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!