Heroes -An experimental unit upgrade idea

I am all for stealing the best ideas from other rules sets.  To The Strongest has a neat unit upgrade to represent exceptional junior officers or slightly above average units, your best painted unit, priests or totems, magic?, etc.  The Hero in TTS is a one-time use unit marker that allows a reroll of the combat card.  I think we could do something similar in Impetus, not too dissimilar from the tactical cards except that Heroes are tied to a specific unit.

Optional Experimental  Rule - Allow units to buy heroes for specific units in replacement of a 3 pt. tactical card.  The Hero is a one-time use marker or single figurine that allows either a single reroll or a +2 dice in one combat round for that unit only.  The hero does not apply to rerolls for groups.    Once used for this purpose it is removed.  For rerolling cohesion tests with the hero he needs to belong to the main unit in that combat.

What do you think?

I am very familiar with the use of heroes in To the Strongest. I like the idea itself, but I think TtS allows for too many heroes. As for Impetus, I can see this working as an addition to tactical cards, falling within the same limitations. It would be very useful for high VBU units, but not as worthwhile for a low VBU unit. In addition, if both a friendly unit and the enemy unit have a hero, would they cancel each other out?

uh, uh, I don't know....aaaahhhh! I would say both heroes apply as they could be used or not used for different purposes. one might want the +2 combat dice, the other may hold it for any cohesion test reroll.


i was just looking at my collection of single based characters and trying to find a use for them.  I  think it is much more interesting to put a hero figure on the base or touching it than use a card.

As you've taken the trouble to paint them would be a shame not to use them, should also add a bit of fun to the game.
Reminds me that over 20 years ago we did something similar with the Trojan wars based on the Iliad we just couldn't leave out the hero's. We made the walls of Troy and used DBM rules and took the game round the shows for a year. Can't remember exactly how we did it but know we introduced rules for combat for hero's think we had 6 per side. They ran the risk of dying in personal combat against another hero or enemy element. If 'killed' in combat roll a dice to see if gods intervened to save him or whisked him away to mend and return later or caught napping so hero killed. If either of the latter two would have an affect on that command depending whether he was its leader or just the side kick.
Since playing impetus only used the figures once as still in need of rebasing. After reading your posting got me thinking how to recreate hero's for the trojan wars based on the Iliad using impetus got the redoubt enterprise range with plenty of heros so rebasing looks like my next task

Well Hero could be a future additional tactical card, why not. Keep going to share ideas.

Suggestion for hero card:-
1/On deployment allocate hero to unit.
2/In melee hero gives 1 extra die and increases minimum die roll from 1 to 2. Continues to give this benefit until removed from play.
3/ Removed from play when
unit attached to rolls a melee CT of 6 (or may be 5 or 6).
You could also have a different type of hero card for a hero good at keeping men fighting so instead of adding a melee die he could give a -1 from melee CT.