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Am considering painting an undead army. Is AOS skeletons fun? Do people play a lot of AOS compared to 40K for example?
Are they crap? are there pitfalls I should avoid?
I have also seen Kings of War undead and these look pretty cool and are also relatively cheap compared - are they decent quality?
In particular I like the undead lords/special characters etc - I want to paint these.

AOS is pretty much (un)dead. Unless you know a vibrant community, i would highly recommend to not start it, since I think you'll have a lot of problems finding opponents.

As for matinc undead. they are by far the best release Mantic ever did. Even if I like GW mini more (bar the zombie), they are real good quality for their price.

So this raises the question of whether there is an undead army in a game that people do play? I am considering some kind of 40K chaos army with undead - maybe skeleton space marines with a bold gun or a las cannon... now that would be cool....

Necrons are pretty much metallic undead

Is the 'start collecting necrons' pack any good?

It seem pretty good, but I'm no necron specialist.

First of all don't believe the first guy who comes and tells you AoS is dead. In many places it is not. So find out if people are playing in your area.

Second, my roomate plays them in AoS and they are very fun. Skeletons particularly since you can equip them with different weapons in the same unit which lets you build battle lines and formations with swords in the front and spears in the back. Passed 20 models (ideally even 30), and with a Wight King with black axe, they become a very strong unit.

Finally, GW models for skeletons are great. My advice is to wait a couple weeks though, as it is rumored a new start collecting box with great value will come out for them, and probably some reboxing.

Cryx for Wm/H
Ressurectionists for Malifaux

Melbourne you might be alright, Alice Springs, AoS DOA.

 Haechi wrote:
First of all don't believe the first guy who comes and tells you AoS is dead. In many places it is not. So find out if people are playing in your area.

.

If you were able to comprehend a simple phrase, you would realise that this is prety much what I told him to do.

Removed - pointless sticky-beaking

It's not a bad time to start the death faction for AoS as there are now two start collecting sets, which are great deals. One focuses around Arkhan and Skeletons and the other the Coven Throne and Spirit Hosts.

I've got some Mantic skeletons and though they may blend in on a formation tray, I don't like them at all and won't bother painting them. They stand out as lesser quality than all the minis around them.

Nearly every minis game has some undead or undead equivalent faction. Figure out what games are being played in your local area, then look at what armies are available.


Malifaux: small scale skirmish game (few models per game which move and fight as individuals) with nice, larger-scale models, great setting, a really engaging scenario system, and a leaning towards competitive balance. The undead faction is the Resurrectionists, necromancers and spirit mediums looking to collect wyrdstone to fuel their mad experiments. While they have a considerable amount of variety, they tend towards weaker units that can be summoned or revived during play.

Warmachine/Hordes: Medium scale skirmish game (some individual models, others are units which move individually but have to stay close to their unit) with an emphasis on rule combos and competitive balance. The undead faction is Cryx, a nation of twisted monsters ruled by the father of all dragons. Cryx emphasizes powerful infantry, recursion mechanics, and spell casting. Their larger stuff tends to be more fragile, but also full of trisksy special rules.

Age of Sigmar: medium scale skirmish game (though the streamlined rules and formations are intended to allow for larger games). Age of sigmar emphasizes streamlined rules, and makes the core and unit rules freely available online from GW's webpage. Tactically it can be more involved then it looks, but that's not saying much. Not at all competitively balanced - as in it doesn't even try, no points costs or nothing, though there are some fan made homebrew projects that try to paste a balancing system onto it. That said, for casual beer & pretzel gaming with friends it can still be fun and the rules are free, so if there's a local scene give it a go before writing it off, but I wouldn't buy a bunch before making sure it's something you like.

Anyway, the undead 'faction' is the Grand Alliance of Death, ruled by the godlike first necromancer Nagash, and they emphasize fragile units with recursion effects and powerful wizards and heroes that can buff those units up to hit hard. But there are no army construction rules or limits in age of sigmar (barring homebrew systems, so, again, see how the local scene runs things), so if you wanted to field a 'haunted forest' army of ghostly units from the Death alliance and tree spirits from the Order aliance, or a 'zombie plague' mixing undead units with plague demons from the Chaos alliance, you're free to do so.

40k: a medium scale skirmish game in a science fantasy setting that draws heavily from Dune, Starship Troopers, and other sources. I've been out of the game for a while, so I'm not really in a position to speak for it as a whole. The undead action are Necrons, an ancient alien race that bound their souls into machine bodies in order to survive an ancient calamity, now waking in the twilight years of the galactic human imperium to reclaim their old empire. They emphasize durability, recursion mechanics, and strange weaponry with weird effects.

Oldhammer: Warhammer Fantasy Battles was a long running game that ran through many editions before being retired for Age of Sigmar, something many people are still plenty bitter about. A number of groups still play Warhammer Fantasy in some form or another, ranging from retro games of 6th edition, to people who just kept playing 8th edition (the last version before AoS) to a fan-made 9th edition. Regardless of edition, Oldhammer is a medium scale battle game (models are arranged in blocks that move and fight as units rather than individuals), emphasizing careful positioning and lining up advantageous combats before committing to the charge.

