Hobby Update: Battery of Balefire Catapults

Over the winter I made a few purchases, among which was a bunch of Balefire Catapult bits. For about $8 each, I snagged enough to make 4 Catapults, minus the wheels. And here they are!

Lock and load! or whatever the war machine equivalent is.

The minis are all from the Mantic kit. While I really like much of their Undead line, it turns out I'm not a big fan of this kit.

The throwing arm is a bummer; I don't know what Balefire is, but I don't think skulls should be the ammunition. It looks more silly than anything. The front it what really spoils it for me though; it's just not a great sculpt. The shields up top are thick and don't look particularly great; none of the spikes seem to have a reason to be there.

Not to say that spikes and gross ammunition shouldn't be used! I played a lot of Warcraft 3 when it first launched, and really loved the design of the Meat Wagon. It would have been nice to have something along those lines. Oh well, enough complaining.

The other parts of the kit (remaining chassis and crew) are nice. The rest of the chassis has a really nice decayed look to it. Ropes are everywhere, along with lots of small metal plates. I feel like this machine is always creaking along. The crew actually has a lot of customization available, coming with three different torsos and extra bits (sword arm; shield arm; spyglass arm; pointing arm). That was a nice surprise, but pretty typical of Mantic's Undead. Their tiny Zombie sprue is a thing of hobbying beauty.

For my catapults, I added a few plastic rods the axle space to allude to it being dragged around the field. I think that will work well enough. The crew are nothing special, I figured I'd leave the bonus sword and shield wielding torso out of these. I have a bunch of skeletons to finish for the army, and may be able to put them to use later...



Game-wise, the Balefire Catapult is a pretty standard war machine. It's got the expected Reload, a single attack hitting on 5+, a Blast value and some Piercing. All that is pretty standard, meaning it will be pretty unreliable, just like typical war machines! However, it does have some unique extra things going for it.

First, it's got Lifeleech, which is useless. There is no Melee attack score so it cannot regain anything. That's disappointing. It's also got Shambling, so potentially you could Surge it forward and have it shoot still. But Surging and Shooting is gimmicky. It's already got good range, so you're unlikely to need to do this trick in-game to get it into range of something.

Two more useful rules it has are Indirect Fire and Vicious. The Undead tend to field a lot of larger units, so firing over them without the cover penalty could be very nice indeed. Likewise Vicious could help you score more damage when the war machine does manage to connect. Both should be nice to have.

Painting up 4 is definitely overkill, not sure how often these will see play, but I did want a handful done up in case of an epic game, as that's still on my list of Kings of War goals. For normal games, they aren't big commitments at 100 points each, but the Undead aren't known for gunlines. I'll add a few into the next list and we'll see how the girlfriend likes them.