Building a New Army Part I

This is the first article in a series that hopefully will cover me designing a tournament army from the ground up, including the modelling, painting, and list design issues that show up.

Building a New Army Part I - Ideas and General Guidelines

On the way home from JimCon this year, Gina was all aflutter about her new army idea (an amazon-themed Dark Elf army-- very cool idea that looks to be turning out pretty well so far) and this got my thinking. Her idea was more of an "art" army, in that the design would very much be about the modeling and painting versus other concerns. This gave me the idea to do something similar for next year's JimCon (the only big tournament that I go to anymore)

After a bit of consideration, I came up with a theme idea. Basically, it's Elves meets the Trojan War. Before this gets too complex, let me explain the basics:

High Elves at least have been given a vaguely Greco-Roman feel to them. Citizen spearmen, the various names of the regions, ect. So I decided to carry this through to the logical conclusion and make an army that really reflects this-- the armour, mythology, ect. Easily the biggest conflict in Greek mythology would be the Trojan War: it latest years and involved nearly as many important figures as the quest for the golden fleece. Of course, the Greeks were only one side of the conflict-- to do this right you'd need to have Trojans also. Dark Elves could easily stand in here for them, and also give me the opportunity to a "match pair" set of armies. It's a common concept in historicals gaming, and I think it should work fairly well with two classically opposed armies like dark elves and high elves. As an extra twist, it might make things interesting if the High Elves were the Trojans in this equation. Just to mix things up a bit.

Another interesting part of the Trojan War (and here I'm talking about the mythological event, not the historical one) is early on the gods did take sides in the battle, helping out their favored sons to either defend Troy or help it sack it. I think this might work out well in wfb also-- there are piles of high elf and dark elf gods that get mentioned for a text bubble or two in the background section of the army books, and then never get mentioned afterwards. They need to be used more than this, so decided I had to use them in these armies.

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Given all those ideas, here's the basic guidelines I came up with for the armies:

1. Since for the time period in Greek history we're talking about cavalry wasn't usable, I've decided to go without also. Chariots should certainly be in use, and I plan to use at least a couple of them in these armies.

2. Every god from both sides (High Elf & Dark Elf) needs to be represented with at least one unit if not an attached hero. Unit champions and the like should be converted up to match what I can find about the various gods.

3. These lists shouldn't include a bunch of over the top or cliched combos of items, ect. I'm planning on taking these armies to JimCon in the future, so there's no excuse for making them overpowered slop that I copied off of the internet somewhere.

With these guidelines in mind, now I have a place to start making my army lists from. In my next installment, that's what I hope to explain and work on.

Next: Part II - Developing an initial army list for the High Elves