Hobby Update: Rebased KoM Champions

I had been hoping for a quick 4th Edition game to test my understanding of the changes in advance of my first demo day as a Pathfinder. Alas, that little trial did not come to pass, but my firsta demo day went very well, with several veteran players, eager to get a sneak peak of the rules, coming out to help, and playing the majority of the games for the new players that the day, so I could adjudicate and clarify and bounce around between a few tables. Overall, it was a good experience, and I prepped decently well, and have just a few things to adjust for in the future. A big thanks to Joe, Rob, Will, and Jeanette for their efforts and assistance!

Hoping for that test game, after reading the partial advance rules, I had quickly rebased a few Kingdoms of Men heroes, as I hoped to explore the army building rules more. The Kingdoms of Men look to be able to field quite a number of units, and I figured that a basic-but-numerous army would be ideal for getting my feet wet. These are table-ready, but we'll add rocks and touch-ups down the road. With winter here most of that is in the garage and very hard to get to at the moment.

A pair of Wizards. A third is painted up and waiting to be rebased yet, if needed.

Wizards look to have lost their Pegasus mounts, but honestly, with the mix of changes, simple ponies look like they will be fine alternative. They are still Yielding, so won't be as good at blocking and delaying scary things, but everything has a unit strength, but Individuals are still a thing, meaning that they still get a free pivot in the movement phase, which should still make the Wizards great for any late-game scenario play. 

A pair of Heroes.

I wasn’t sure how the lowly, uninspiring Hero units would fare in the new edition, but these really got a glow up from what I’ve seen. Inspiring and a conditional Rally is really nice. Their combat stats are still meh, but with more utility like this, I can easily imagine fielding a few of these and doing the old blocking trick to prevent sliding into terrain, enabling clean charges from your Knights, who now have more attacks and TC3. From even the demo games unit movement overall seems way more dynamic now with all the extra pivots, and it will be interesting to see how the Heroes get used. I think their future is bright, so I hobbied up two. 

The extra-sturdy-lookin ASB. 

I had three of these plastic Heroes, and turned the third into a mounted ASB by breaking off the sword arm and replacing it with a banner. I am now a little conflicted on this, as the barding oversells the Def4 of the flag-bearer. we'll see, I can always replace the arm and hobby something new up down the road. 

My often-used Lute unfortunately appears to be no more, but there are still plenty of cool items for an ASB to take! I think the old approach of having my sources of Inspiring striving to do more than just that in-game is still a good idea, so we'll see what items come to the fore and look interesting after a few games.

I had tried to give my initial takes on my assorted armies with the display board posts, but those were half-baked at different times. Apologies, but it's my blog, so we're going to stumble through some thoughts for each again as I rebase some units, and then probably later yet again, as we get into the first games with each army.

I am actually pretty excited about the Kingdoms of Men for the new edition. They were on shaky ground, but rolling them in with League of Rhordia and the Halfling mercenaries gives them a lot of options while largely preserves the general style of the army. A few things in my collection appear to be invalidated (Pegasus Wizards; Fanatic Instigators), and while many are bemoaning the loss of Pikes, they are still available as a Dogs of War upgrade, albeit as a horde. Maybe 300 points of my collection is voided with the edition change, and that is all characters. The remaining things have either gotten stronger or weaker, as happens in such a change, but the units can easily find uses and alternatives in the roster, and we have some supporting Halfling units as well now, and they even have the correct Spellward rules now! These are all very welcome changes and the army looks like it is in a great spot.

Both my humans and my Undead look like a lot of fun, as the core units are all very versatile, and both can unlock a few battalions easily and cheaply, allowing for a huge variety of possible builds, with multiple Giants and even multiple flying characters still a real possibility for things to play. The Kingdoms of Men have better quality of core units than the Undead though, and just flooding the board with endless decent units looks like it could be fun!

Next weekend is another demo day which I won't be reporting on in detail, and after that we're approaching the holidays and travel and additional personal commitments. I was hoping to get a few "proper" 4th Edition games in before the end of the year, but that might be in doubt! For now, the hobbying and theory-crafting will continue, and we'll hope for the best regarding "proper" games as the year concludes.