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So this flies in the face of the last article I wrote about Conquest: The Last Argument of Kings models, which basically said that the models were very large, giving me a little breathing room to paint them with shaky hands. And yes, I like that. But as I’ve tried to make my way through an entire army, my opinion has somewhat changed.

Here’s the deal: the models are big, which is why I liked them, but the quality is… not good.

Conquest: The Last Argument of Kings Models: Assembly

Some of the models were pretty straightforward to assemble, and I think that I was lulled into a false sense of security because I was building the Household Knights–an all-around good kit. Each knight (there are three to a box) came on its own sprue, so there was never any question of which pieces belonged to which knight. There were some options–they gave you two shields per knight, for example–but you knew that everything you needed for a knight was going to be on one sprue, so it all made sense.

(It should be pointed out right here that there are NO instructions. This is dumb. Even on the basic Household Knights instructions would have been welcome, and I can’t help but think that if I was not a seasoned wargamer who has assembled hundreds or thousands of models in my life, I would have had a hard time figuring these guys out. They need instructions. And–foreshadowing–the next models are only worse.)

But when I got to the next models in my Hundred Kingdoms army–The Gilded Legion and the Crossbowmen–the assembly was stupid and ridiculous. Instead of a single model on a single sprue, you’d get eight models on a single sprue (for the crossbowmen) and four models per sprue (for the Gilded Legion). And the crossbowmen just kind of assumed that you’d figure out what went to what. There weren’t a lot of variations, so it was generally fine.

But the Gilded Legion had a lot of variations, and the models were marked by a tiny little A, B, C, or D stamped in an obscure place.

Now this is fine, I guess. It tells you what pieces go with what pieces. But the problem was that not all of the pieces were very explicit in what they were supposed to be, and The Gilded Legion are spearmen, and it was MADDENING trying to get their spear arms to match up with the hands on their spears and still attach to the arm sockets in the torso. It was just dumb, and there was no guidance, and, to be frank, I just got tired of assembling the Gilded Legion after I’d put four of them together and decided I wasn’t going to worry about the rest.

And there’s a reason for that, and it is:

Conquest: The Last Argument of Kings Models: Quality

I admit that I thoroughly enjoyed painting the knights. I believe that when I posted shots of them on Instagram I touted them as painting on easy mode. And I believe that about the knights. As someone with shaky hands, the knights were a nice break and something fun to sink my teeth into and do a little bit of freehand work.

The problem is that I’ve written about the large scale of the Conquest: The Last Argument of Kings models–they’re big (supposedly 38mm, but I think they’re bigger). You would think that with a larger canvas, the sculptors would have more opportunity to play, to make them more detailed and more textured.

But they didn’t. In fact, I found there was a surprising lack of sharpness in almost all the detail on these miniatures. This was not like taking a high-quality miniatures and sizing it up to 38mm scale. This was a 38mm scale miniature that was less crisp and less detailed than models half their size.

And it was like this only almost all the models. Even the Household Knights, which I enjoyed, were lacking, and I think I only liked them because it gave me a lot of opportunity for freehand work. But there were unforgivable errors, like no definition in chainmail, and no definition in quilted armor. It really looked, well, cheap.

The Ultimate Problem with Conquest: The Last Argument of Kings Models

What all of this adds up to is that, while I got this small force of models from a $100 gift card from work that I decided to dump into Conquest, I have no interest spending any of my real money on any more of these models. I don’t want to buy more of a different force and be disappointed again and not want to assemble them, let alone paint them.

So I don’t think I’ll ever actually review Conquest: The Last Argument of Kings, because no one I know plays it, and I don’t want to invest in a second army to try to teach it to others.

And it’s too bad, because it had a lot going for it.