Goonhammer Historicals: New Pillage Starter Warbands for Saga

Victrix brought out brand new Pillage Starter Warbands and I immediately wondered how they might work for Saga, because I love Saga. Do they work well for Pillage? Yes, probably, I'd assume so given they're a large number of minis each and they're all excellent kits as far as weapon options go so that's not my concern here. How well do they work for the intended Saga warband equivalents??

If you missed the first round of what is now becoming a mini-series about Victrix Pillage sets and how good of a value they are then you can check that out. If you've come here and aren't even sure what Pillage is then definitely go read our review of it. Both Pillage and Saga are "skirmish" games but at a different scale to each other, hell we even have an article discussing what various scales mean in the context of Historical Wargaming that's also worth checking out. Lastly, I wrote something earlier this year about how great it is that Historicals are starting to do more, and better, starter sets to make it easier than ever to get into it, so go have a look at that. When you're done reading all of those then come back here, or read them later, either way.

Let's get past the slightly awkward part here. Three out of four of these bags (yes, bags, they come as a bundle of sprues in a bag, it rules) are the exact same models and the only difference is that the Late Roman bag doesn't come with any transfers while the Arthurian/Briton and Goth Warband bags come with a couple sheets of transfers each as appropriate.

Value

It's all about money and that's one reason you're even reading this, especially if you're coming in fresh to Historicals and have no clue where to start or what anything is. As mentioned the Late Romans, Arthurian/Briton, and Goth Warband bags all have the exact same contents:

Late Roman Unarmoured Infantry - 12 models
Late Roman Armoured Infantry - 6 models
Late Roman Armoured Infantry Command - 6 models
Late Roman Armoured Cavalry - 4 models
Late Roman Archers & Slingers - 6 models
Late Roman Head frame - 43 spare/extra heads for more variation

The only awkward sprue here is the slingers/archers because you really want twelve of them for a full point of Levy. If you're not buying anything else though that still, typically, comes out to whopping five and a half points in Saga when a "normal" game is six points. These are not brand new kits so you should be able to find a single additional sprue of slingers/archers online, there's lots of sellers that split down the bags. Overall that's pretty great value and if this is your first foray into Saga is an absolutely fine way to begin a warband for any of these factions which is great for their cost.

Early Saxons on the other hand just get loads of infantry in the form of:

Early Saxon Armoured Infantry - 12 models
Early Saxon Unarmoured Infantry - 12 models
Late Roman archers sprue - 6 models
Dark Age Archers sprue - 6 models
Late Roman Head frame - 43 spare/extra heads for more variation

Full units! Yes! Unlike the other three this gives you a full point of Levy across those twelve slingers/archers though I do find it a little strange they're giving you one each of Late Romans and Dark Age kits here, it's not an issue just a bit odd. I'll talk about warband construction below.

Credit: Victrix Limited

Warbands in Saga

For gaming within Saga we'll be looking at Age of Invasions and Age of Vikings here for what boards/factions you can/should use these! If you're not familiar with Saga the points system as mentioned above is a bit odd. For a single point you get four Hearthguard, eight Warriors, or twelve Levy and can do a half-point once across any two options in your warband. Weapon options or being mounted doesn't cost anything extra they just come with their own disadvantages to balance them.

If you want a very, very, easy way of building warbands with any of these bags then simply buying two sets will give you lots of flexibility with any of these options and you'll be set up well for games. I'm going to talk about how well you can make one bag work instead and a recommendation of one additional set to make it a "full" warband easily too.

Saxons

These Early Saxons are best used to represent Saxons in Age of Invasions, the Anglo-Saxons in Age of Vikings have a reasonably different look to them; I'm not going to tell you that you can't use them of course, that would be absurd! Just that I'm approaching this purely from an Age of Invasions Warband.

The Saxons are an extremely simple Warband in construction: There are no cavalry, there are no equipment options at all aside from your Levy taking either slings or bows. The simplicity is a big win. By making a Warlord (with an extra guy on the base, cause it's cool to do that) you end up with:

10 armoured infantry - 2.5 points of Hearthguard
12 unarmoured infantry - 1.5 points of Warriors
12 slingers or archers - 1 point of Levy

If you want you could easily just use some of those unarmoured guys in and amongst the armoured ones if you want to go Oops All Hearthguard to flesh out to a full warband without spending any extra money. If you do want to get one more bag of minis on top of this set then it'd be great to get more unarmoured infantry for lots and lots of Warriors.

