Odds & Ends March '24

2024-03-21 warmasteer / dropfleet / heavy gear /

Warmaster

Last year I got a resin printer and cranked out a bunch of terrain and a few warmaster armies for my friends(dark elfs, brets) and myself(skaven, dwarfs). They've been sitting in a box for a while, but amidst frustration with another set of models (see Dystopian Wars below) I decided to switch up my painting and get some of the rats to a respectable table standard. Deliberately slapdash because this is like a twelfth of an army and it's a hundred rats and I do not want to kill myself doing up every individual rat to macro-lens display quality. All of these are Army Painter v2 Speed Paints, and applied in this order for least complications.

Crusader Skin - general skin; nose, hands, tail
Dark Wood - fur
Maggot Skin - robes
Ochre Clay - sash/belt around their waists
Pallid Bone - cloth wraps
Brownish Decay - wood; weapon hafts and banner
Shamrock - warpstone weapon ends
Hoplite Gold - the rings in the warpstone
Skeleton Bone - teeth

I actually need to reprint one more banner and base of them for a full three units. I originally did one banner in an embossed symbol, but I don't like, I prefer my free hand rat scratch characters. The other base was my test rats for colors, and it'll be easier to just print new rats than bother stripping them.

Dropfleet

Painted some Santiagos a while ago. They're not to the same scale as the other ships, a blown up model which I can both understand but I'm not thrilled with, despite how cool the model itself looks. But I've always turned off NLIPS in Homeworld back in the 90s, so I've always been a bit of a scale stickler.

UCM has some other light vessels I should get around to finishing, and I've got a ton of the Scourge basecoated but not detailed. And then there's the sector tokens. I finished all the military and power sectors, but have been struggling with the commercial and industrial. Just not coming out how I want it to for the amount of effort involved.

I also finally settled on some station designs from the station kit sprues. I figure one large, two medium, four small, a few defense platforms, and a gate station should cover a lot of bases. Also got a shipyard design I'm still tinkering with. I have sooo many pieces left I could do something with, but I want to get some basic usable ones knocked out first. Someday, I aspire to the variety as seen on Broken Stars & Burning Ships

Heavy Gear

Last game was a total blowout loss as the EAZ (CEF occupied South) vs NuCoal and Eden/Caprice. Between struggling with how-to-camera and the rolling disaster of my strategies, I only got pics from the start of the game.

Eden melee is super nasty. I had 10TV models taking out 30+ tanks in one hit from half the board away with nothing whatsoever I could do about it. I'm starting to think the jetpack rule needs tweaked to mitigate the power of the lancers vs heavy armor vehicles, or, more radically, there needs to be a cap on Margin-of-Success in HGB3.

That NC bastard in the yellow construction gear continues to dunk on me, because I am trivially easy to goad into overextending. It's like Napoleonic counter battery fire, a rake I will run arms flailing into over and over again.

Meanwhile hobby side, got a pair of Anolises (cheap recon gears) and the rest of Special Forces stealth gears painted, along with my take on the never-officially-modeled "Lidded Iguana".

I'm usually pretty good about writing down my painting notes either in a notebook or on my blog preferably, but I somehow forgot my camo recipe I used on my Chameleons and so you can see the first through third attempts in the middle there. The Lidded Iguana on the right middle was totally wrong colors, the Snakeye left middle I forgot that the stripes need to be parallel not crosshatch, and then finally the guy in the middle I did it right.

Project: Jager Gang mk II is underway. I scored a 5lb box of random metal HG models and there's enough parts there to totally replace all my Jagers with metal variants. It's a pretty huge upgrade in posing and detailing from the waist down. 2/8 built. Metal mambas and iguanas and cobras will be on the workbench later.