19) No Rest For the Wicked: A Very Productive Weekend

The skeletons need numbers in order to play up to their strength. After the game, we conferred, and agreed that the two 20 skeleton regiments should be combined into a horde of 40. As mentioned previously in this blog, units in a wargame are usually either good at “Thumping” or they are good at “Grinding”. The strength of the basic Undead infantry is that they can grind. In order to do that, they need large numbers.

Secondly, I made an oversight when I threw together that little demo list. It had no leadership. In Kings of War, having officers or heroes on the table is important not because they are good fighters, but rather because they allow the troops to re-roll morale tests. This is critically important for an army that relies on the “grind”. I included two necromancers in the list as heroes, and overlooked the fact that they are not leaders, and do not have the “inspiring” rule to aid morale tests! Were they good spellcasters who helped make the Undead more mobile? Yes, but the army needs leadership with “inspiring” I rectified this by adding a Liche King with the “Crown of the Wizard King”, and by finally finishing painting that Vampire on a dark pegasus. As one last cheap source of “inspiring”, I also threw together a battle standard bearer made from 100% spare parts. He's really great, especially because I just kinda grabbed a handful of cavalry bits, and glued them all together without any thought or planning.

The final touch to the 2000 point Undead list was a hastily improvised unit of Barrow Wights. Wights are the animated corpses of fallen warlords, chieftains, and kings, arisen from their tombs and burial mounds. They are strong, and they are heavily armored. In KoW, they are classifed as large infantry, like werewolves or trolls. That meant that I only needed to come up with six of them for the unit. I love the Mantic models for Wights, but I decided to see what I could do with what I already had in my spare bits box. I had some 6^th edition Chaos warriors, still on the sprues. They're big, and they are heavily armored. I swapped their heads for skulls, and sanded the Chaos icons off of their shields. I'm happy with how they turned out. In the future, I may get the actual Mantic models, but these guys certainly look the part for now.

Going forward, I will probably expand this list to 2300 points, because that seems to be the most common list size for both tournaments and casual play. When the time comes to do that, I will have to give it some serious thought, because the Undead are really spoiled for choices and variety compared to other armies. There's an awful lot that I can do with 300 points. Whatever I do, I would really like to get some actual Mantic models to support the company that makes Kings of War. My Ratkin army is mostly Mantic, but my Undead and Bretonmark armies are all made up from older minis that predate both Mantic and Kings of War.

I finished up last week by re-basing the Beastmen Herd army that my wife picked up at the miniature gaming swapmeet. The figures were originally on individual round bases for a different game system. I very carefully clipped them off of their individual bases and glued them on to square unit multibases for KoW. These miniatures were beautifully painted by my friend Michael back when he played AoS. They have now been arranged into a horde of 40 warriors, a regiment of 20 longhorns, a horde of werewolves, and a unit of minotaurs. We also have enough dire wolves and hunting hounds to proxy as a regiment of wild gur panthers, but I need to multibase them.