colour by numbers - my fantasy hobby log

[Sylass]

As promised, a quick summary about the Amazon Warriors box from Wargames Factory:

It seems with the Amazons Wargames Factory changed the layout of the boxes. Not sure if it's happening for all their products or if it's "Amazon only".

Example of an old style box:

(Zulu Warriors)

New style (?) box:

(Amazon Warriors)

What surprised me the most was that they picked the pictures of the poorly painted amazons shown on their homepage for the box. The pictures are pretty small, but I expected them to get some decent paintjobs done for the box.

The box itself is stuffed with sprues:


Looks promising if you ask me.
Next update is going to feature a rundown of the contents incl. closeups of the individual sprues.

[Sylass]

A few more pictures of the Maelstrom guys:





It's huuuge!

[Sylass]

Back to the Amazons:


There are 3 different types of bodies. The box included 10x pose #1 and 10x pose #2 and 4x the kneeling one. All in all you get 24 bodies.


Quite a large number of heads is included. There are 6 different designs (helmeted ones) and you get 9 heads per design -> 54 amazon heads!

[Sylass]

The sprue containing the left and right arms.


hand weapons & casualities

[Sylass]

unhelmeted heads (I prefer the helmeted ones, these are probably going to the bitz box), leather slings & belt bags



There are different types of spears included, javelins and pikes. On top of that you get bows, quivers & something that looks like steel claws?

6 x javelins
24x spears
12x pikes
8x hunting spears
8x bows & quivers
8x steel claws

[Sylass]

Last but not least there are 3 different types of shields included:



6x shield#1
12x shield#2
27x shield#3

And this is what it looks like like when you finished clipping all parts off their sprues:



Please note that Mrs Sylass did all the hard work here, I only took pictures.
It's likely that Mrs. Sylass will continue assembling/painting the Amazons while I'll "focus" on Beastmen, Undead, Dwarfs or other stuff.

[vinush]

I don't know if anyone's mentioned it to you, but if you are interested in getting a Dwarven force up and running, try looking at Mantic's Dwarf range. They're not everyone's cup of tea, but I quite like them and if I hadn't just dropped a crap-ton of money into a new Lizardmen army I'd of gone Dwarf with them.

THE \/ince

[Sylass]

I don't know if anyone's mentioned it to you, but if you are interested in getting a Dwarven force up and running, try looking at Mantic's Dwarf range. They're not everyone's cup of tea, but I quite like them and if I hadn't just dropped a crap-ton of money into a new Lizardmen army I'd of gone Dwarf with them.

THE \/ince

Yeah, I know Mantic. I already own a few boxes of Mantic's Dwarfs and Undead.

I used to really dislike their Dwarfs, but I gave them a try and after assembling the first unit of Ironclads I realized that they look quite good as a unit.

Most of their Undead are pretty nice, I just finished assembling the Skeletons, Zombies and half the Ghouls from the army box.
Zombies and Skeletons are great but I'm still undecided about the Ghouls. I'll try to mix in a few Zombie/Skeleton parts when assembling the second half of them. They seriously suffer from a lack of different poses and heads.

The Revenants are still on their sprues, but seem to be a bit static...I'll probably take a closer look at them tomorrow.

[Sylass]

Seems I finished assembling the miniatures from Mantics Undead Army box.

The miniatures are cleaned, assembled and based. A second round of cleaning/removing mold lines is going to happen right before then basecoating starts. After that it's painting time.

Undead army:


Skeletons with hand weapon & shield:


Skeletons with spears:


Zombies:


Ghouls:


Revenants with spears:


Rats & Bones:


All in all the box included 110 miniatures (116 if you count/include the undead rats&bones). A very nice box if you ask me.

I decided to build the Revenants with spears instead of hand weapons to make them look a bit closer to Graveguard wielding double handed weapons.

I even played a game of WHF last week using my old Undead/Vampire army again the first time for several years (the last time I used them was about first half of 6th edition!).

We played a 1500 points game featuring Vampire Counts vs Empire and it was a very close and exciting game which ended in a draw in the end. There was a 24 points favour for Empire due to point bonus for a captured standard.
I lost my Vampire General and most of my army (I had a Banshee, half a unit of Ghouls and 1 1/2 bases of Ghosts left) but managed to reduce the Empire army to 2 models: left were only the wounded Arch Lector and the last model (standard bearer) from the Lectors Helbadier bodyguard!

Looking back this may as well be one of the top 3 games we played so far.

[Sylass]

Did a bit of testing feat. some Mantic Dwarfs yesterday/today. Basically I am/was searching for ways to make them look more different (there are only a very few different head options, probably the major problem I have with Mantic miniatures).

Well, when visiting my partents I had a look at my old Warhammer cupboard and picked up a box of oop Dwarf plastic bitz. On the following pictures you can see the results of mixing old plastic Dwarf stuff with Mantics Shieldbreaker sprues:



Looks quite primising, don't you think?

Sadly I only have a very limited number of these double handed weapons, crossbows, heads and left arms left...but I think I maybe found a way to weasel out of this.



