I used to love Warmaster and Fantasy Battle, but over time got tired
of the look of Warmaster being 2 thin rows of models or removing
individual models in Fantasy Battle. So, I went looking for something
else and came across Kings of War. Its an awesome simple and fast
fantasy mass battle game that focuses more on units and positioning
rather than individual heroes. It's a fun game but at 28mm it just
always looked wrong to me, as it is almost impossible to get the look of
a mass battle game in 28mm on a 6x4 or even 8x4 table. So, a couple
friends and I decided, why not do it in 10mm, its cheap (as you can 3d
print everything), super fast to paint (to a simple tabletop standard),
and looks great ranked up!
I have to start by saying sorry for
the image quality on these, I just for the life of me could not get
good pictures of these. The camera just wouldn't focus correctly on them
and kept washing out all the colours, and Photoshop decided to blow up
on me as well, so until I sort that out I had no way to correct the
colours or clean them up.
All of these models are from the excellent collection offered by
Forest Dragon, and the detail is amazing! All the bases are from my company (
Northern Lights Terrain)
and are the standard Kings of War base sizes as if the units were
standard 28mm scale. I chose to do this as it allowed the game to play
exactly the same as if it was being played with 28mm figures, and
allowed a lot of space to pack on models to a base.
First up is the really cool looking Vampire Count on Undead Dragon. He will obviously be my army commander.
Next
up, a unit of Vampire Knights. This is a hard hitting but small unit,
only counting as a troop sized unit in KoW. There are 40 heavily
armoured Vampires packed onto that 100mm x 40mm base.
Next
is a big regiment of Skeletons. While I painted up a ton for the base
(64 of them on there!), once I started ranking them up I realized I
could have done another 20 or so to completely pack the base, but it
still looks good with so many ranks and a bit of space at the front, so I
left it.
Then
come the wraiths, which I tried to paint up as eerie glowing green
ghosts. Not sure it worked, but I am OK with them as they offer a bit
of a counter point to the purple I chose for the main colour of the rest
of the army. This is a regiment sized unit of them (100mm x 80mm) and
has 60 of them on the base.
As
a side note, while printing 10mm strips is cheap and effective,
re-basing them once done is NOT. I learned that leason the hard way. I
had done a unit of these wraiths as a test unit over the summer for
this project, and I had wanted to base everything green to blend with
many of my play mats. It looked horrible with green ghosts on a green
base, so I figured no problem, pop them off and re-base to grey when I
got to the army in the painting challenge... NOPE, every single strip
broke when trying to get them off the old base (weapons broke, wraiths
broke of the strip, and the strip broke in multiple places)... So had to
print and paint all new models... Oh well at least they paint fast.
Lastly,
a unit of Black Coaches, which I based up on a 125mm x 100mm Cavalry
Regiment size base and am using them as Revenant Cavalry since Black
Coaches do not exist in KoW but I still wanted to use them. Initially
the horses were just painted as undead horses but the models lacked
enough contrast, so I switched them over spectral horses to add some
more colour. I think it worked out ok.
As
for points, these add up pretty damn fast, which I honestly didn't
expect given how fast they paint up. But there are 164 infantry models
for 164 points, then the dragon and rider for 4, and 4 Black Coaches at 6
points each for a total of 24.
I am also claiming these as my
entry for the Babylon 5 planet as "low budget fun" as doing an army this
way is super cheap and a ton of fun to paint as it is so quick. So
that adds 20 more points to the total, for a grand total of 212 points!
Lastly, this is my second different theme, so my second point in the Squirrel side contest.
