The Return

It’s time, whispered a voice inside my head.

For the first time, in many many years I’m allowing the idea of pushing tiny figures around gain access to my mental faculties. Is THIS a good idea?.. or what about THIS!

ah, the familiar pleasure of pondering - the endless posibilities!

If things go according to my plan I’ll participate in my first ever tournament of KoW in February next year. And I’ll use this post to share random stuff related to it, leading up to the event, and ending with a summary of how it actually played out in real life.

As you can probably imagine I’ve got plenty of “very important” questions to ponder, ranging form trying to imagine how the game is actually played, to; if I got gw grypon riders, and I can now field Beast Cavalry in my Kingdom of Men list, how the hell would I toggle “flying On and Off”??? Visually I mean. My best solution so far is; I’m thinking that I could add a pegasuss rider as a centerpice to the unit, as a reminder, “something flying” is relevant to this particular unit XD And Id take this out if I went with tthe TC/Vicious build.

haha, would my solution be looked down upon, like lol; look at that noooob! haha, not that I’d mind too much, but prior notice won’t hurt. :wink: How did other Kingdom of men players solve this particular dilemma?

Oh, and yes, Hi! - this is my very first post.

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Welcome to the forum! Another KoM player, eh! Those are quite popular. :slight_smile:

Are you thinking of unit basing or using individual models in trays?
If you did a unit base, perhaps magnetizing some wings could be a fix. Does take some work, of course. :slight_smile:

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My brain has really been working overtime with the beast cav unit - and I’ve actually come up with some pretty “crazy” ideas, that I might just mess around with to see if they’re workable.

I’ll reveal what they are once I get some tests done XD
I would really like to make som unit bases for the beast cav though. Especially since the models are so long, they don’t really fit onto a 50x50 base anyway.

Im so happy though, to be able to field my chocobo inspired gryphon riders in a KoW army!

Im glad there is a “fair bit” of time before the tourney starts, because I’ve got quite a bit of basing and painting to do.

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Welcome, and congratulations for choosing the right army :wink: Plus it segways nicely into Rhordia (honour guard are awesome) and Brothermark!

If you have the models based for another game, just make an appropriate sized unit base (horde one easily fits a few of the gw oval bases) - ideally look at 4 to a horde. You could then leave space for a very clear flying/not flying figure which no-one would really have any issues with if switch it out between lists.

[Mantic aren’t necessarily consistent with their own models - these for example fly, and don’t have any sort of fireball attack!]

Screenshot_20210831-130840_Chrome

I’ve got an old unit of honour guard/beast cavalry made from the demigryph knights, but my more recent ones are, err, a bit odd! Weird tick bugs (from necromunda) and bird/insect things (para bellum conquest).


There are plentiful blogs/videos about the game itself, check the simple ones here if nothing else.

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Haha, weird and odd, are just my cup of tea! XD

I appreciate knowing people would not generally mind to much though - as I never really had this particular problem to deal with at all in my gaming experience. Never had a “Toggle FLY button” before on any of my units XD.

Your stuff is awesome!

I’m so looking forward to finally be playing Kings of War! :grin:

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Back in the day I wanted to theme my empire list to be a roaming border line defence type of army. Worn down, always on the move, gritty, battle hardened.

I tried to get this idea through in a few different ways, one is no knights wear helmets at all, but are mostly bearded stuff from the militia sprues if my memory serves me right. And I bought bretonnia men at arms/archers instead of the regular empire ones etc.

The one I never got to finish, was a greatsword unit, where I mostly used the flagelants sprues.
Turns out my “back then” somewhat original idea of making the steamtank into a huge armoured beast was just waiting for KoW all along XD.

The units I need to focus on going forwads toward the tournament, is getting that greatsword unit up and running. - making a diorama for it, is very tempting.
Then I need to finish my General on Winged beast, and the Monarch.

I need to do a whole lot of basing, and finally make a unit base for my gryphon riders.

I’ll start posting pictures etc as I get going.

After many years in a drawer, it will be interesting for sure, to see how much, if any at all of my old paint is still usable XD… Im not very optimistic, to say the least.

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Scared of doom divers are you?

This of course, is a very hush hush secret experimental design, - but Leonardo insists it could be doable - The gryphons still has retained some of their flying instincts he claims. Gryphons should not freak out when gliding through the air, - at least he thinks this ought to be the case. - they would be the perfect mount to use, becasue few others seem willing to run at full tilt and throw themselves out over cliffs - but the gryphons still do! Once airborn, we could ride the winds far into behind enemy lines. Its brilliant, he squeaked with exitment. We attach the wings onto the sturdy armour of the Gryphs, here here and here. Think of the tactial possibilites!! he blabbered on, waiving his hands in the air, as he got lost in mental imagery of gryphon riders silently gliding through the air. At least give me some funds to try he pleaded, looking over to the general. It might work you know.

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Hi there, I am new to the forum but I hope I can help developing the idea…

Re: signalling ‘flyability’
With my Undead I use cotton ‘clouds’ on the bases, so the opponents see that the miniatures have a distinctly different base design to show the flying capability.

Re: Kingdom of Men large cav
I have a Landsknecht/empire themed army. My largeCav are three Hussite war waggons (the proper heavy ones, can’t be confused with lights and fast chariots) on 5x10cm bases staging a horde.

