Princely Points

Last time I wrote about shelving my plans to paint an Empire army, and that it was all because of some guy called Ulther.

Most oldhammeres will probably have guessed that this refers to Prince Ulther and his Imperial Dwarfs – The Dragon Company:

So, what happened was as follows:

I’ve always (since I became aware of them, at least) loved the Dragon Company. The sculpts are awesome, as are their color-scheme, they get a funny bit of story in the White Dwarf add, and the rules… ob boy, the rules. Here they are, as well as the short story:

On the surface they appear to be normal Imperial Dwarfs, but look closely and you’ll notice that they are equipped with pistols. This would ok by itself, except that these are second edition pistols (firelocks), which fire at S5. They are single-shot, mind you (depending on how you interpret the rules in Ravening Hordes), but since each trooper has two, you can get a volley off and still be ready to stand-and-fire against chargers. Or position them five wide on a hill, and attackers have to face 10 shots before having to deal with a rather fearsome dwarf unit in h-t-h. 

The rules for firelock pistols

Despite all this, they weren’t really on my radar in a major way. I was mostly focused on getting figures for WFRP and AHQ, and Ulther’s dwarfs usually sell for non-trivial amounts. But then I saw an entire unit (sans the champion) at a BIN price of less that £24. Only slightly over £1 per dwarf – how could I refuse?

So I bought them, and wanting to complete the unit I went looking for the champion. I eventually found him at a (somewhat) reasonable price, and in the same deal I picked up a flame-thrower team and a ballista. As I’ve been gathering a unit of Bugman’s Rangers for my Empire army, I suddenly found myself the proud owner of a small dwarven army.

 

My Dragon Company

Since the whole point of focusing on a single army was to avoid having huge pile of unpainted figures languishing in the cellar, I really had no choice but to abandon my previous plans. At the speed I’m currently painting, it’ll take me several months before I can finish my dwarfs, so there’s really no point in pretending that I’ll get around to the humans this side of summer.

So there you have it; My new project: paint a dwarf army!

As of right now, I only have one problem. You may have noticed that the add from WD doesn’t include point values. The back of the original box does though, but the only picture I’ve been able to find is this:

The resolution is simply too low for me to make out what it’s supposed to be.

Now, using the formula from the 2^nd edition rules, I calculate them at 15,5 points (10 for imperial dwarfs, 1 for mail armor, 0,5 for shields and 4 for two pistols – with an equipment cost multiplier of 1, since their base value is below 11), but I’m pretty sure that the point value on the box is only two characters. This either means that I’ve made some mistake in my calculation, or that they get some kind of discount/markup… I just don’t know – maybe there’s someone out there who does?

Croaker