Got any questions about Kings of War?

I'm Nick, one of the Mantic Rules Committee* for Kings of War.

One of the other members, Matt Gilbert, created a similar, popular thread over on Bugmans Brewery and we were asked if one of us could set up shop over here too As the resident Ogre player obsessee, I was the natural choice for the Ogre Stronghold

So Kings of War 2nd edition is on its way with free downloads of all the rules and army lists going up on July 10th. Meanwhile you can download the 1st edition rules here, and V2 public beta testing documents here.

KoW and WHFB covered a similar style of game, but there are some key differences:
1) Units pivot rather than wheel. No more measuring how far they're wheeling - if you're allowed to pivot with the move you're making them just pivot them up to 90 degrees. Done.

2) Individual casualties are not removed. Instead units act very much like monsters do in WHFB - they keep going and accumulating wounds until they reach their breaking point. Whenever they take damage, they'll take a Nerve test (similar to a Leadership test in WHFB) to see if they are Steady, Wavered or Rout from the battlefield. In practice this means that you can not only have the "wrong" number of models in the unit (as long as the units movement tray/footprint is correct) but you can also go as far as multibasing and creating whole dioramas out of a unit without worrying about removing individual models. Unit fillers aren't just legal, they're actively encouraged.

3) Heroes don't join units. They act as units in their own right. This doesn't mean they're easy to snipe (they're really not), just that they act as mobile support to your main battle units rather than being stuck within a unit.

4) There's no dedicated Magic phase. Magic supports your army but doesn't break it. Magic lets you cause small amounts of damage, or slightly buff a single unit (giving it +1 when rolling to wound for example), but it does not have the ability to wipe out entire units by itself. Spells are simply ranged attacks used in the shooting phase.

Any questions you have, I'll try and answer as best I can


*The RC is made up of community members who volunteer to work closely with Mantic and their designers on their games. We help out with the design of the game, often writing large chunks of it, as well as collecting and summarising feedback for Mantic to act upon.

I will add a few things to Daedleh's post :

- as you don't remove individual models, you can easily use varied models for an unit as long as the total unit footprint is appropriate. For exemple, For the hunter unit entry in the KoW 2nd edition ogre list, I plan to use my old metal ogre hunter with its sabretusk instead of the expected 3 ogres models.

- While mournfang might seems to be missing in the list, the chariots entries are in fact perfectly suited for them, and this means that you can have characters on mournfang too.

- Unit customisation might seems to be lacking at first, until you realise that most of the magic artefacts can be equipped on normal units and not only heroes. While you can only equip one artefact per unit, and can only use each artefact oçnce to prevent spamming, this allow for much more unit variations (and modeling opportunities) that might appear at first.

A few exemples :

- the war bow of Kaba or Kevinar’s Flying Hammer are both cheap 5-points items that give a single ranged attack to the unit (long ranged for the bow, short ranged but more powerful for the hammer). This can easily be used to represent options lije the mournfang champion (or any character) with a pistol, or the javelins of the hunter.

- There is also on item give a breath attack to the unit, and while a firebelly might be represented by a warlock with the fireball spell option (fireball is the spell version of breath attack, short ranged with lots of attacks), you might instead put the firebelly in any unit of Ogres on foot to represent this magic artefact and remember that the unit has a breath attack.

- Want to find a use for mounfangs with great weapons, but also want to use mournfangs with hand weapon and ironfist in the same army ? The brew of strength increase the damage of the unit and will faithfully represent the great weapons, so your different models will in fact represent different units on the battlefield.

Welcome and thanks for stopping by to help initiate and welcome new KoW Ogre players!

Just want to chime in and spread the KoW love. Fun game. I never understood the accusations that it's too simple of a game. I just assume said naysayers have never played before.

Not like anyone has anything to lose anyway, the rules are free!

The Stronghold will have a new Kings of War forum section soon, and thanks for the helpful posts guys

Thanks for the kind welcome guys and gals Now I just need to get my camera out and start Gnobblogging my new KoW Ogre army...

Nice to see you over here too jtrowell

tell us something about magic in kow, how potent and how diverse?

what future does it have in edition 2?

Magic is still fully integrated in the basic rules, it's not a different subsystem but is used the same that you would use a ranged attack.

Spells won't remove several units at once of other extremes things like that, but they are useful and costed for it.

In 2nd edition a few new spells have been added, each spell being a archetype to represent in praticte many king of spells. The basic Lighting bolt spells for exemple (Zap! in 1st edition) is you long range direct damage spells and despite the name might has well represent a ray of light, a stone projected by telekynesy or even a mental attack, no need for different rules, the important part is that it is spell able to strike at targets at long range for some decent damage.

The spells are :

- lignthing bolt : long range attack with Piecing(1)
- Fireball : short range area attack (lots of attacks compared to lightning bolt, but without Piercing and half the range)
- Bane chant : your buff spell, give Crushing strength and Piercing to a targetted friendly unit (yes it works on ranged attacks)
- Wind Blast : try to move an ennemy unit, a control spell that is hard to use, but with a great potential, as it can break the plan of the opponent or do things like put the target outside the range of a banner or move it outside charge range
- Heal : remove damage from a friendly unit
- Surge : used on most undead or other mindless units (units with the Shambling rule) to give them a small bonus move during the shooting phase, this can result in a charge.

Each spell has a level that tell you how many dice you roll to get the corresponding effect, so different wizards will get access to different spells at different levels and different prices.

For exemple an elf wizard starts with heal(3) and might buy a powerful lighting bolt(5), but it will be expensive, while a gobelin wizard would start with lightining bolt(3) and does not have heal as an option but is much more cheaper.

Ogrer Warlocks have LightningBolt(3) by default, and can buy windblast(5) and/or fireball(12), and they have a special rule that give them one more dice for their spells for each unit of berserkers braves in 6"

Hello had a question about allies.
Ogres being neutraly aligned can ally with any army?

Correct.

This allow both for Ogres mercenaries with humans, as well as Ogres allied with green skin or "chaos" ogres