Hobby Update: KoM Bowmmen and Shieldwall

Up now are a few more human regiments to pay the Core tax of the new Edition, with a duo of Archer regiments, and a Shield Wall regiment for the Kingdoms of Men, plus some WIP Halberdier troops.

The models are all from Gripping Beast, and their Late Roman's kit. It is a neat kit, and I've apparently bought a lot of it. However, it is admittedly a smidge awkward in its model offerings. There is a small Command Sprue in the box, which is more of a bonus than anything. The main sprue consists of 5 models, repeated, giving us has two archers, one chain mail infantry guy, and two unarmored infantry guys. A box comes with 8 sprues of these.

Previously, I've focused entirely on the unarmored guys, and I have able to get some Romanized Pole-Arms units, as well as a number of Bowmen troops ready for the table. Doing a little inventory this summer, I found that I apparently still have a bunch of sprues leftover, and I was able to grab a few more sprues online recently to round out the numbers needed, and then start hobbying up all of the new units here in August.

WIP Halberdier troops!

For hobbying, the minis are all related, and nothing too fancy is going on. We primed, then had a gray base color, then off-white layers to build up that color towards a final white drybrush / highlight layer for the tunics. Details got purples and browns and metallics, and the leggings was the desert tan craft paint with the Hardened Leather Speed Paint atop it. Nice and easy. The only significant blunder was gluing one of the Halberdier units on backwards! For now, no tufts for them while I figure out if it is worth it to rebase, and they still need their little shields. More on them hopefully later in the week.

We're hobbying these up to help me explore the more modern, regimentally-focused, Goblin-inspired line of play that caught my eye recently. 

Shield Wall, at the ready.

Shield Wall are Rabble-equivalent and should need no real introduction. On the table, they are truly mediocre, but are indeed a cheap way to fill space and pay the Core Taxes. We had just enough spare models to do up a regiment, so that's what we did, though the shields gave me a lot of trouble. Oh well, good enough for now!

Bowmen!

The Bowmen may seem like an odd pick, but are actually inspired by older Goblin lists. While I wasn't playing often (or well) back then, I do remember reading about Goblin Spitters being balancing terrors, resulting in the introduction of *Irregular units to stop the Spitter Spam (and Ogre Shooter Allies, to a lesser degree).

Goblins still need to jump through hoops to field the Spitters these days no matter the size of the unit, but the same restriction isn't currently hitting the humans here. Things have changed, but with 24 Bowmen sitting around nice and organized, I figured I'd hoppy them up too. We'll see how a bunch of puny bow shots do in the current meta.

Goblins and humans have a lot of parallels including cheap, often mediocre units, a variety of war machines, and cheap, uninspiring Wizards. Goblins in 4E is most notable (so far) for the Rabble Spam at the core of each list, but the humans actually have more of a variety of units to play around with here, which could have some interesting avenues of play. We'll have these on the table soon and see what we can learn!