Abyssals Part Two

Sorry for the delay on this. I still haven't sat down and taking close ups of the rest of the figs. So sorry for that. I'll see about getting those this week and putting them up. Currently I have assembled the following abyssal models:

Lower Abyssals
Flame Bearers
Molochs
Harpy/Gargoyle
Efreeti
Abyssal Champion
Succubi

I talked about the lower abyssals and the flamer bearers last time. Nice models, the LA are a bit hard to rank up. Makes me want to take out a column for a little extra spacing. Kings of War is nice like that.

The Molochs are metal minis and went together just fine. I liked the options they gave with them. I need to buy another set though so I can regiment them in my army. I will say I'm not a fan of the 50x50mm base size for them though. Not sure what the motivation was for that decision, but it made my movement trays useless for them as I didn't build any for that size.

The Harpy/Gargoyle models. First off, they look nice. They use the old plastic material though that Mantic used...so they have a weird flash on them and just a different texture. I have two problems with the models. The first isn't horrid. But all the bodies have boobs on them. Now being a red blooded male, I have no problem with boobs generally. But when you are trying to make gargoyle models with gargoyle heads on them...they look really weird when they all have boobs. So basically I made Harpies since those looked more correct. Not really a problem, just an observation. Problem 2 though is thus, what freaking universe did they think those models would rank up in?? You have to put in some serious planning and engineering up front if you want any hope of those things ranking up on a base. Ugh. And I don't mind holding their feet to the fire on this. If you are going to have rank and file, then you need to design models to fit rank and file.

That brings us to the succubi. These are the new plastic and very nice. But there are issues. Ranking is not one of them though. But again, they decided to have even smaller feet now touching a base and only having part of one foot touching the base!?!? Seriously...what is next, attaching the model to the base using the weapon point? I get the whole "we want dynamic poses". But you know what we really want? We want models that can be assembled and based with only a reasonable amount of effort required. Not as easy to assemble as the lower abyssals, but overall not bad...just the whole "attaching them to a base" part was not great.

Better yet even, I got to play with them this weekend. Got a small group of us that are going to try to get together at least once a month to play kings of war. So this past weekend we did 1000pts and I brought my abyssals.

They grey and purple guys at the bottom of the pic are mine. I went up against a nice fellow that had a Night Stalker army. His models were a hodge podge of models from various systems and other games, but overall looked really good and appropriate. We did a Loot! game and by the end, both armies were pretty well trashed. However, the abyssals were able to snag all three objectives and keep them out of the Night Stalker's hands.

My second game was against the Army of Dust. We used the Idol mission from the campaign book. Not my favorite scenario. I was down a third of my army, and my opponent got to bring back dead units. All the while I had to babysit an Idol that did nothing for me at all. That scenario needs some serious adjustments before I run it again. Suffice to say, my opponent easily destroyed the Idol...I did wipe out a few units though.

Until next time.

Forces of the Abyss

Oh my Stars and Garters, I touched models this weekend! And not just to move them out of the way! Nope, this weekend I packed up the whole abyssal kickstarter army and took it with me as I went to my church's Labor Day retreat. Yeah sure, it was a little weird to be assembling demons and minions from hell basically while at a church function, but its all good, we're very progressive. :)

In a few weeks I'm going to a Kings of War learn to play event, and I have promised to bring a 1000pts of abyssals. So my goal is to have a completely assembled force ready. Clearly I'm a bit limited in my army selection due to just having the KS army. However, I think it will be good for me to play with such a limited selection so that I can learn all the units I own, not just the ones that look good on paper.

Also, this was my first run at putting together Mantic models. All of my other armies for KoW are GW models. And I've pretty much sold off or traded all of my Deadzone models before I did anything with them. I think I did try to put together some enforcer models before...but they didn't impress me. Well, here was a chance for Mantic to redeem themselves. Quite honestly, the models were pretty good. I started off with the lower abyssal models. I knew these would make up the bulk of my army, so I wanted to get going on doing them. The models themselves looked pretty good. Also, they actually assembled quite easily as well. I was even using just normal superglue for this as well as I'm running really low on my gel stuff. So see for yourself:

My first five.

By the way, despite the large bottle of zapp you see in the background, I wasn't using it. I was actually using Loctite super glue (you can see the black cap to the right). As to the models, they were pretty decent. You had to put the arms on, and the head. Other than that, you just glued them to the base. Now here is where I'm going to get a little pissy with Mantic. While the photos don't show it, those bases have the circle indent on the flip side. But for some reason, Mantic did not choose to add the round insert to the bodies. Three of the five bodies only have one foot attached to the base. We know the hassle of gluing a model to its base with only one foot. Thankfully, these weren't bad at all. But I think Mantic could have added the round insert to the bodies to take advantage of their previous system.

To the models themselves, I was pretty happy with them. I am concerned as to how well they are going to rank up though. The tails and arms are all quite a good distance away from the bodies. And the bodies are all single pieces that are basically pointing directly forward. So if you angle the bodies diagonally across the base, then they are all facing a corner instead of forward. If you line them up forward with the base, then their arms are bumping into each other. You'd think that after 30 some years of ranked up mini games being out there, they would have worked this shit out. Oh, and there are no instructions anywhere either. That isn't cool Mantic. Every model you make sure come with instructions...and have them available online at the very least.

All bitching aside, for the most part, things went well. The models were nice, they didn't take forever to build, and they didn't leave me cursing up a storm. So overall, thumbs up to Mantic. I assembled close to 50 models over the course of the weekend (it was a rough weekend) and more pics will be forthcoming as soon as I take them. Next post, abyssal molochs, flame bearers, and heroes.