The Herd rolling up into the Forces of Nature at the launch of 4th has been rough on my collection. As touched on elsewhere in the blog, most of the collection has been voided with the transition, putting me in a rather awkward spot. About the only cool thing to happen here is getting access to the other Elemental units. In addition to the old Earth Elementals and Forest Shamblers, my Herd now has access to Wind and Water Elementals, and the Fire Elementals can be either normal elementals or Guardian Brutes depending on the Warlord choice, which is neat, though this changes the dynamics of the Herd too. Overall, I'm pressing forward, taking inspiration from the winter months, and making a few additions to the army with the intent on running it at an upcoming tournament. All this to say that up now are a pair of Greater Wind Elementals for my frozen Herd!
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| The duo. The front facing is another color, to help better show Surge and Shambling to my opponents. |
The models are Wizkids Air Elementals, picked up second-hand. The model is one of those semi-translucent miniatures, but I'm not a huge fan of that look, so we primed them, and then painted over everything, with a blue-gray base color and then a brighter light blue as a highlight. The paints were just craft paints, so I needed a few passes to get good coverage. With all the swirls, one could really go nuts with blending and detail, but we kept it pretty simple here, just trying to get a solid base color and then drybrush the lighter color on, and did get this all done really quickly in an afternoon session. It's a serviceable paint job, but the paint quality is pretty bad (I think a Target craft paint), so I may want to touch this up at some point down the road.
The basing followed my usual scheme for the Herd with some gray-blue ground plus a snow effect. I put rocks in the middle to further build the model up. One mini had a flat bottom and one had a chunk that fit into a separate base, which was weird. I tried to slop over the snow effect to hide the one with the nub. I did not do a good job, and that gab is large and noticeable, but I also probably won't fix this anytime soon. This is wargaming painting, and is up to a tabletop standard, and is all fine for now.
Despite all the hits to the roster in 4th for my Herd, I am looking at taking them to a tournament in February, but the main possible Herd units (being the Chieftain, Tribal Warriors, Longhorns and Guardian Brutes) are all Speed 6. The Beasts are Speed 7 and Centaurs and are Speed 8, but those are competing for Specialist slots, and in short, I am worried about engagements and being charged, as I can catch infantry, and that's about it. I hobbied these up to see if some Fly 10 monsters might be able to apply pressure and make opponents thing twice about jumping on my relatively slow army. I'm hoping to play some tests games in January, and we'll see what happens. I'm playing around with a few build ideas right now.
Overall, the army just feels like a disorganized placeholder, with every sub faction being hurt or gutted in some fashion. Even the Unicorn is gone! Rumor has it Forces of Natures and their affiliates are in the next book though, which should give them an overhaul. I'll go on the record here saying that I do not like this approach. A big selling point of Kings to me was that all armies were created simultaneously, and then balanced yearly. Revamping one or two with fresh models was fine, but having "haves" and "have nots" and a publishing schedule like GW is not a good move in my opinion. I'm trying to look on the bright side with the Herd getting more Elemental units now, but I don't think I'm going to by hobbying up any more until they get their book.
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