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I'd always wanted to do a High Elf army since I started WHFB in 6th ed, but the basic spearmen and archers were so absolutely terrible that I couldn't. I picked up some of the wonderful Isle of Blood models, but very strongly disliked the huge blocks of basic infantry that ruled 8th edition. Recently, Mantic Games released their Kings of War:Vanguard game, which gave me the excuse to paint up a Wood Elf warband from mixed GW and Runewars Latari figures. While waiting for the rest of the group to finish their warbands, I kept eyeballing some Eternal Guard I'd primed green years ago and always thought would make excellent High Elf Spearmen, so I painted one up in blue and silver and white and it snowballed into a whole army. Not just a Vanguard warband, it is that at the moment, but in the process it turned into the High Elf army I've wanted for 20 years. I plan to build and ideally paint it into a 7th ed army with the option of using the figs for Kings of War if I ever meet any other players. My old gaming buddy lives a couple hours drive and has his old dwarves, and that was the flimsiest excuse I needed to drop hundreds of dollars on hundreds of plastic toys I'd most likely never field

I've played one game of Vanguard with them now (GREAT game, very Mordheim inspired!) and also have a unit of slightly converted archers built, a chariot painted that just needs basing, and a unit of Dragon Princes half assembled. Beyond that, all unbuilt and on sprue I have 3 complete sets of Isle of Blood, 20 additional Seaguard, a Lion Chariot, a dragon mage, a few mounted and dismounted mages and princes, a unit of Silver Helms, 2 eagles, plus my old isle of blood set and 2 bolt throwers, and a unit of shadow warriors on order. Originally I was going to use Eternal Guard as Spearmen, but will instead likely use converted DE Dreadspears as the newer plastics look very high-elven if you give them sea guard spears, remove the shield emblems and leave the helmet crests off. I've got some coming in that I'll give it a try on and if it doesn't work, I'll just go with the original plan of Eternal Guard

First up is the completed Vanguard Warband. Phone images look a little posterized, not sure if it's my phone settings or just how these colors appear with a slight blur



The warjack is my counts-as treeman, it makes more sense to me that High Elves would use an arcane construct than an ent, that would be uncivilised


The guys that started it all. In the full army they will get shields, in Vanguard they act as my citizen levies




Inaugural run of the warband in Vanguard, they lost, but they looked oh-so-pretty doing it


Hopefully more images to come, there need to break away to finish an Infinity army for a tournament in a couple weeks, and I've been sidelined by Vanguard terrain and objectives in the meantime

Thats an awesome collection I daresay!


And the idea of the warjack totally makes sense when I think of it.
I love how my guardian shamblers turned out, but somehow they look alien when standing beside my WHFB elves... next time i field them probably even more so

you use the green one as the kindred gladestalker i guess while the other is the normal kindred archer?

whats does your 2-hand-sword wielder represent?


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and BTW:
You might have lost, but you looked that much better losing than he did winning

Wow, awesome painting. Compliments!

Glade Guard is indeed a Gladestalker. I may replace him with a Shadow Warrior in that role once I buy the unit. The Swordmaster is a Kindred Tallspear w/ a heavy weapon. I wish I had the option to drop the spear, but it's not a terrible thing to have it if he drops the model he's engaged with and supports another spearman next to him. Honestly, the only reason I lost was that my opponent rolled FIRE for armor saves, I've never seen so many exploding 8s! It's good though, got him even more invested in the game and it got some of our group to look into it as a side game to Infinity

Gorgeous army, you've selected all the best looking models for that force.

Looks good.

I didn't want to mention it, but considering you mentioned replacing it, I think the Gladeguard would fit right in with a tiny amount of white and blue. For example where the boot folds down or at the wrists.

I am going to have to post some pictures of my next battle now.

"they lost, but they looked oh-so-pretty doing it"

Looking good IS winning (as per the rule of cool).

Very nice painting and enjoyed hearing about how an army you envisioned many years ago is coming to life. The same is happening for me in KoW and Vanguard.

