WIP Swordmasters

Working on my Swordmasters for Bayou Battles. Tonight's brew of choice is a cider I made using organic apple juice and Windsor Ale yeast.

Now it all makes sense...

Played a 1500 point game with a player who normally trashes me yesterday. Rather than make a separate list, I just used units from the list I'm making for Bayou Battles.

So I dropped the prince, the mage, the noble with the reaver bow, the spearmen, an eagle and the phoenix. I kept the lvl 4 wizard, the bsb, the archers, sword masters, the reavers and the artillery (all four repeating bolt throwers).
For the first (and possibly last) time ever, he didn't bring any artillery. His  quarrelers tore up my archers, since the sword masters weren't in range, and the iron drakes wiped out the reavers, and wasted the eagle.

The bolt throwers dropped the gyrocopter and then chewed up iron drakes. His axe and shield dwarves charged the sword masters, who'd been whittled down a bit by the drakes over a couple of turns, and it didn't go well for the dwarves, especially with the drakes failing the supporting charge.

In the end, I lost the 5 reavers, and the eagle 1/3 of the sword masters and 2/3 of the archers. He had the 10 quarrelers left at the end and 3-4 iron drakes.

Considering our games usually involve me trying to get models across the table and into combat as quick as I can and him shooting them apart on the way across, the reversal of roles was fun.

We played another game at 2500 points, and the table looked even at first glance when we had to call time, but the combats were mostly not going my way, and if we'd have continued, I'd have lost pretty handily.

Lessons of the day: 1) Repeating bolt throwers are nasty, especially in small games. 2) Don't clump them together if the other guy has anything flying.

You'd think I'd learn...

For the third year in a row, I find myself madly painting in preparation for Bayou Battles. Last year at this time, though, I had more models to go than are in my entire army this year. That sounds like good news, but High Elves are much more complicated for me to paint than Tomb Kings. There is far less use for the airbrush with them as well.

Two down...

Except for basing, the two smaller dragons are done. Since the larger of the three will be representing a frostheart phoenix, I am planning on going with a color scheme that looks like a cold based critter. I thought it best that even though none of the dragon models in the army will actually represent dragons,  they should at least look related.

WIP

Those aren't dragons. That's a frostheart phoenix and a couple of great eagles. Just a base coat with the airbrush.