Hobby Update: "Improved" Mammoths and more Siege Artillery

One of the staples of my 2nd edition lists for the Regnum were the mighty Beasts of War.

Having a big, fighty creature with a ballista mounted back in a howdah was just a really cool conceptual option. It kinda reminded me of a tank, which can shoot or run you over, and I really enjoyed making the model back in the day. As I embarked with the Roman/Byzantine-inspired models, these were really the only thing I had with Crushing Strength for a long, long time, so they became must-takes for me, especially with the cheap shooting upgrade. It was effective enough on the table that I eventually hobbied up a second Beast, and as 2nd Edition rolled on, the dinos even got buffs, gaining a version Steady Aim and a few other things as the updates continued. 

Alas, 3rd Edition took away the war machine upgrade, and these have sat unused for several years down in storage. While pulling out units from storage for Battle 002 though, I dug the dinos out as well, and decided to give them a bit of a refresh as April kicked off. One of the general goals of the blog is to show that things can be "good enough." Hobby to your ability now, and you can always improve on your work later. This felt like a good showcase of that approach.

"Improved" Mammoths, with swappable soldiers and artillery, should that option ever return.

I touched up the base with some grass tufts, and added a little more tan paint to the sandy base, since the black primed undercoat was pretty obvious in a few places. And I finally attached some chains to make some super-basic reins. I also scored the exterior of the howdah with a knife and dry brushed a very light beige on it for a little more color variation there. That should all look a little more like wood, though the popsicle stick shape is pretty recognizable. I may trim the round bits down/off in the future, but it still doesn't bother me enough yet. Likewise the yellow I had used to paint the dinos back in the day was a bit rough in places, but I didn't have the drive to repaint the dinos entirely. 

I had originally super-glued the ballistae to the popsicle-stick howdah, but I was able to pop them off using a curved / hooked sculpting tool, getting the model back to I guess more of a "basic chassis" setting. 

The weather in March was terrible, as has been the weather in April so far. Chilly, lots of rain and even a handful of snow showers, but there were around two good days for priming in March, which I was able to take good advantage of, and have been able to get a little hobbying in since Battle 002. For the refresh here, I painted up two trios of impressive-looking soldiers, kitbashed similarly to the Pikes I did up not too long ago. 

A close-up on the "Mammoths". The feet look splotchy on each, but it's still passable for now as I don't have a good alternative yellow to try out. This close and at this angle, you can see the cardstock platforms for the soldiers, but on the table, this should all look fine.

I did some haphazard measuring (the interior dimension is slightly different, owing to two different driver platforms. Fortunately I had measured the smaller one and has used that for everything) and cut out some rectangles from cereal boxes, slapped some paint on those, and then glued both the ballistae and the soldiers to their own little platforms. Now, I have two Mammoths I can run in 3rd and be wysiwyg, each with the option to swap out the soldiers for a ballista, should that upgrade ever come back. 

Add some bases, and bits to the bases, and I get two new war machines out of this little refresh project!

It then occurred to me that the ballistae model here is the same as what I had used for the Siege Artillery a while back, so while I was writing up this post, I decided to take another hobby break. I raided a bits box and dig out some old bases from Proxy Models. The cardboard platforms are small enough to fit easily on a 50mm square war machine base, so I decided to put the ballistae to use here for now, adding some basing paste, rocks, and bits to turn then into Siege Artillery units two and three. Even with some paint, the flat cardboard base looked pretty bad, so with a pen, I added some wood lines for a little extra detail on these, but not to the soldier ones. In the howdah, that level of detail seemed unnecessary. And with that, the currently superfluous ballistae are now useful as Siege Artillery  alongside the now more wysiwyg Mammoths!

These may not hit the table for a while though. Both are pretty low down on the things I want to test. The Dinos/Mammoths/Beasts seem comparable to Giants, but then just be generally worse? I do like the differences, like Rampage vs Slayer, but for 5 points the Giant gains a fair amount (Fury, 2 bumps in Nerve and a higher ceiling for attacks, plus all the attacks have Crushing Strength, rather than a mix of CS and Thunderous Charge, making the Giants better in a grind or counter-charge). Outside of some fluffy reason or a meta-based choice, the Mammoths just seem wanting in comparison, so I am hesitant to commit valuable game time to exploring the Mammoths currently.

Fielding the Siege Artillery could lead to some interesting tests though. In 2nd, I came to the belief that war machines were the KoM's most efficient source of ranged damage. That said, I did not play tons and tons of games to fully test this theory out, so I would interested in exploring this idea more in 3rd, especially with all the changes from 2nd to 3rd (mainly multiple shots from the war machines). This would likely require a few stages of tests to really explore though, like running a few war machine heavy lists, and then doing comparisons between the cheaper Ballistae vs the ignoring cover Siege Artillery... all in all, a lot of work. So this is an interesting idea, but unlikely to be tackled for a at least a few more games. I have plenty of other things I am more interested in testing first.

