Build Your Ancient Armies With Kings Of War Historical
September 6, 2016 by brennon
Mantic Games have now added their Kings Of War Historical book onto their webstore for you to pre-order. If you're looking for an alternative rules set to build up your Historical armies and bring them to the table then this could be the one for you...
If you're interested in picking up this particular book then inside you're going to find...
- The core Kings of War rules.
- 30 new lists for historical armies from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages. Use a combination of a master list, themes and mercenary units to build your army.
- Veteran abilities to create unique units and represent elite fighters.
- New rules and scenarios.
- Add mythical units to recreate legends (or make new ones).
- Play your historical army against Kings of War fantasy armies!
It all sounds like a great way to get your armies down onto the tabletop and play out some good games using these straightforward and effective rules from Mantic.
All of the rules for Kings of War are represented here so they'll give you an easy entrance to this game and of course their Fantasy world of Mantica too. With that in mind you can also add in some Fantastical elements to your force if you wish and have Historical armies battling against Fantasy ones.
The real meat and potatoes of the game though come in the Ancient and Middle Ages/Medieval army lists. We think it will be great fun seeing how this plays out on the tabletop and where it goes with the possibility of additional expansions.
Once this hits the tabletop we'd love to hear what you have to say about it and of course we'll give you our own thoughts on it too.
Has this caught your eye?
"Once this hits the tabletop we'd love to hear what you have to say about it..."
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will be a great way to have all the differant armys fighting to see what one was the actual best.
Kushan Empire vs Rome!
http://berserk.wikia.com/wiki/Kushan?file=Berserk-1592317.jpg
“Veteran abilities to create unique units and represent elite fighters” This might be a problem. The reason games like 40k and the league rules for Blood Bowl ex. are crap at game balance is letting the players custom pick items or character traits to add to units. It is impossible to accurately playtest all the options and it creates too many variables to deal with in game design. People will notice that well-balanced games have set troop load outs or character cards that have been well vetted in the design process, ensuring an even game experience across factions. While a… Read more »
Kings of War already allows for customization of units with magical items and I haven’t heard of anyone saying that it’s broken – not that I’m paying attention to what anyone’s saying, mind you!
Maybe the veteran ability things will have a similar effect.
The veteran abilities are simple stuff like adding ‘Elite’ or ‘Brutal’ to units. It’s very similar to the magic items in regular KoW and replaces those in KoW:H
KoW:H will possibly not be as balanced as regular KoW, but that’s because it’s been less playtested (no public Beta), so there’s bound to be more imbalances in unit costs, not because it has a slightly different item system.
Keyword here : *might*
40k has rather imperfect balance, because they design the models and fluff before they think about balance and mechanics.
With a rules first approach this most certainly is possible, especially if they limit the extra stuff to a single unit per army.
Never mind that historical fights rarely were perfectly balanced. 😉
I for one am looking forward to this release as I think the KoW engine will work well for Historicals
Maybe the Veteran stuff is like ‘Hill Tribe’ move through cover or Macedonian Silver Shields extra kill-experience against Elephants?
…or Julius Caesar armed with Cuchulain’s Gae Bulg :-O
I will most likely pick these up as a comparison to Hail Caesar. Any idea who wrote the adaptation?
I think Cavarore did the foundation of the lists. The basic rules is more or less identical to regular KoW.
The Rules Committee has done most of the work balancing and fleshing out the lists though.
As long as the Samurai over overpowered I’ll be happy 😉
Are overpowered even.
Wonder if I could kit-bash some Samurai-like Kushans using LoR Easterlings – how else can I get an armoured elephant into a historical wargame?
Dragons Blade 🙂
Sassanid Persians,Indians, Medieval Burmese,Han Chinese, to name a few