I am playing this game alot for years but I have never been quite happy with the selection of available units.

Since I favor ASOS over the original board you dont have ships anymore and I dont dare to include siege engines to ASOS as I see little use for them other than giving Baratheon a very powerful tool to wear down Kings Landings walls pretty easily. So with ASOS you are pretty much reduced to footmen and knights which gets boring rather quickly, making musterings a no brainer.

I always had some sort of archer units in mind to fit in well into selection of units given by FFG. They should on the one hand be quite effective on the offensive side of a battle but on the other hand they should be quite vulnerable as well. Sort of intermediate siege engine thats not so much limited for assaulting cities/strongholds but having a more versatile and general bonus in exchange for some general disadvantage as well.

So here is what I finally came up with after discussing this on the official FFG board as well as with some of the most experienced AGOT/ASOS players that I know. This definition of archer units has been played in several test games and worked out well. In the end, rules for archer units have been kept as simple as possible.

Mustering Points : 1
Base Strength : 1

Strength Modifiers :
- Attack or support an attack : 2
- Defend : 0
- Support a defense or defend city/stronghold/fortification : 1

Special:
- killed on retreat
- may be upgraded to knight or siege (in case playing with as well)


So, archers are cheap units that have a good strength when using them in an attack or for supporting an attack. On the other hand they are very vulnerable (0 strength) when directly attacked unless they are positioned behind walls (city/stronghold/fort) where they maintain their regular strength of 1. When not directly under attack but supporting a defense (regardless of terrain such as city/stronghold/fort) they may add their base strength of 1 as well. Just like siege engines, archer may never be routed, when they are directly involved in a battle (attacking or defending) and the battle is lost, those archers are to be removed from the board immediately, before casualties are removed, they cannot serve as casualties inflicted by swords over fortification icons.

As for amount of available archers, in PBEM thats easy enough to adjust, as unit pieces are virtual. Since the ASOS supply track leaves abit space on for some units even when maxed out on troops and allied units, in our test games, we removed 2 footmen in favor of adding 4 archers per house and this worked out well so far. So all in all there are 2 more units available. For a face2face game, you may as well try to give say 3 of your footmen a special mark and treat them as archers instead of footmen, or you borrow some units like ships or sieges, or use units of house Martell maybe.

I guess archers should work on the original board as well, but I have to admit I havent tried them out there yet. If anyone does, please let me know how they worked for you.

Anyone having another question or comment on this variant, speak aloud

Here is the link to the unit picture for photoshop, thx alot to Haggis for providing: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/file/info/33884