Stygian - Possibly. I'd toyed with the idea of just using Glade Guard for regular archers painted white and blue. I wasn't concerned with making this particular one "match" the rest since he's supposed to be a ranger/scout. Kind of moot, he'll most likely get replaced with a Shadow Warrior once the box I ordered comes in

Didn't get much done on the elves this weekend, still finishing my Invincible Army for Infinity, but I did pick up some of the newer Dark Elf Dreadspears and did up the first of the regular spearmen. Model doesn't actually show the fair bit of work it took to get it to this level, something that's annoying and gratifying since it's SUPPOSED to look like a bog-standard infantryman. Shaved the emblem off the shield, filled the void in his helmet where the crest normally glues into, shaved some of the jagged edges down on the pauldrons into smoother edges, filled the chainmail undershirt on the shield arm, replaced the spear arm with a Lothern Sea Guard arm and spear and shaved off the rivets on the bottom hem of armor. The golden jewel on his helmet crest isn't supposed to be there at all, unfortunately the plastic putty I used to fill in his helmet had a void in it that expanded when I hit it with a hairdryer to dry the washes, but the bubble was so perfectly formed I just painted it gold and hit it with some black lining. Plan is to do 4 more to be the regular Kindred Talspears for Vanguard, not sure if I want to use the Dreadspear conversions or the Eternal Guard for my basic Spearmen units when I do the full army. The EG are much easier to build, but the Dreadspears are much easier to paint. I gots some thinking to do...

Been a couple weeks but I've not been completely idle. Infinity Imperial Army models got painted and I got 2nd place in the ITS tournament with them, pretty happy w/ that performance.Was supposed to go back to painting elves, but had some things pop up that made that difficult. Made a total of 5 High Elf Spearmen from the dreadspears (pictures below), the other 4 I also cut down the helmets to look more like a High Elf face opening, left side of the openings (as you look, model's right side) came out great but the right side (model's left0 are slightly dodgy. They still solve my biggest problem with the original Delf->Helf spearmen: the faceplate.

Even with the slight unevenness they still look much closer to High Elves than the original and weren't all that much more work. I used some floral decals for the shields, but there just isn't enough contrast, might add a symbol on top or at the very least outline the decals to make them pop. Happy with how they're turning out, I picked up 3 more boxes of Dreadspears and a box of Shadow Warriors, he's going to replace the wood elf as my gladestalker. I also repainted the Lothern shields white, just to differentiate them a bit more and make them closer to traditional paint schemes. Vanguard army is now more than complete, but full Kow/9th Age/7th Ed is just beginning

Looks fantastic, but that warjack needs some spot colors on gems to take him to the same level IMO.

Work progresses on the project. Got the Swordmasters finished up, did them as a unit of 20 with an extra command so they can split into 2 units if I want to. Painting the first rank was fun, but decided to batch paint the next 3 ranks all at once which only took a couple afternoons, but was utterly mind numbing to do the same figure over and over and over again. Glad to have them finished up and out of the way





WIP of the chariot, needs some details and basing. Going ot paint up an Eternal Guardsman as the second crewman





and a few more units assembled and primed. A unit of 10 archers ready for paint. Always hated these figures, but using Eternal Guard heads solved the most egregious problem with them



Unit of Dragon Princes with the Noble is also ready for paint, hopefully get to them sometime this week



And the other 9 Shadow Warriors and another mage assembled and primed.



Need to convert the rest of the spearmen up and find the 2 Bolt Throwers I have hiding in my closet somewhere. 4 more Ellyrian Reavers were assembled earlier tonight, they'll get primed once the weather permits. No real timeframe for army completion, but also no deadline, so just slow and steady progress

Nice progress! I love your painting!

I agree that painting up 20+ of the same model can be mind numbing.... That's why I strive to make the first two ranks as good as I can and the less perfect models in the rear ranks.

Regular life has not been playing well with my hobby time, making it difficult to paint, but I did get some models built and primed. Also got a couple more Vanguard games in, so that's always a plus!



First game was Light the Beacon, we rolled up and Norther Alliance decided to attack. Odd setup where the beacon is on a hill near my edge and most of my models need to be 12" away. After setting up we realized the defender only gets 175 points for this mission, so I removed the 2 elves next to the river on my left side before we began. Northern Alliance needs to light the beacon fire by ending a turn having a model in B2B w/ the beacon while no elves are in B2B defending the beacon



End of the first turn, not much happened, just ran more people in to guard the beacon and prepare to counterattack while the northerns pushed up the board. I end the turn w/ 2 spearmen and the Shambler protecting the beacon, a citizen levy behind, my prince taking cover behind a pillar near the right building and my mage & archer on the 2nd story walkway overlooking the main attack run



