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 Rivetbull wrote:
I just didn’t want any crazy skulls or moulded faces, because they serve in historicals as often as fantasy.

Very wise. Buying your warmachines for mutiple games/factions is good practice.

At the time of purchase around 1st edition KoW these were for a Chaos Kingdoms of Men army, but with 2nd edition the best fit for that army was Varrangur and they don't have any catapaults or Trebuchet. Now they'll wind up with a Good-Guy Kingdoms of Man (or variant) that I'm about halfway through painting and I'll probably get some shields or some-such to cover over the skulls.

There were really good catapults and ballistae in a recent Bones KS for real cheap. Not sure if they've hit retail yet.

So, I’ve played a few games now and have decided to add some more fantasy elements (big monsters) to the army. I also repurposed some wildly underused Malifaux catapults, as the Wizkids ones are never going to fit on a 50mm base. I’m enjoying the system so far, although the archers I relied upon in Lion Rampant and Oathmark are at best a mild annoyance to an opponent in Kings of War. I’ve decided to take the force to a Kings of War event the first weekend of December. Given the mistakes I have been making in deployment and lack of awareness of what most other armies are doing I expect to do poorly.

Those catapults are very nice!

Cheers

This is the original model.

Yep, that looks pretty Malifaux.

 Rivetbull wrote:
So, I’ve played a few games now and have decided to add some more fantasy elements (big monsters) to the army. I also repurposed some wildly underused Malifaux catapults, as the Wizkids ones are never going to fit on a 50mm base. I’m enjoying the system so far, although the archers I relied upon in Lion Rampant and Oathmark are at best a mild annoyance to an opponent in Kings of War. I’ve decided to take the force to a Kings of War event the first weekend of December. Given the mistakes I have been making in deployment and lack of awareness of what most other armies are doing I expect to do poorly.

Hey man how did your Kings of War event go??

When trying to sort through the old pile of shame for a bring-and-buy at the weekend I stumbled across an army core box of these undead samurai from Zenit miniatures. https://shop.zenitminiatures.es/en/22-undead

Having spent some hours reading through reviews of different rank & file rulesets I have settled on building up a force for KoW and going from there. I like that the game is miniature agnostic (reading about people using some really mad stuff on the tabletop, even in Mantic's own tournaments) and you can use unit fillers and things like that to help bulk up those larger blocks. Also that events themselves seem really common and the game must have made critical mass for those to happen. I did look at Oathmark and Warhammer Renaissance, but the difficulty in finding events for those games put me off - none of my gaming friends like rank and file games, so it's a necessity for me.

Anyway looking forward to getting some stuff painted up and an army ready in 2 or 3 years!

So, hey, sorry I didn't notice your reply for six months.

That event was a mixed bag. I won best army, but lost all my games. In fact only one of those games was particularly close. I concluded that first of all, there is a LOT more tactical finesse to KoW than lets on until you actually start playing it. Second, the Kingdoms of Men list lets you see a Kings of War game right up close, and learn, but I am not sure how much you are actually participating in those games. It is very much a starter army list, the priority of which is making most any fantasy/historical human model line playable in the system. I’m sure a superb player can get results from it. I am not saying they are helpless, but they are clearly sub-optimal and have a lot of vanilla and redundant units. But, my own play and lack of experience was every bit as important as my list’s strength in bringing about my doom. This is a game that is won in lost in the movement phase (or deployment choices) in the previous turn than the one you are playing. Unit synergies exist and matter, but there are no ‘combo’ plays or massive spells to swing a game. Careful movement, planning your facings and match-ups, and anticipating opponent’s moves are where the game is won and lost. Because it is a battle game mistakes can snowball and early losses and feel punishing in the late game. However, it is very rare that ‘a die roll’ impacts the game in a serious way. The most outsized single luck points I am noticing are rolls for wild charges, which can completely change the flow of a turn if they let a unit connect (but good players will account for the chance ahead of time), and the roll for ‘is there a turn 7?’ which can really impact who wins and is hard to mitigate in a close game. Lastly, the occasional double “1”s causing a beaten unit to not break can throw a huge spike into a gameplan, but i think it is rare enough to not be a negative. It is a game that rewards ‘tight’ play kind of like WarMachine did, but has a flow closer to a game of chess and a feel of a fantasy battle but not much like old Warhammer Fantasy Battle.

