@Geep, Thanks for your thoughts. You picked up on two points that I had asterisked. The other ones I don't feel so strongly about.
On the woods, I just don't see them as necessary. If you're playing friendly, scenario-based games in a non-competitive context, then lay down plenty of woods when you put the terrain; just as you would if you were theming the table to match other armies/situations. But whether people like it or not, the army lists are used a lot for competitive play. As a tournament organiser, I don't want to ban things that have been 'agreed' by the community, because that can create unnecessary discontent and undermine the credibility of the rules/lists revision system.
On the price of the general, with DEs there is the small matter of them executing subordinates, usually after 36 orders or less. If the WEs had some sort of command problem, I'd very happily support 155 points. For example, it's a guerrilla army, so why not limit the characters to 20cm command range? That helps rein in the Lizardmen, who are otherwise very powerful and also live somewhere with lots of trees.
@Leonida, my experience has been this: In 2014 and 2015 we allowed the 2009 WE list at tournaments we ran. They over-performed noticeably and feedback from experienced and sensible players (including the WE players) was that they had too many good things for too few points. It used to be the same for HEs, but they got reined in a bit.
Since the new version of the list came out recently, three of us have playtested it in several games, against different armies, with scenarios rather than just line-of-battle, and with players on each side with similar levels of experience. A little-bit-of-everything WE list was narrowly defeated once and lost badly once (to a list containing six Chaos Warriors in a hold-the-tower scenario). All their other games they won by a significant margin. And a maxed WE list with 4 Wild Riders managed to take down an army with a break of 10 for the loss of only 1 Treeman and 4 stands from 4 units.
So, from the evidence of our experiences, we have suggested some changes to the WMRC. I don't have any 'fury' or any other sort of passion for the list, so I am not going to spend any more time on it. Other people will also feed in their experiences and suggestions on this forum and the committee will make a decision and we will respect it. But if we then see a repeat of the 2014/2015 tournament experience, we might have to ban them again partially or fully from our events. It would be a real shame if we had to do that. So let's see what happens. Personally, I am not going to say anything more on WEs until after a new list gets finalised.
In the meantime, I shall playtest some other lists to help move things forward for the community. We have Cathay next on the to-do list. But I'm going to predict that, in the future, Nippon will become just as controversial as WEs before a final list is agreed. But such debate is a good thing, not a bad thing, especially if people use playtest evidence-based arguments.
