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It's 3D printed miniature, original made by Lord of the Print.

 SgtBANZAI wrote:
It's 3D printed miniature, original made by Lord of the Print.

Thanks!

I really like the sounds of Oathmark, though I have to admit I do like strong faction identity in my fantasy games. The mixing units is really cool but I'm somehow against it at the same time, because I'm gonna be using my own minis, and my forces are all visually cohesive within faction, and will look weird mixed together.

But if I see the book in my FLGS I'll definitely pick it up.

5th season (out of 12 total) of our small 1vs1 map campaign (Blue Undead VS Red Orcs&Goblins + Auxillaries from both sides) has come to an end. 6th will finally most likely result in direct confrontation, hopefully will get a game in relatively soon.

Two first battles of the campaign have been played, both times ended in decisive Horde victory, The Undead had to withdraw and lose one province.



After initial clashes both me and my opponent are under impression that the undead are severely underpowered. Having good activation stat and immunity to low accuracy missiles is nice, but additional casualties scored in close combat, bad stats, necessity of spellcaster control and inability to use shielding are way too punishing, both skeletons and revenants get deleted basically every time they come into contact with any of my melee units (especially knucker that looks to be almost unkillable and did like 2x its cost in damage with only one wound inflicted by the enemy). Skeletal archers are just absurdly useless for the price, and resurrection ability is also usually ineffective since I can reliably outkill the amount of raised corpses almost every single activation. I think we will buff the Undead by severely reducing prices and damage from additional casualties.

Skeleton Archers are obviously overcosted.

Oathmark is a very nice rules set, in terms of it’s mechanics.

But Joe’s admission that he does not actually playtest his rules is very apparent in the army lists for this game.

He doesn't? That actually explains a lot, including often questionable statblocks and unit prices.

I like Oathmark as ruleset, it's fast, simple and still deep enough to actually think where you want to position your troops and how to attack the enemy. Usually I'm against rolling both accuracy, weapon damage and resistance into a single characteristic because it always leads to illogical gamey situations like unhittable plate mail knights from En Garde, but I think this game does it in a clever way that suits its mass battle theme: I don't care about the precise step by step resolve of enemy shooting, all I want to know as a commander is how many of my orcs died and if the squad can actually fulfill its role.

My biggest gripes are army lists. They are mostly bland and poorly balanced - worse units can cost more, better units can cost less, entire classes of units are just absurdly overpriced for what they do (heavy cavalry unit costs the same as knucker, and one knucker from my experience can delete two full squads of heavy cavalry without much issue), half of magic abilities do such a small impact they can as well not exist. I'm going to definitely play it in the future, but I think at least some rewrites are in order.

would love your take on Dark Heaven Apocalypse from reaper.

Never heard of it. By the looks of it it's an old system from Reaper? Didn't know they had a ruleset in addition to their Dark Heaven line.

I think you guys need to play more and pay major attention to listing and how to play.
In the beginning I was very worried about my elven army as I was unable to win. Then I managed to adjust my list and I won my last four games in a row.
I am quite sure Oathmark isn't ideal for tournaments or competitive games but I can warrant I have seen games less balanced than this (and GW produces a lot of them).

Changing some units for the others doesn't really fix bad units' performance. Some entries are clearly better than the others, some rules also have a bigger impact than the others. Overall I came to conclusion that cavalry seems to be the most lacking, followed by the Oathbreakers' ranged options.

Last game has finally brought in first victory for the Undead; dropping price for the skeletal archers seems to be a good idea, now they can be taken in properly big numbers to become dangerous.

What is that bug guy? He’s super cool.

It's one of Reaper Miniatures' Bones series models, can't remember the actual name, likely some creature from D&D. I use the likes of it to represent Trolls and call them "Nightmares" to suit the visuals better.

Another battle of the campaign finished, the biggest so far. The Horde emerged victorious at the very last moment by killing all the Undead wizards, which forced the rest of the army to turn into dust (we have actually played this a bit wrong since Ghouls have no such rule and shouldn't have been destroyed together with skeletons, but we found out only after the game), scoring a victory for the dark alliance of humans and monstrocities on turn 8.



I have to say I'm not thrilled with objective control rules, they seem to be way too punishing for the attacker. You have to clear the objective, make sure there are no enemies both 5" away from the objective and your unit closest to the objective, maneuver in a way that makes you 1" close and then wait a turn before you can activate 1" from it. Other games usually either suggest counting the number of models/units in an area to determine who can control what or allow you to take actions to burn things down, having so many limitations when the objective is also impassable terrain that the opponents can dance around feels awkward.

Also, burrow worm is just a weird unit design that we will probably houserule in the future in some way. Incredibly powerful and nearly unkillable unit with insanely high HP, great offensive capabilities, good defense and maneuverability that has 30% chance of actually doing anything and will just stand there most of the time, like a living wall.

Another battle, another unit tested. Despite crushing through enemy infantry, surviving (and killing 1/4 of the squad in return) the ghoul ambush and killing ballista, knights still couldn't resist the onslaught of barrow worm and were killed to the last man.

 SgtBANZAI wrote:
It's one of Reaper Miniatures' Bones series models, can't remember the actual name, likely some creature from D&D. I use the likes of it to represent Trolls and call them "Nightmares" to suit the visuals better.

It's a Burrowing Behemoth from Reaper.
https://www.reapermini.com/search/insect/latest/44058


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 SgtBANZAI wrote:
Another battle, another unit tested. Despite crushing through enemy infantry, surviving (and killing 1/4 of the squad in return) the ghoul ambush and killing ballista, knights still couldn't resist the onslaught of barrow worm and were killed to the last man.

Awesome looking game, as usual. Thanks for posting.

Me and my opponent are planning on playing 3000 points armies next time to draw our mini campaign to a conclusion and also take a look at how the game behaves at upper points limit. So far we've been playing smaller sized battles (up to 2000), and monsters, artillery and heavy brick assault units have been by far the most dominating forces in comparison to normal infantry, light cavalry and archers. We're no experts on this system but it really feels like it's heavily skewed towards single big entities with huge defence and attack values, or those things that essentially ignore command&control portions of the game (dragons, undead...) due to their better A statistics and unshakable morale. Everything else is not useless, but it feels really subpar, and we couldn't help but notice that in every single game it's brutes and monsters always doing and standing up to the most damage.