Naturally the detail of the pressmoulded head isn't as crisp but for a first try using an instantmold replica/alternative I bought from ebay and some Green Stuff it's quite good, I think.

[mrtn]

That's an interesting experiment. They look quite different, but if you like it it's all cool.

[Darkoth10]

Sylass this is an awesome log, and thanks a bunch for showing and informing me/all of us the other miniature companies out there, will be "borrowing" the razorgor idea and found a bunch of other minis i will buy from banelords and i will borrow the amazon idea for my chaos army its just too good to pass up .

Will be following this log for future updates keep up the great work mate .


Cheers

Dark

[Sylass]

That's an interesting experiment. They look quite different, but if you like it it's all cool.

Yep, I agree that they aren't very alike. I'd still like some variety, I think the Mantic Dwarfs suffer the most from limited variety (heard something similar being said about the Orx, but I can't attest this cause I only own 1 of them).

Would you have a better idea of adding some variety to the minis without too much work. No advanced Green Stuff work please, I'm terrible at sculpting.

Sylass this is an awesome log, and thanks a bunch for showing and informing me/all of us the other miniature companies out there, will be "borrowing" the razorgor idea and found a bunch of other minis i will buy from banelords and i will borrow the amazon idea for my chaos army its just too good to pass up .

Will be following this log for future updates keep up the great work mate .

Cheers

Dark

Thanks alot for the kind words.

These alternative Razorgors are pretty nice and the Maestrom ranges (Banebests and Banelords) are awesome too. Generally I can only recommend taking a look at non-GW stuff. There's a ton of great miniatures out there (there are a lot of poor ones too, but it's all a matter of taste I guess).

[Sylass]

A few more tabletop stuff arrived...

I seriously *do* need to start doing more hobby related work again. Otherwise I'll not be able to fight this pile of unbuild/unpainted stuff within this lifespan.

Avatars of War "Dwarf Berserkers"

A lovely box. Great quality sculpts, great quality sprues. It'll be a joy to build these Berserkers. Unless someone specifically asks for it, I'll skip doing pictures of the content because there are already a lot of threads about this.


Wargames Factors "Celt Chariots"

These 3 chariots came in the old style box, not the newer type of box the Amazons got.


In the box you'll find the 3 basic sprues with the chariot itself and the crew. The chariots seems a bit small but I'm sure they'll work fine for the WF Amazons (or even Beastmen if you add only 1 Gor/Ungor as crew).


2 sprues with the steeds. Average quality I'd say, the hair on the horse tails lacks a bit of detail.


The last 2 sprues contain another 2 humans, lots of different weapon options, shields, standards/banner poles & command group parts.

We'll probably use these chariots as heavy cavalry in a Kings of War Elves army.

[Sylass]

Doing it "Harry style"...blast from the past and all that.

Picked up some old Undead miniatures when visiting my parents. I originally thought about selling these, but I guess they could still be useful in my VC or KoW Undead army. Now I'm thinking of assembling and painting these instead.


I don't think I still have enough of the really old plastic Skeletons to mount the chariots, so I maybe have to switch to new GW ones or Mantic Skeletons instead.


Pile of bones turned out to be 2 old Screaming Skull Catapults and a few Skaven skulls. One of the catapult pieces broke (top right corner) but it should be possible to fix it using a pinning device.

[Sylass]

Nothing too spectecular happened today, but the Screaming Skull Catapults were assembled:



I'm now waiting for the arrival of the "gabion gun emplacements" I ordered from the tabletop-art online shop.



At the moment I plan to paint these in a generic way (probbaly similar to the model shown in the promotion picture above) and keep them seperate from the warmachines so that I can use them for more than one machine/army.

[mdiscala]

I really like the GW heads on the Mantic bodies.

[Sylass]

I really like the GW heads on the Mantic bodies.

Yeah, they really started to grow on me too. I'll see if I can get a few more heads/weapons/left arms from the old plastic boxes.

I got another idea last night and as a result I've maybe found a nice way to waste even more money for silly conversions build some Longbeards for my Dwarfs. Weapons would need a bit more variation (mix of axes and hammers) but all in all I quite like these.



Does anyone have a good idea what to do with a whole box of headless Avatars of War Dwarf Berserkers?

[Sylass]

The "gabion gun emplacements" from tabletop-art.de arrived today. Really nice stuff, I can only recommend these.

In addition to the 2 bases I ordered they put a little bag with bases into the box. They already did this the last time I ordered (seems they always do this?), a nice addition/preview of their other products.

[Sylass]

Small progress assembling more minitures. I continued the "AoW Berserker heads + KoW Shieldbreaker bodies = Longbeards" approach and assembled 4 Longbeards tonight.





I really like how they turned out.

Here's a picture of the other 13 Shieldbreakers I finished building:



As you can see these are a pain to rank up. I'll probably have to adjust the poses/positions on their bases a bit in order to get them ranked up properly.
The banner seems to be a bit too large for them, I'll probably try to replace it with a slightly smaller one...