Armada: New Raiders

The Twilight Kin are renowned raiders and slavers in the world of Pannithor and as such they like to get in close enough to seize enemy ships and plunder the booty (and people) on board.

The first of the ships to leave dry-dock for this new project are the Butcher and Assassin/Heart Seeker.

Not having yet played a game it's hard to talk about the tactics and stats for the individual ships but I will run through them quickly

Weapons come in four types, C (close), L (Light), H (heavy) and IDW (indirect). Light weapons do the least amount of damage with Heavy doing more damage over a longer range and Close doing the most but at a shorter range. IDW are more likely to miss than hit but do good damage when they do hit.

Ships then have four stats, M is move distance in inches (most ships get to move up to 3 'steps' in a turn), Nv & SP are a measure of the ships durability and CS it's combat strength in boarding actions. 

There aren't many faction resources around yet but Scarhand Painting has a good blog which suggests the Twilight Kin ships have good speed and manoeuvrability and plenty of close range guns and boarding strength.

First up are some pictures of the Butcher (which I actually painted second) which is a large ship with a reasonable number of C guns and a good CS. No doubt any Butchers will constitute the main brute force in a TK fleet.

All the Armada models are resin and whilst the sails are moulded onto the main masts the little side sails are separate and also the front triangular sail is as well so I had a fair few bits to glue together once painted was complete. You could glue the sails on first but I think that would make painted a more difficult task.

The second ship is the Assassin/Heart Seeker, which is a dual kit. I opted to make the Heart Seeker variant as it looked a bit more interesting but it could be used as either. At present the only way to buy another to make the Assassin version is to buy a full £40 box and as the other models wouldn't be that useful I'm going to wait and see if they appear on the Mantic Vault for 3D printing. 

Whilst only a Medium ship both versions pack a good C punch up front and boast a respectable amount of CS. The Heart Seeker looks like a good deal for an extra 3 points if they can be found in your list.

The nice thing about Armada is the low model count for a fleet, so much in the same way as Deadzone it doesn't really take much effort to get a force on the table.

I've also been painting up some of the extras needed for the scenarios, in this case a couple of Kraken and Vortex stand-ins.

The Kraken features in a Capture the Giant like scenario that has seemingly been borrowed from KoW: Vanguard. That was one of my favourite scenarios which was generally very chaotic as the giant rampaged across the table. The models come from the Mythic Battles board game I backed on Kickstarter a few years ago. The vortex is used in a scenario which sees points awarded for being close enough to harvest it's power but also at the same time being dragged in towards the vortex with instant destruction awaiting any ship that touches it.

I've now also taken delivery of the Abyssal Dwarf ships and these look much easier to deal with than the TK ones. With no sails they should just be a case of gluing together and painting. I've also ordered a few 3D printed ships for use in some of the other scenarios in the book from a local store, Bristol Independent Gaming. They've signed up as a retail partner for Mantic Vault so if the prints turn out to be good then I may pick up some more in the future. They've not put the prices up on their site as of yet but the ships I ordered worked out to be 1/2 - 2/3 the cost of ordering from Mantic.