Kings of War: Dwarves

Dwarf Mega Army set

So I finally caved and got myself one of the Mantic mega army sets, the ones where you get loads of figurines for set amount. In this case it was 125 miniatures for 140USD *with shipping* from Maelstrom Games. That's about 1.12USD per mini and if there's a cheaper way to get dwarves in Singapore, I don't know about it.

Anyway, opening the box, you'll find it's  packed full of sprues and includes a free copy of the Kings of War 2nd ed rule book. It's a fairly basic rulebook which also includes the stats for all the units in Kings of War; including those that haven't been released yet. 

The sprues themselves are fairly detailed. The ones above are just the ones for the standard dwarf warriors, armed with a shield and a hammer. 

Once assembled, they don't look bad either. In this case, I used the same torso for both shots but in one I gave him a beer mug and in the other a warhammer.

The one complain I have about these dwarves so far is 'NOT ENOUGH ARMOR'. When I think dwarves, I think short surly stout soldiers, packing warhammers and heavy armor. Granted, the rules do indicate they have heavy armor but it just doesn't show on the figure. They do have sprues with heavy armor but those are few and far between and probably meant for the champions of the units. 

Another thing was trying to decide what color scheme to use for the dwarves. I didn't like Mantic's own red/yellow color scheme. I did google for mantic dwarves to see what others had done with their dwarves but didn't see anything that really inspired me. Being dwellers of mountain caverns, I figured my dwarven army should have a darker look with little to no colors. At first I tried painting them all brown except for the metallic armor. Boy, was that a mistake. It looked HORRIBLE. It looked like a brown blob. Then in the end, I decided that I would try the Black Templars color scheme on the dwarves and it worked...sorta

For the Emperor!

So there you have it. As you can see, there is very little armor on the dwarf except for his shoulder plates. Anyway, i painted out several of them below including a 2H weapon champion. There's even one with the horrible afro beard that I so detest but at least there are other types of beards available on the models -_-. I just have to accept that some dwarves have really horrible taste.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed by Mantics quality and prices. I can't say anything about the game system because I STILL haven't managed to get a game of Kings of War and will probably use these to proxy for WHFB. But I can say I am tempted to get their undead range as well because I heard those are probably the best they've produced so far.