Hobby Update: Varangur Tundra Wolves

I haven’t gotten any games with them in quite a long time, so I have not bolstered the ranks of the Varangur in a long while either. I was trawling ebay over the summer though, and I happened upon a pretty cheap bundle of what I think are very old, plastic Vampire Counts Dire Wolves? I supplemented them with some Reaper Wolves, and so up now are two regiments worth of Tundra Wolves for the Varangur!

Both regiments, but with some poor lighting. Sorry!

Hobbying-wise, I wanted to keep the colors similar to those for the basing, as a way to make the minis feel like they belong here. Bases and models were all primed black, and then I dry brushed everything with the same colors. White wolves and snow felt to samey though, so I stopped with some gray dry brushing, hit the fangs and details, and then added in all the snow. It’s all good enough for the table!

Four troops, with some slightly better light? I'm digging out my light box again.

I’ve had some Varangur lists kicking around since February, but haven’t had the opportunity to field them, since smaller League games have dominated my availability the last few months and I was busy running other things for that. I had been hoping to explore the Formation, contrast it with Horse Raiders generally, and explore Night Raiders more, since my usual opponent had been using Pack Hunters and such against me to such great effect. As it turns out, the Hunters should probably have been taking more shooting penalties than we had been applying, though they still seem like interesting units. The Varangur Night Raiders can buy an upgrade to get Scout (an even better option now, to help avoid the shooting penalties by using more thoughtful early positioning), which also gives an Aura Vicious to Tundra Wolves. It’s an odd upgrade. It’s an aura, so the Raiders do get the benefit, but I wanted to commit a little more here and see how useful it and the Tundra Wolves might be… 

Crunch-wise, I think Tundra Wolves function like medium cavalry; able to get places quickly, but rarely having the damage output to best anything quickly, even with hot dice. I have just started exploring these kinds of units a bit more, and so I have much more testing to do! Making the assumption of very clean charges, and comparing these newcomers with some of the unit's I've run or encountered so far gives us the following for expected damage:

The Tundra Wolves and Hellhounds are functionally identical, just playing around with the number of attacks vs Melee score math. In ideal conditions they actually come out ahead against these other examples due to their greater number of attacks... but we are ignoring speed, Defense, Nerve, hindered charges and disordered charges, to try and over-simply things. The Centaur Striders are still very close behind on the expected damage, are slightly cheaper, and should be better in non-ideal conditions, due to CS1 and Pathfinder (compared to the Hellhounds). 

I still don't really know how best to employ these kinds of units, but I guess that just means I need to run them and test them out more! In an ideal situation, I feel like the Tundra Wolves might be good in an envelopment strategy, used alongside the upgraded Night Raiders. The Raiders can scout up before the game begins. The Wolves can use their range reinforce them if the Raiders get charged early, and otherwise, you leapfrog the Wolves and the Raiders up until you need to start charging things. I think that's an ideal scenario, but that's several hundred points and multiple drops, so I don't know how likely that would be! Speaking more generally, just tossing a Bane Chant or something on them should be ok, though I still don't think that will be enough to consistently break units. I don't know what I am doing with them, or this kind of unit yet, so we'll just need to get them on the table sometime!