More hobbying and games and blabbering coming soon!

Hobby Update: KoM Pole-Arms and Bowmen

March wasn't great for priming weather, but there were around two workable days and I was able to make use of. I primed up and then continued hobbying through the Gripping Beast Late Roman Infantry boxes, hobbying up some more Bowmen and, finally, some converted Pole-Arms Blocks!

The Gripping Beast infantry box comes 44 models strong and has been surprisingly good. It contains a command sprue of two minis (an armored commander and unarmored bannerman/musician, each repeated once for four models total) and a troop sprue of five minis repeated eight times. The troop sprue is pretty rigid, so from a box you'll end up with 8 armored soldiers (spears or swords, with one pose) 16 cloth archers (two poses) and 16 cloth soldiers (spears or swords, two poses). 

The main sprue of the kit, for reference. Pretty limited poses overall.

I ended up with a few spare bodies for all the new unarmored troops. Not sure what I will do with those just yet. Additionally, with the exception of using one armored body for the Brigand, the rest of the armored dudes are untouched and unused. We'll see what they all end up being used for in the future.

This guy was a little MVP in Battle 002 by doing a surprising amount of work with his bow before tanking a horde of Snow Trolls by himself. He was painted up "good enough" for the game, and post-battle he got some washes and touchups to finish him off.

The Bowmen from the box were done up in two more troops, for flexibility building lists. I enjoyed the Outlaws formation in Battle 002, but really only for the Brigand. While I admittedly didn't use the units well, troops of Bowmen (and additional points for the formation buffs) just doesn't seem like a good use of points for most match-ups. Their stats just aren't good enough to warrant paying either the troop tax or for the additional formation rules. Still, I think the Bowmen are likely to see the table. A cheap unlocking regiment with a ranged attack seems like it could be fun to play around with. 

More Bowmen. The stats aren't great, but I think they have potential in a list as a Regiment.

The Pole-Arm Blocks are a long time coming. When I started Kings of War, I had my WHFB Empire army, with old halberds aplenty, and they were great. I have definitely missed them since switching into Warlord Games and the more classical / historical direction the Regnum has gone with its models. Kings of War kinda revolves around melee-phase for damage, and having Crushing Strength is just a great tool to have. I have since converted some Foot Guard and built some Fanatics, but the Pole-Arms (with their slightly worse stats) get me Crushing Strength at a discount. I am looking forward to trying these out!

Pole-Arms Block 1. The guy just to the left of the leader point has a GW halberd topper. It looks massively out of place, but I'll keep it for now. He's the leader and he definitely means business with his beard and huge blade.

Getting Pole-Arms Blocks for the Regnum took a long while because I was trying to be wysiwyg. The Warlord Games minis which I was leaning heavily on for the army really want that shield otherwise they look weird, and with the segmentata armor plus shield, they'd just look a little too sturdy for a Defense 3 unit. It works fine for the more elite and tankier Foot Guard, but less great for wimpy Pole-Arms Blocks. I could have chopped the shield arms off and tried to convert some two-handers... but that seemed like a ton of work, and unlikely to go well with my hobbying skills. Thankfully, I came across the Gripping Beast box, and a ton of extra bits, and this all came together.

Block #2. Going 4x4 worked out really well for these. 

The bodies, arms, and heads are all Gripping Beast. The spear heads were clipped off and replaced with axes and such from a variety of other kits. Like Warlord's range, the Gripping Beast bodies come with an immovable shield arm, which I tried to ignore early on, but just couldn't. Swinging one-handed just looked weird. The little buckler-like shields came from Fireforge's Byzantine Auxiliaries, and were just what I needed. The little shields give a uniformity with the rest of the army, and everything looks a little better with them. 

There are two poses for these minis, and with the first box, I had assembled everything "squared up" which, looks goofy with the more actively posed mini. Both poses look better the more the more their forward their left feet are. Rather than try and pop off and re-glue a number of heads, I tried to have a transition in the units, with the more aggressively-turned minis in front, and the more "squared-up at attention" poses in the back. For overwhelmingly just two body sculpts (I did sneak in a few of the banner-bearers from the box to get a third pose going) the units come across nicely varied with regards to posing. They don't look too "samey" so I am quite happy with how these turned out.

Painting was a bit rough though, and it took a few longer sessions to get through everything. Painting up so many minis at once, the gradient on the white tunics definitely suffered a bit. All these minis have belts with loops in the tunic, some shoulder straps/harnesses, and then these weird additional straps. too. They also have these weird circles on them, which I chose to treat as ornamentation. A lot of fiddily detail work for a very basic soldier. All in all, things could be a little tidier, but these are good enough for now and I am happy to have these ready for games.