Armada: Don't Call me Short!

 The second fleet I'm painting up for Armada are the Abyssal Dwarfs, these will be for Mr T to play and will pair nicely with the Ambush force already completed if/when we decide to do a land and see campaign.

In general the Abyssal Dwarf navy has a nice mixture of long range indirect fire and boarding focused ships. Whilst not the fastest fleet overall they do have the Hellforged Engines special which allows them to balance greater manoeuvrability against the chance to cause self-inflicted damage by pushing their engines over the safe limit. The Abyssal Dwarfs don't field any Tiny or XL ships so everything is every Small, Medium, or Large.

First up we have a pair of Angkor, named after a KoW mortar unit it is no surprise these boast a large indirect weapon up front and decent broadsides. One thing that is noticeable for the AD is the cost of their ships tends to be comparable to one size up of most other fleets. They are also generally tougher than comparable sized ships in other navies, so can take a real beating.

The studio paint-jobs depicted all the skulls in bone colour but I fancied something a bit more bling for the AD so broke out the gold. This is the first outing for the Army Painter speedpaint metallics, which I really liked. I wasn't getting much of a contrast but the paint really flows nicely onto the models.

The Infernox boasts a mighty CS 7 for boarding actions along with it's massive gold skull so absolutely wants to get in close and mix it up in boarding actions. I think we could have some bloody actions with my Twilight Kin also looking to get in close and initiate boarding.

The Decimator also wants to get in close but rather than boarding it wants to set the enemy ablaze. I've not really checked out the fire rules yet but my expectation is that being on a wooden ship that's burning is probably a bad thing that you want to avoid. It also has a good CS for boarding actions so certainly isn't a one trick sea-pony.

The cheapest and fastest ships in the AD fleet the Blacksouls are useful for filling out the last few points and chucking in the way of enemy ships to run interference. I think their speed could also be useful in scenario play for seizing objectives.

The last ship (for the moment) is the Katsuchan and this again concentrates on the long range indirect fire support. This has two forward firing IDW's and the chance to cause extra damage on the enemy when rolling doubles to hit at the expense of setting itself ablaze.

That's all the ships painted thus far, it's certainly much more straight forwards painting up ships without sails so perhaps the next fleet will be Trident Realm's.