What do you think?

Regs, Urs


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Hi there and welcome too! Enjoy the game and the community.

About the beast cavalry, I did this quite easy: Mine are war elephants. This means, they don’t fly, since I think the flying upgrade is too expensive for what they do. A better picture here.

Kingdoms of Men is a great army to play. At the last Clash of Kings tournament, I was the “best” Kingdoms of Men player (which means that I did slightly better than the other Kingdoms of Men player) and I think the army is a bit under-represented due to not having official Mantic models. There’s so many great model lines for them, though!

My army is nearly 100% Gee-dub due to vast quantities of oldhammer stuff which I bought a long time ago. If I were to re-start these days, I’d use perry twins plastics, I think. Great models and very afordable too.

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Classic!! Very nice army. I like the elephants. Same miniature range as mine…

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So, Ive been thinking about… wound markers XD

And I think what I’ll need is a few rubber bands -tiny and brightly coloured, and some ice cream sticks. Then I’ll just mark them , and make notches for the rubber bands.

Probably gonna paint the sticks to make them less icecreamy, and more look at that “cool wound marker thingy” ish.

Will it work? I don’t really know. But Im optimistic it will.

Worst case scenario, me and my girls get a bit to much icecream :laughing:

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I have experienced different styles of wound markers, and have devised a simple check:
If your opponent has to ask you how many wounds are on your units, then it was a bad idea. (because you failed to convey the info without the opponent needing to ask) :wink:
so it all depends on how easy it is to “read”, I think.
Dice are still the best IMO, I like to get some smaller ones of a different color, or often I use other dice types, like D10 or similar, so no chance of picking them up and rolling them by accident.

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haha, I totally agree with your “is it good check” - your opponent ought to be able to see, and not ask - totally agree!. :grin:

This is one aspect I like about the stick idea, you can easily make zones on it clearly depicting 10, 15, 20, preferably some dark colour, and use a brigth read rubber marker, making it very easy to just at a glance see “how far across the stick the marker is.”

One aspect I really like about the sticks is they cant easily get scrambled. One reason I think several D6s would be preferrable to d20s

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thanks! 1:72 selucids, right?

They are a bit small for Kings of War, but then again, they fit wonderful on a 50x100 base. Combined with Perry twins mercenaries for crew, they are just very small elephants. Since most cavalry horses (especially GW) are also miniature compared to their riders, the elephants follow that trend, so nothing is inconsistent there.

Must be hell for the backs of these beasts, though.

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I did something similar for honour guard/beast cavalry - 1/72 scale elephants and 28mm crew (fireforge with gripping beast arab heads)

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Started on my gryphon gliders. Gonna paint them, steampunk them some more, and perhaps add some ropes to soften the design a bit.

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So, I’ve surveyd the painting situation. And short story is, well most of my vallejo paint have survived the multi year hiatous. All of my gw paint, without expeciton, are rock solid.

I’m severly color range limited, but. at least I have some paint to work with.

Naturally enough, I never had the option to have ensnare in my empire army, so I’ve been busy thinking of ways to get across the idea of nets. Then I noticed the flail on the flaggelants might just be pretty darn perfect little sprue to have some fishernet like stuff that could then just fasten on the front of the big shields of the front rank. Haha, the irony when I decided to sacrifce the actuall flagelant flails and only later noticing I have a lot of sheets with flagelant sprues lying around - ofc with plenty of these flail thingys XD So this is what I did- need some drybrushing and highlighs, but I actually need to buy som paint for that XD. Im curious what other “ensnare” upgrade solutions you guys found, so dont hesitate to share your ideas =)

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Depends really on the units in question with ensnare (note only the upgraded spearman have it in KoM, although Phalanx is more available across human type armies).

Stakes, pits, walls, attack dogs etc can all work to show a way to represent the difficulty in attacking your unit(s).

Btw, I have a rule question that I’m somewhat puzzled by. So the siege artillery ignores obscured - and Im… eh… obscured? Is that just another way to saying ignores cover?

I guess, it might be? But why not just say ignores cover then? Btw, Im working with the gamers edition of the rules until I can buy the new 3.5 one, as a pdf, - so this kind of stuff, “trips me up” lol, as I dont know if my rule book is outdate, OR its my mental faculties thats sub par for the task XD. Then the cannon, it ignores concealed… and its at this pint Im totally lost. What do they MEAN concealed? My best guess? Well, it would be you cant SEE the bugger, like its behind a hill or something? But you would still get cover penalties, and besides, it just makes NO sense a cannon being able to “home in” on targets out of sight like that… so Im… just properly confused XD. Not that it will matter all that much I guess, since in my list I’ll instead bring 2 ballistas to the party instead.

Almost.

The sole rule change in 3.5 compared to 3 was how cover works. Previously, both hiding behind other units and hiding within terrain grantsed cover. Nowadays, the one grants obscured and the other grants concealment. (i can never remember which is which) Anyhow, your siege artillery grants the one you want, the one that prevents hiding behind other units. The cannon is useless these days, since it doesn’t grant that one.

I’m not 100% convinced if this rule change was needed, but we’ll see in a couple of months.

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