The tournament taught me a few things about my Rat army. First off, my army is pretty good at what it is designed to do, which is to be really durable, and to just heal a lot and dominate the center of the table. However...
It could be better. There is a unit that I could add to the list which would help make my shock troops even tougher and braver. It's a mobile battle shrine called the Tangle. The model is really great, too, and I have wanted one for a long time, so I finally picked one up.
Secondly, my Mutant Rat Friend is lonely. He just didn't perform very well at the tournament, despite how great he has been for me in the past. I realized that what he really needs is a battle buddy, so I made him one. Now, I could have bought the actual Mantic Rat Fiend model, which is an awesome and nasty model, but it just wouldn't pair well with my cute Rat Friend, so instead I made my own. This new Rat Friend is based on a mouse from a little resin christmas candle holder. I am very pleased with how he turned out, and I can't wait to see what mischief two Mutant Rat Friends can get into together, holding hands, skipping around the battlefield, stomping on knights and eating their horses.
In order to fit these additions into my army, I had to drop my horde of rat ogres. While I absolutely love the models, they really did terrible all weekend at the tournament. Strangely enough, they are more of a shooting unit than a melee unit, which means that unless they are in a list with a lot of other shooting, they can't really live up to their potential, just like my clawshots earlier this year. In a list with a lot of shooting, you can concentrate all your fire on one unit, or monster, or officer, at a time, and delete them. If you don't have a lot of shooting, though, all you really accomplish is to slightly annoy your enemy, and waste time rolling dice, which is a problem when you are on the chess clock at a tournament. Shooting is all or nothing in KoW.
With this in mind, I decided to create an alternate rat army list that focuses on shooting. This list will feature shooty units, artillery pieces, war machines, and spell casters. It will allow me to use my clawshots and my rat ogres to their potential. Instead of charging forward as fast as it can to grab the center of the battlefield, the shooty list will stay back and shoot the enemy to ribbons from afar. This will be a future project, but it doesn't have priority at the moment.
I scored a lot of loot at the tournament, specifically a lot of Abyssal Demon minis, so my project for the winter will be painting up a new Abyssal army for my collection. Going into October, I knew I needed to focus on assembling and priming these models while it was still warm enough to spray paint outside. Unfortunately, my cars also needed attention going into the winter. The first three weekends of October were mostly dedicated to fixing my aging fleet of shitbox vehicles. I definitely don't want to be replacing brake calipers and rotors in the snow.
I did finally get a day where I was able to focus on assembling and spray priming the minis for my Abyssal army. Using plastic cement instead of super glue definitely makes assembly go faster, because the models stick together much quicker.
Well, at least it did for the Mantic official "Kings of War" minis.
A bunch of the minis that I picked up recently were from a different miniatures game called "Wrath of Kings". These minis look really cool, but the quality control is terrible. They don't come on a plastic sprue like Mantic or GW minis. Instead they come packaged in little individual plastic baggies. Of the six boxes that I opened, five of them were missing pieces, or had the wrong pieces for at least one mini. It's kinda hard to assemble a mini when you get two left arms and no head. The other problem that I had with them is that whatever plastic they are made of will not react with plastic cement, so I had to go back to the old superglue.
As far as list building and planning for this army, it's kind of backwards. Because the bulk of this army will be miniatures I got as tournament prizes, I am building a list based off of what I have, rather than buying minis based off what I want. It's ok, though. I have a lot of the core troops that I need for any variation of the list. Once everything is built and painted, I can learn and evolve the list from there.
I haven't been able to get any games in since the tournament, but that's because my friends have all been just as busy as me. William is swamped with school by day and working 3rd shift at night, Ellie has a new season of Blood Bowl League to run for her gaming club on weekends, and Michael is extra busy this season because he picks up hours at the Halloween pop-up store.
Hopefully my friends and I can start running some demo games at local game shops this winter, to try to get more people into the hobby. We really want to grow the community so there are more players locally. I already scouted out one of the local shops in New Berlin. It has a nice gaming area and would be a good place to meet up and play. Michael says that he found a game shop in Menomonee Falls that would also be a good location. The store currently has mostly card gamers, but the owner says that he would like to start selling more miniatures, and to diversify his stock into wargames and RPGs. Hopefully we can drum up some interest for KoW this winter and make some more friends.
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These are GREAT, especially knowing their humble origins. The little rat friends mobbing about them help sell the scale and tie them in with the infantry.