The undead factions in oldhammer were gothic/hammer horror Vampire Counts (weak core units with little to no ranged ability, powerful heroes and elites, strong magic, and recursion effects) and egyptian-themed Tomb Kings (slightly stronger core units with some ranged ability, strong animated statue elites, characters with support abilities that enhanced their units).

Kings of War: a medium scale battle game, that originally was little more than a pretense to sell cheaper models to be used in Warhammer Fantasy. With it's second edition, it has shifted emphasis from selling models for GW's fantasy game to selling a game for GW's fantasy models, and it has rules for both the Vampire Counts and the Tomb Kings, though it only has a model line for the former. I haven't played much kings of war, so I can't speak to the game beyond that.

DrDr244 wrote:
Am considering painting an undead army. Is AOS skeletons fun? Do people play a lot of AOS compared to 40K for example?
Are they crap? are there pitfalls I should avoid?
I have also seen Kings of War undead and these look pretty cool and are also relatively cheap compared - are they decent quality?
In particular I like the undead lords/special characters etc - I want to paint these.

Paint what you like. The great thing about Age of Sigmar is that you can bring whatever models you like.

With regards to whether people play a lot of AOS, that will depend on your area. Having said that, the rules are straight forward and you can easily play someone who has never seen the rules before.

If you like painting, having two painted armies is a great way to grow a group of miniatures gamers. You let someone borrow your other army and fight a battle. A week or two later, that other person will show up with their own army.

Thanks for the info everyone, and especially to you Malisteen. Its a lot to think about. Maybe I will just paint them and make them look pretty. Play the Ultramarines, display the undead.

If there are people who play Age of Sigmar in your area, then the undead are quite fun to play in that game. They have a lot of nice subfaction synergies (ghouls buffed by ghoul kings; zombies buffed by corpse carts; skeletons buffed by wight kings, etc) that small thematic armies fun. They've also got some great characters, some of the very few female heroes (both named and unnamed) in the game, some great plastic kits, etc.

The game itself is controversial, and not without reason. But if there are opponents and you're just looking to show off some cool models while shoving them around the table and rolling dice, then you very well may find you like it more than several of the alternatives. I find myself enjoying Age of Sigmar more than 40k these days (then again, I play chaos marines).

It's just... the game is on rocky footing. It hasn't taken off everywhere, it has a wealth of pre-existing antipathy due to Warhammer Fantasy being cancelled to put it out, and if it doesn't catch on and start paying for itself in the next year or two, it's entirely possible that the game might not exist in five years, and those are potential downsides you should be aware of before investing heavily.


But if that doesn't put you off, and if you have a local club that plays the game, and if you try a demo game and like it, then the next step for a new undead player should be picking up the Grand Alliance: Death book. Sure the book is 90% just print outs of scrolls you can see for free online, but it's color print-outs on nice paper, the book is very cheap, and it does have introductory fluff to give you an idea of what the various subfactions are and who the undead movers and players are. That should be enough to give you an idea of where you might want to start, as I definitely recommend picking a foundational subfaction to build up on when starting out, one of zombies, skeletons, ghouls, or ghosts, then pick up heroes and monsters to match.

 Malisteen wrote:
If there are people who play Age of Sigmar in your area, then the undead are quite fun to play in that game. They have a lot of nice subfaction synergies (ghouls buffed by ghoul kings; zombies buffed by corpse carts; skeletons buffed by wight kings, etc) that small thematic armies fun. They've also got some great characters, some of the very few female heroes (both named and unnamed) in the game, some great plastic kits, etc.

The game itself is controversial, and not without reason. But if there are opponents and you're just looking to show off some cool models while shoving them around the table and rolling dice, then you very well may find you like it more than several of the alternatives. I find myself enjoying Age of Sigmar more than 40k these days (then again, I play chaos marines).

It's just... the game is on rocky footing. It hasn't taken off everywhere, it has a wealth of pre-existing antipathy due to Warhammer Fantasy being cancelled to put it out, and if it doesn't catch on and start paying for itself in the next year or two, it's entirely possible that the game might not exist in five years, and those are potential downsides you should be aware of before investing heavily.


But if that doesn't put you off, and if you have a local club that plays the game, and if you try a demo game and like it, then the next step for a new undead player should be picking up the Grand Alliance: Death book. Sure the book is 90% just print outs of scrolls you can see for free online, but it's color print-outs on nice paper, the book is very cheap, and it does have introductory fluff to give you an idea of what the various subfactions are and who the undead movers and players are. That should be enough to give you an idea of where you might want to start, as I definitely recommend picking a foundational subfaction to build up on when starting out, one of zombies, skeletons, ghouls, or ghosts, then pick up heroes and monsters to match.

thats pretty much the main gist, if you can get a game its gonna be good, if you cant, its gonna be bad, but the advantage is, even if AoS tanks ( likely) you can still use the models in other games as they are pretty open ended.