Army showcase – Circle Orboros Herd for Kings of War

I have recently painted up an army for a friend (he helped).

He has been away from the hobby for some years, but really liked Kings of War when I gave him a demo. He had an unpainted Hordes Circle Orboros army from when we used to play Warmachine a few years back that I quickly realized could be turned into a perfectly good Herd / Forces of Nature army.

The fact that you can take your old Warhammer / Warmachine / historical / Runewars etc army and just put them on new bases or trays to get into KoW is one of the greatest strengths of this game IMO.

If you are like me and my friend, and can not really bother about getting into Warmahordes again because of the complexity, the rapid changes, the need to buy into themes or something else, I strongly suggest looking into Kings of War. While some armies, like Circle or Trollblods port over better than others, I think all the armies can find a pretty good fit. I wish Mantic would make a human steampunk army to make the port even easier for the traditional human armies as well though. 🙂

Guardian Brutes / Earth elementals

The Circle Golems look like great earth elementals, with the bigger ones fitting in as monster variants of the same. Playing as herd, guardian brutes are a similar unit, trading some defense for more attacks.

Beast Packs

The smaller dogs and arguses fit well in as beast packs, which just happens to be one of the best chaff units in the game. I don´t know what they can play in a nature army, but I guess they can be centaurs in a pinch.

Lycans

Circle is an army that is already full of werewolves, so Lycans are not too hard to find. I filled out the units with some warlocks and solos, and a warlock in beast mode is a fine looking Alpha.

Brutox, Chimera, Beast of Nature

Hordes has a lot of big beasts, so finding something fitting monster profiles was not hard. The chimera is a bit small for such a hitty profile, so I covered it in blood so you can see that it is a vicious bastard.

Stampede

My friend had more monsters than you could ever play in Kings of War, so we figured out that we could make use of a few of them to make a monster unit. With stampede having 30 attacks that usually wound on 2´s against anything, the profile fits a gang of angry beasts perfectly. Note the little druid goading them on and the “superhero” poses of the unit. “Picture time guys!”

Heroes and herdstone

Warmachine / hordes is all about cool solos and warcasters, so there were certainly enough options for heroes. Three druid / shaman / totem bearer type guys and a mounted hero (centaur chief) made up a good start for many types of lists. We also managed to get some use out of the many standing stones Circle armies usually have by building a herdstone.

Air elementals

The last unit was not really planned, but they are so easy to paint, so I made an air elemental regiment out of the three feral geists my friend had lying around.

Army shot

Since my friend could not attend the Conquest 2019 tournament, I decided to play the army myself as a price for painting it. I ran the army below as herd with the following list:

Guardian Brutes horde
Guardian Brutes horde, macwars
Stampede, wine of elvenkind
Lycan horde
Lycan horde, fire oil
3x Beastpack
Chimera, wings
Shaman, heal
Totem bearer, lute of darkness
Centaur chief
1995

The army played very well, I will try to do a quick recap of the tournament with some thoughts on the herd army itself in a different post. However, the army also did very well in painting contest, getting a good score from the judge and also getting quite a few nominations for being amongst the best armies, which I was very happy about.

While I have received quite a few nominations for my Kislev and Norse armies, the kicker of this army showcase is that the army was finished in about two working days worth of painting time. My friend put in 5,5 hours and I estimate my work at about 10-12 hours. I will make a post about the techniques used to make this army in such a short time fairly soon.

Zoomable pictures can be seen by clicking the images below: