"Kings of War battle report" Topic

Fellow TMPer ordinarybass and I got in an introductory game of Kings of War last week, after a month or two spent preparing our two armies. The game was exactly what we had hoped -- simple, fun and quick. Almost too quick, in fact. Check out the batrep here: link

And here are a few pictures from the game (more on the blog):

Sounds like a great first game.

Werewolves are good – but for the big units you are fielding they are very expensive. Artillery is good against them – as are small high defense units that tie them up, while you hit them in the flank.

Single werewolves are very useful too as they rampage around the enemies rear areas.

We really like KoW – and play it most weeks, be find the fast play – mixed with tactical thinking a great combination. The rules are so straight forward that we hardly ever even open the rule book now.

Yes, a unit of 6 werewolves is quite expensive! But no other unit on the battlefield offered much of a contest vs. them. We were actually worried that they'd take over and dominate our games. Maybe we're just being too cautious, and just need to play more games.

Cool report and really like your miniatures.

Glad you folks enjoyed the game and the miniatures. My side was the Chaos warriors (Except for Pat's mounted Mauraders)

The werewolfs in the pic above are the prepainted Rackham Wolfen from the starter set. I just rebased them, repositioned a few arms and heads at the glue joints, over-painted the blue tatoos red, brush-dipped them with Minwax and varnished them.

The game improves with larger forces -- the 2k you mentioned as a goal would be very nice. We've found 2k is a nice level for a 4x6 table---big forces but still enough space to move stuff. Much larger than that and you start impacting maneuver (as you pointed out)

Also maneuver can be important if you can get the flank or kilt attack. If you get one of those, the best the attacked unit can do on its turn is to spin to face the most dangerous unit (losing that attacker its double or treble attacks). The defender will have to lose an entire turn if flanked and it spun AND face another round of charge in its face.

Also don't forget you can move through friendlies (except if you're declaring a charge. That means you can meat shield some smaller units (missile units with bows are good for this) in front of some of the units you want to get into melee in good shape.

Thanks for the advice. Lots to think about.

As for
"Much larger than that and you start impacting maneuver (as you pointed out)"

Do you mean that at 2000 points, you shouldn't use a table bigger than 4x6 or that a 4x6 table shouldn't have more than 2000 points per side?

2k forces will play nicely on 6x4 table.

We often play 3.5k on 6x4, we use large units of 10mm figures so our units have about 80% frontage of 28mm, but we keep the standard move distances. This fits, but is a bit crowded, but gives second lines of troops.

Thanks Fred,
10mm on a 6x4 with 28mm measurements sounds like a very dramatic game!
I'd love to see pictures of that.

Photos are available

It certainly does give a sweeping game – with some 70-80 figures to an infantry unit, and 30-40 for a cavalry regiment.