Credit: Victrix Limited

Britons

You've got a few options here to make a Warband work. This warband is all about beefing up your Warlord and making any units that stick by him extra good when they activate abilities on the battle board. It's very heroic and very Arthurian. For the cost of two Hearthguard or four Warrior models your Warlord can be joined by two Companions that form a unit with him; that's a pretty rare and incredibly cool thing in Saga so you definitely should, just to do it.

Your Warlord can either be on foot or mounted and your Hearthguard can only be mounted if your Warlord is, they can still be on foot if your Warlord is mounted though as well. So you can use your four armoured cavalry models to put a Warlord with one additional one on a larger base like 50mm and then the other two join as Companions then:

12 command and armoured infantry - 3 points Hearthguard
12 unarmoured infantry - 1.5 points Warriors
6 slingers or archers - .5 points Levy

Alternatively you model your Warlord on foot with one extra guy on the base to mark him out better, on a 40mm base probably, with two Companions on foot and then:

8 command and armoured infantry - 2 points Hearthguard
12 unarmoured infantry - 1.5 points Warriors
4 cavalry - .5 points mounted Warriors
6 slingers or archers - .5 points Levy

If you want to add on just one additional bag then I'd probably pick up another set of Late Roman Armoured or Unarmoured Infantry to aesthetic taste and just use them all as Warriors to go very body-heavy or Late Roman Armoured Cavalry for a bunch more mounted Warriors or Hearthguard.

Credit: Victrix Limited

Goths

When creating a Goth warband you have to choose what kind of Goth they are between the Visigoths and Ostrogoths. Unfortunately neither one of these works that well straight out the bag without buying at least one more thing on top of the extra sprue of slingers/archers.

Visigoth Warlords can be either mounted or on foot, their Hearthguard may only be mounted if the Warlord is, and there's no option for mounted Warriors making it very tricky to get going. I'd recommend picking up an appropriate mounted Warlord, you can get single models like that relatively cheap from places like Footsore, Gripping Beast, or 1st Corps among many other historicals makers. If you do pick up a mounted Warlord then you have a very easy list made up of:

4 cavalry - 1 point Hearthguard
24 infantry - 3 points Warriors
6 slingers or archers - .5 points Levy

That gets you to four and a half points, you could easily not use the bows/slings and just play a four point game.

Ostrogoth Warlords on the other hand must be mounted and their Hearthguard can be mounted or can fight on foot. This will end up causing the same issues of having some wayward cavalry models by using at least one to make a Warlord and not being able to field units smaller than four models stopping you from using the remaining three cavalry easily. Pick yourself up a nice Warlord model separately and then copy the above for the Visigoths but with the option of using the more armoured infantry models as Hearthguard to bump that up to five and a half points super easily.

Either way you go you could fix the above "issues" very easily by just picking up an additional set of Late Roman Armoured Infantry or Cavalry as well, especially if you don't want to get any metal or resin models from elsewhere!

Credit: Victrix Limited

Late Romans

Slightly confusingly these Late Romans are not the "Late Romans" in Age of Vikings but instead are "Romans" from Age of Invasions. Rome is a hell of a thing. Maybe we'll have an article all about Rome and the Romans and the different kinds of them at some point, that would be neat.

This is, by far, the most flexible warband of all of the options. One thing I haven't quite covered is that in Saga you don't need to field models in the same unit sizes that you buy them in, during deployment you field them in units of 4-12 models with the same equipment. That's important for how you'll be making use of those archers. For a warband you could have a Warlord on foot and take:

4 cavalry - 1 point Hearthguard
10 command and armoured infantry - 2.5 points Hearthguard
12 unarmoured infantry - 1.5 points warriors
4 archers - .5 points warriors

That leaves you with two spare archer minis, you could give them spare melee weapons from the infantry sprues to hide them into some Hearthguard taking you up to a full army if you don't mind the mix of armour there. Adding one more kit here I'd pick up either unarmoured Roman cavalry to take some as Warriors or more armoured ones for more Hearthguard, that's up to you.

Good Sets?

If you've read this far you know the answer is basically "yes" but if you skipped down to this bit for the summary then just scroll back up and read why that is. Absurd if you did that. Despite these sets being for Pillage they work really well for starting out in Saga or for the beginnings of a new army for the Age of Invasions; the fact that the Britons is basically a solid straight-out-the-bag set is really cool. I'd love to see Victrix do some more sets that are aimed more specifically at Sage but for now these work well! More mixed sets of a few sprues each across many of the ages would be perfect.

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Tags: historicals | SAGA | victrix | pillage