times while also experimenting with alternate win conditions. We might try out a tweaked LMS rule, where the LMS only gets to remove one fatigue per turn, and see how that feels.

Thanks to those who answered.

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I'm gonna vote in favor of LMS. A lot has already been said, but I agree that it's a strategy to work around, like RidiQles mentioned. Planning out how much vitality your opponent has before they go full nanners is huge.

Also, I have noticed that the last man standing is able to take down a model, but I've never seen an LMS model win while it was 1v3. They did take down some models, but ultimately died.

The dice gods are fickle asshats, but that gives the game variance, so we know it won't be the same every time