Archangel: When ruins want revenge!

By Troy A. Hill

I admit it. I’m a new army junkie.

Whenever a new force comes out, I look at the new faction rules, and the new models to see if either appeals to me.

So when Para Bellum Games announced they were doing a “rebuild” on one of their oldest factions, the Hundred Kingdoms for Conquest: The Last Argument of Kings, this past winter, I was immediately interested.

Yes, the W’adrhun are my first army. And orcs riding dinos are still my first love in the game. But, a gamer needs a second army. Right? And when fellow NDNGer Tom Gall said he was looking to unload his Conquest Hundred Kingdoms army, I jumped at the chance.

But then the reboot of the faction rules hit, and I had some tough choices to make.

The Hundred Kingdoms in Conquest is the “human” faction of the fantasy army. Humans are always the bane of fantasy worlds. They’re usually the generic, jack of all trades forces. Don’t live as long as the Elves, don’t have the firepower and magic resistance (or, in Conquest’s case) the forceful blunt magic of the Dweghom.

In the past incarnation of the force, you got to mix knightly orders, with feudal peasants and basic knights, remnants of an Imperial legionary corps, and the other side of the “churchy” forces. It was a free-for-all list building system, that finally gravitated toward a heavy emphasis on the mounted knightly orders for meta-reasons in the game.

And then the reboot happened.

One thing Para Bellum does well is keep their forces under constant scrutiny. The game is built on good bones, originally designed by Alessio Cavatore. Rules are adjusted and tweaked on an almost quarterly basis. And the current rules overseers at the company are rebooting two forces a year. Add to that a completely new force each year (hello Yoroni!), and Conquest is always maturing.

Ok, I can hear you rolling your eyes over constant reboots – especially if you were into the GW line up of games in the early to mid 2000s. Conquest by Para Bellum is different from that GW business model.

All the rules and army lists are available free, and online. Just search their Rules and FAQ portal. You don’t have to keep purchasing the other faction’s codexis. And they’ve got an app for IOS and Android. Links to faction stats and specials rules are at your fingertips as you play.

The one thing Para Bellum could do better is get their rules out of the PDF form, and into a searchable hot-link app system. I got spoiled playing Kings of War with their app that included the base rules for the system.

When we played Conquest recently, our local group was constantly hitting our devices, and opening a PDF. I’d put a search term into the PDF reader, and get 30 or more hits. Something like “flank” seemed easy to find the rule for what happens when attacked in the flank, but every caption in the book that shows a unit’s flank pulls up in the hits. A hot link system would save me a bunch of time.

Back the the new Hundred Kingdoms. What changed?

Not much, but a whole lot.

First, Army design has some tweaks. In addition to finessing points, special rules, and stat lines for some of the units, there was one large change.

Within the Hundred Kingdoms, there were four factions: Knightly Orders, Imperial Forces, Feudal Forces, and Theist orders. Those are now defined for each type of character that builds a warband within the force. But then the lore kicked in. As the Dominion of Humans fell many years before, the churchly Theist order, and the Knightly Orders came to blows. The Memories of Red keep these two factions snarling and glaring at each other, with steel half-drawn merely when occupying the same room.

Standing against this rising tide are the Orders, warriors without peers whose prowess verges on the supernatural, a mantle and burden inherited from the shattered Legion that birthed them. Bound by their common cause to protect mankind from a hostile world, the Orders are split along ideological lines on how best to do this. Ranging from the fanatical devotion of the Order of the Sword to the calculated interventions of the Order of the Sealed Temple, the Orders are the strongest check to the rising power and aggression of the Church and the all-too-numerous local rulers. – Conquest Lore

Don’t mix knightly orders and Theist in the same force. Either of those two can be paired with Imperial and/or Feudal warbands to make your army. But Orders and Theist may not exist together.

Which is probably for the best. The Theist faction now includes the ArchAngel. Some of the other hardest hitting forces are the knightly orders. Game Designers had to limit the toughest of them, the Ashen Dawn unit, to one regiment of three models to keep the force fairly balanced.

Building my angel

Listening to the reveal of the new force in the Para Bellum “happy hour” product preview discussion online, staffers revealed the lore behind the creature. Religious rites at sites of destroyed churches allow divine energy to coalesce, and the “angel” pulls together remnants of the ruins to form it’s corporeal body.

Those Nords that sacked and destroyed such buildings, one of the staffers joked, now get to face the wrath of the church they just destroyed.

Para Bellum has learned over it’s short run to make decent instructions for their models. The newer models are well documented, and the Archangel is no exception. One caveat: I am NOT a fine-scale modeller. And my lack of experience in this area bit me as I built the model.

Where I began to have problems was in the torso section. Where the torso sets atop the leg structure, a lot of extra pieces get added to torso to create the “skirt” and armor sections from the waist up.

There are a couple of diagrams in the instructions that don’t quite give the full assembly picture. Do your test fitting, a perhaps some poster-putty temporary assembly before committing glue. I ended up with a few gaps lower down, that cascaded and increased the amount of gap at the shoulder level. Nothing a bit of liquid putty couldn’t hide, though.

The model design is forgiving enough to let me hide the gaps.

You’ll have a few options to make when assembling the angel. Multiple heads are offered. I chose to go with the humanesque statue’s head. Some marble saint of the church animated the by devout energy. You can also go with more an ornate head.

Two different weapon types are given. These each indicate one of two gameplay options for the archangel. I settled on the Spear and Shield aspect. But after playing with the model in my force yesterday, I can’t say this fits my play style.

It seems defensive, allowing the angel to provide healing to fellow theist units in her 8-inch bubble. But she has to do wounds to an enemy unit in order to activate that healing, and only half the wounds that she causes to her foe, rounded down get healed in nearby units.

But what about the other option? Would this fit my playstyle better?

(Out-of-Combat Action): The Archangel immediately performs a Charge Action, with a Charge Distance of 12″ ignoring the effects of Hindering Terrain. Should the Charge [be] completed successfully the Archangel automatically cause 7 Hits with the Smite Special Rule against the Target Enemy Regiment. If the Charge Target is an Objective Marker, it is immediately destroyed. This Action must be performed as the Regiment’s first Action. Once the Action is performed the Regiment’s Activation immediately ends.

Since many of the missions in Conquest are objective based, this would have suited my gameplay better.

However, the shield arm is heavy, and I feared trying to magnetize it to the model. In addition, the weapon arm provided for the Sword aspect is holding a long greatsword. While I love the model, transport and safe storage in a tote of some sort was top of my mind. I have begun to build and paint the sword arm with the sword cut down to a single hand weapon. I’m not sure yet if I’ll magnetize only the right arm, swapping it out with the current spear arm, or if I’ll glue the sword on, and leave the shield as it. That might be enough to use the Angel with either power, as long as I’m clear with my opponent before the game.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of new Theist forces to build and paint. More on those in future pieces.