A Quick Look At the Armies
If you saw my last post, you will know I am planning to start a new Age of Fantasy army for OnePage Rules. I gave a quick breakdown of the 4 armies I was interested in starting, 1 of them was a no go due to the model releases, but the other 3 are really up for looking at properly.
So I am going to give a quick overview of the 3 viable armies new special rules and changes.
Chivalrous Kingdoms
Right off the bat, these guys look to really be focused on their shooting and knights. The peasant longbow men, while they start off with crap quality, with their Peasant’s Oath, each round their quality improves. If I then pair them with a Vale Defender with the Crusader upgrade, they then benefit from a +4 inch on their shooting taking them up to 34 inches. That would give some nice volley fire from the back lines and if I spend the first turn moving the unit whilst their quality improves, they should be able to get some nice targets.
For the knights there are so many to pick from, but a set of pegasus knights are absolutely going to be needed. They come with the Thrust ability which gives them +1 to hit and +1 AP on the charge. If I then put in a High Champion with the Crusader and Pegasus upgrades, they get an additional 8 inches on their charge. Then use other knights to clean up elsewhere and deal with objectives.
Goblins
The Goblins are absolutely going to have to be a horde army. Their quality and defense is pretty bad across the board. They do have some nice tricks though, as standard all enemy models that make a save roll of 6 need to reroll it, when fighting other squishy units, that can make the difference between models dying and not dying. But really, the only units that are really speaking to me right now is a big spider rider caster, the shaman circle and beast riders. In order to make some real use of the units, they would have to be upgraded with Instinctive which gives the units +1 to attacks, but that does then also require them to always shoot or charge the closest viable unit. This could lead to them being drawn out into horrible positions.
Honestly a tough decision for this army, I want to because I have some good models for them. But the army just doesn’t look like it is going to be a nice army to play. Not to mention the number of models that would be needed!
High Elves
The thing that instantly drew my eye for this guys is the ability Spell Conduit, this allows a caster within 12 inches of the model to cast a spell from the conduits position and get +1 to casting rolls. The only way to get this is to put it on the Champion hero. I think the best way to use this ability is to have a couple of Weapon Masters units with a caster upgrade as well as another high level hero caster. Then put a conduit or two onto eagles to fly about and get in good position to take advantage of their ability, give them a bow with the Crack rule or Great Longbow with indirect and they should be able to hold their own.
So what else can I get from this army, the crack rule on archers, some of which you can upgrade to have volley fire is pretty nice. Get some units in to position which have Precision Shooting Mark or Piercing Tag and you can really make use of the archers ability to volley fire to reign all sorts of pain down on tougher units.
So who is it going to be?
I think the Goblins are going to be put on the back burner. I think you would need to be against a certain type of army and be pretty lucky to make good use of them. So what I am going to do is print off 1 hero from each of the armies, including the Goblins because you never know… paint them up and see which one just draws me to them more.
The models I am going to do are the following;
While I am really tempted to do a big model for each, the big spider, the dragon and the eagle rider, I want something a little quicker to get an idea of the armies. They will be the next on the list though! Even if I never use them.
Once I get a feel for the army, I will sit down and put an army together and start running the numbers. I will probably start with 1500 points to get my teeth sunk in. Perhaps to spice things up a little, I will also print a 350 point skirmish army of the other 2 or something just to fill my need to paint the others.
So keep an eye out for the painting posts!
Until then,
Much Love <3