Turn 2 went very, very badly. He ran the Bear Cavalry right into center of board and said "Come get some!". My Prince activated and got a glorious charge attack , the charge-of-charges! Boosted the attack, exploding "8"s go off, 6 hits at Crushing 2 (-2 to the armor save) and he rolls absolute fire for his saves, only takes a single wound of his 4. Worst yet, his counterattack does 4 wounds to my prince knocking him to the ground and even with a reroll I fail the don't-die-check, and my prince dies on his own activation! My heavy-hitter is down and the Bear Cavalry is Bear-ly scratched. Enemy mage moves up the board and I charge in w/ the Swordmaster (Tallspear w/ extra Greatweapon), who wounds but doesn't kill the mage. His half-elven berserker then charges my Swordmaster and goes full frenzy, carving him into bit-sized chunks of ithilmar armor and blonde hair. Archer does a poor job guessing range and misses, mage fails to do much with a lightning bolt. Bad times, boys.



Mage blasts a few nobodys for light damage, but the enemy champion and a friend charge up the hill and take out the Tallspear and Levy. Berserker charges the Guardian Shambler who mostly shrugs it and smashes the berserker in retaliation, then stomps on the corpse to make sure it stays down.



Turn 4 turns into a mosh pit on the hill with the ranged and casters cheering on from the rafters. Elven mage got to live the dream an tossed an empowered lightning bolt into an unengaged dwarf that splashes to all his friends, so I took a couple extra pics of that:




Didn't do a whole lotta damage in the end, only killed one dwarf and did some wounds to the chieftain, but I got to roll a whole bunch of dice at least so that felt great! Just need to hold out one more turn and...



Derp. Chieftain rolls up into combat aided by the 2 surviving dwarves and they manage to overwhelm the Shambler and light the beacon at the last minute, winning the match for Northern Alliance. Many "Gondor calls for aid!" jokes were made and it was an amazingly close game considering how quickly my Prince died

Game 2 as more of a demo game for another player and once we got his list set up and deployed, we only had time for a half-game before the store closed. Game 2 was "Secure the Portal" against Varanguard (Mortals of Chaos, complete w/ marks of the gods. You earn points by ending a round w/ models in B2B of the portal, but there's a chance to get sucked through it into the Abyss. It's only on D8 roll of 7 or 8, but that wound up being more like a 50-50 chance in this game...



Setup for first turn



End of first turn, mostly just moshing in the middle. It's at this moment I realized I've made a huge mistake and that only Command and Spellcaster models earn extra VP for being B2B with the portal, Support models do NOT earn you extra points. At this point I looked at my opponent and said "well, that means he's going to get sucked through the portal and I'm going to lose a 35 point model for nothing". My opponent has known me for many years, and knows my luck, and replied "Oh Yea, he's a gonner, you've doomed him to an existence of eternal agony". Remember, you ONLY lose a model on a roll of 7 or an 8, so the odds are actually pretty good that he won't get sucked through the portal



Which means I rolled an 8 and he got sucked through the portal. I might have been upset if I hadn't seen it coming the moment I realized Support models don't earn extra points.



End of turn 2, where we had to call it. Rather bloody affair, where my prince cut down a Bloodsworn (Chaos Warrior) only to be charged by a new one, who would be charged by a Tallspear that killed the Bloodsworn, who would be charged by a Bloodsworn killing that Tallspear, who would be charged by a Levy (killing that Bloodsworn) etc etc etc. I think 5 models were taken out in the back and forth and a few more wounded. I ended the turn (and the game) runnin my Mage into the portal, knowing full damned well that he's get sucked through. Sure enough, rolled a 7 and down the mage went. I began singing "I want it now!" in my head as I pictured him diving right in after his beloved arcane construct like Varuca Salt's father in Willie Wonka.

I technically won that game 6-4 because of that, but mostly it was just to show how the game plays soe we can get a third player and maybe start an actual campaign.


On the modelling front, I got another 10 Spearmen converted up. Need 5 more for the full unit of 20 (the first 5 are already painted). Need to figure out what to do for the unit champion, the sword arms I have that look right wonn't actully work on a model that needs to rank up, and the ones I have that will rank up don't match the style of the rest of them. The Anointed of Asuryan has been built for a while, just got him primed today since the weather was nice, and built 4 more Ellyrian Reavers to fill out a unit of 5. I need to do a full unit of 10, but I'm not looking forward to that one. Hoping to get some paint on models this week

That was a good Vanguard Battle Report with nice pics.