I played a second event New York a couple weeks ago. This was a much larger event than what I’d played before and had many more relatively serious players. It was also the first two day event I’d played in years. I played better and had a much better army this time, but I was definitely behind the curve in terms of experience and game skill. I was also quickly tired from playing so many games in succession which definitely wieghed me down on my last games each day. I also was unused to playing on a clock, which KoW does very cleanly. My first game would of been much closer or even a win if i was playing quicker. I learned a great deal, i think. The most important thing is to get more games in, if one wants to play better. There is a limit to what you can put in a list and still expect to do well, but play is far more important than your list. I would say play is most important, list creation/matchup is a distant second, and luck is an only modestly important factor.

@Rivetbull: That's an attractive army!

 Ancestral Hamster wrote:
@Rivetbull: That's an attractive army!

Agreed, it looks awesome!

I was there too, Rivetbull, loved your army and told you so when I thought my team was matched against yours before we were unmatched. You were sensibly sitting down and waiting instead of overthinking the match up like me

Glad you had a better time! Crossroads is probably the chummiest of tournaments, thanks in part to the team setup, although it was quite chummy before that as well (I've attended since 2009 I think? Back in WHFB days).

If you really miss WFB you should try - for free! - the default place for WFB orphans: The 9th Age. It is very popular (here in Poland more popular than AoS, at least it was last time I checked) and free.

The downside is it is based on 8th, so random charges :( but it has more options to compensate for that than WFB used to have (musician offers rerolls or something like that).

Well, to word it differently

If you miss WHF and liked 6th, you should try KoW for free
If you liked 8th, you should try 9th Age

I've been getting back into KoW myself - mostly because kodos pointed out to me there's an actual tournament scene going on just one country over - and having a blast teaching a new player, we look forward to going and being obliterated by players who actually know what they're doing. 3rd edition is a little bit more "corpo" than 2nd (mostly through the regrettable cutting of some options that do not conform to Mantic's own model range) but the gameplay itself is as fast and tight as ever. I've also had to take up the challenge of expanding an army I started in early 2nd edition and matching its original look, which means forgoing modern comforts such as Contrast paint and 3d printers.

So here's my new stuff, a Warsmith and a reg of Shieldbreakers, pretty much all from Battle of Skull Pass, like most of my infantry.



And 4 blisters of metal Mastiffs from Warlord Games, because that's what you did in the mid 2010s if you needed doggos.



Amusingly, these are the heaviest units in my army by weight, easily beating out even the Giant, which is Reaper Bones.

Good looking dwarves, the wagon is a nice addition. The mini-dioramas that KoW opens for is a great boon for the game IMO.

Funny thing for me is, KoW is pretty dead in my area since the pandemic, but I might actually use my Empire of Dust models to play The Old World, at least in casual play. The bases are too small for any kind of tournament play. The Mantic EoD skeleton models look way better than the ancient ugly sculpts of GW's Tomb Kings skeletons. Kind of ironic as EoD was designed to mimic Tomb Kings but I might be doing it the other way around.

So this weekend a friend and I drove to Austria to play KoW with people we met over the internet. They gave us beer, whisky, 8 hour smoked BBQ ribs, and didn't kill us in our sleep

We also played two games each with completely new people and learned a lot and now we're thinking of starting our second armies

 lord_blackfang wrote:
So this weekend a friend and I drove to Austria to play KoW with people we met over the internet. They gave us beer, whisky, 8 hour smoked BBQ ribs, and didn't kill us in our sleep

We also played two games each with completely new people and learned a lot and now we're thinking of starting our second armies

Wow, Hospitality, good gaming and hobby inspiration in one trip.

That there is the beauty of the wargaming community!

Glad you got some games in and also didn't die! New/old Dwarfs looking good