The Great Arthurian Repair Project...and Kings of War

Yes, all the models from last Monday's 'unfortunate incident' now have spears replaced and the job of going over them to 'black out' the chipped parts (and undercoat the new spears) has begun! This is a shame as it has deflected my attention from the unit of Elves I was about to do for my Dragon Rampant Wood Elf force and, more importantly, the start of my big Indian Mutiny project that I am really looking forward to doing.

Still, I need the Arthurian models for a War & Conquest event in September and they are doing double duty as my Kings of War army (although El Cid knights will be called up for duty for tomorrow's campaign game) so I need to bite the bullet and get the done.

Speaking of Kings of War, there'll be more on that shortly. I lost an entire 2000pt army in 4 turns last week in possibly the least enjoyable wargame I have ever had. The fact that this was largely down to being beaten by the rules and army selection worries me, although unfamiliarity with rules mechanisms doesn't help. Still, the chap I played did tell me that, of the 3 games he'd played, I was the only person thus far to destroy even one of his units, so that was a tiny bonus (and he's a lovely chap too, so it wasn't like being gloated over by some tournament crazed buffoon, far from it.)  He played with The Brotherhood, essentially Brettonians... It was rather like the battle of the Somme, as I advanced into the teeth of 60 arrow shots per turn (all armour piercing as well). The archers also count as a phalanx because of the 'stakes' they deploy, so negate knights' charges. Ok...fair enough on first turn of combat, but these guys always count as phalanx, so even if they've been pushed back (and away from their stakes, of course) they STILL negate your knights' 'Thunderous Charge' in subsequent turns...very silly!!! Anyway, he had 2 hordes of these, 2 siege catapults and 2 regiments of kick-ass knights. But the worst thing was the 2 heroes on pegasus that aren't 'individual' heroes  but count as Monstrous cavalry (so they can happily fly into the rear and they then get triple attacks on you!) AND he had taken a horde unit of the same sort of thing as well. I could do nothing but watch as I was systematically taken apart, unit by unit. Even when I did get into combat, my knights were so shot up that the enemy archers routed them in a counter charge (my own charge being weakened by the bloody phalanx rule!) Ignominious defeat...

Still, it was fun fielding the new (partly painted...another thing I can't finish cos of the repair project) giant War Mammoth... It kills things fairly adequately and looks IMMENSE. Pictures when it's done, I promise!!

Anyway, campaign game 2 tomorrow. No doubt I'll be the target of various pre-battle political things so that could end up being interesting!! I suspect that using an historical army in this campaign will prove my undoing as it lacks enough nasty stuff (especially flyers) to enable me to deal with the horrible things in my opponents' armies. I also suspect that the lack of archer models I possess will be a downfall as well, as shooting seems to be a key thing in these rules - possibly far too important given that it's based on typical Fantasy warfare...

Well, that's enough rambling on for a Sunday morning. I plan to sort out the terrain boxes today - bought some new trees and new stone walls at Partizan last week and need to cull the damaged old stock from my collection and repackage it for easy storage...