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To those of you who follow my work it will be of no surprise that I am a huge Armada enthusiast. The game by Mantic Games hooked me up since day one. My personal collection consists of eight fleets of varying sizes and multiple dedicated scenery sets. I went deep and beyond, dedicating a part of my hobby blog exclusively to Armada, not to mention a huge part of my life.
Regardless of multiple fleets I have been playing the Salamanders fleet almost exclusively for the past few years. This is because I really like their playstyle, but also due to the simple color scheme and a fast painting methodology that allows me to add more ships ASAP whenever I decide to test out some borderline insane lists. One might even say that in the end comfort and speed of painting won with all the other, much fancier fleets.
But my only true miniature love of all time was always the Undead. We’re talking since the early 90s. I have been collecting skeletons and wrights, vampires, mummies and zombies of all kinds in a variety of miniatures games. The time finally came for Armada to get spiced with some bones if you catch my drift.
As it happens I am a part of the Mantic Games Rules Committee and participate in the design process of the new fleets that come to the game. When an opportunity to write the Undead fleet rules presented itself I called dibs! I was given a guideline of what types of ships I was to focus on, created a draft, then playtested the ruleset extensively before presenting it to Mantic Games for further testing and eventual approval. All that to say I had the opportunity to write the rules for my favorite faction in my favorite miniatures game…
…but the rules are just half of a fleet. The models are a different story. Although Armada has a set of beautiful STL files for every existing faction available through Mantic Vault (including the Undead), there’s nothing stopping players from outsourcing models. More so, I do believe that the game is somewhat miniatures agnostic – it is the base size that represents a ship class and it is easy to track what’s what as long as players know what faction is being played.
With that in mind and being a creative dude, I wanted to really flesh out the Undead that I feel. A mix of old Warhammer with Heroes of Might & Magic 3, more bones, more gothic afts, more spikes and tattered sais… but also something disturbing and strange about the fleet I had in mind.
In the end I digitally kitbashed my own fleet with official Mantic’s files of the Twilight Kin (hulls) and Forces of the Abyss (sails, flames, bones), adding a few extras (tombstones, piles of bodies, etc.). It was all done in Meshmixer, which I learned from scratch as I went. The end result is clunky, but has some charm to it.
At that point I had a fleet of Undead ships built in advance to the possible maximum and over the top. For those who don’t know – Armada is a game of usually between five to nine ships with some borderline examples of over a dozen. Still, with multiple fleets and a multitude of list archetypes there’s ways to lean into a particular ship class or playstyle, thus covering some extremes. I’ve covered this particular topic in Armada Expanding Collection Guide for those interested, but for now, allow me to state that with the Undead I aimed at truely embracing the fleet with all of its possible configurations.
And it broke me! Because of the sheer number of ships, the magnitude of the project somehow turned it from a ‘hobby boner’ into a downer. I laid the undercoat, then shelved the project for a later date. It was June 2025 and the moment of inspiration did not come in 2025. I just continued to play the Salamanders as usual…
That is until Saturday 17th of January 2026! New year, a lot of commissions completed ahead of time (I’m already working on stuff planned for the end of May), a lot of gaming spread across the month… an Armada event hit! “Black Waters 16” is a cyclic local event I organize. This one was a blast. We had a full house with players from across Poland driving in to attend. I had a great time and as usual the event energized me for everything Armada. I managed to focus this power of hype into painting a shelved project – the Undead got onto my desk the day after!
In the end it took me about 16 hours of intense painting, spread across Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. After over half a year of waiting the Undead Fleet is now completed and I cannot wait to take it to the sea and play my very first game! (other than the beta testing).
More pictures and close-ups for every ship class at: UNDEAD FLEET GALLERY
Lemme know what you think of the ship designs, how they feel and how you like the color scheme for these bony puppies!
I hope you find this article interesting. Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments below, or at Facebook or Instagram. If, by any chance, you are looking for a professional miniatures painting service, be sure to contact me with this contact form. I always reply within 24 hours, after which please check out your spam folder.
