Teeny Tiny Drukhari

Teeny tiny pieces!

I can say with some experience that one has never experienced putting together a finicky model until one has attempted to put together a multi-piece 6mm one!

I received my Dark Eldar army 4 days earlier than I'd originally thought so this evening my wife and I retired up to to loft and we put on Crimson Peak while she knit and I set to begin assembling very, very tiny evil space elves.

I started on the Raiders first. Raider transports don't cost any points in the Dark Eldar force, so I figured I should capitalize on them as much as possible, free transports are a tremendous boon!

I ordered the Dark Eldar force from Onslaught miniatures. Branded as the Stygians, these are wonderful sculpts consisting of white metal. There was little flash on the models, so they required only a bare minimum of work prior to assembly.

The models though are 7 pieces including the base! So it takes a little while to put them together.

Raiders in fine form

I'm debating paint schemes. I debate whether or not to go with a traditional Drukhari theme with a deep green base tone and a blood red sail, or to flip the theme and go with a maroon ox blood base with a teal sail. We shall see.

I also debate about the basing for the models. The Raiders are easy enough, I'm using some old Warmaster bases for them, but the infantry I could use either round bases or long rectangle bases. The rectangle bases would provide a maximum frontage for the infantry, though I'll admit that the round bases do look amazing, even if the frontage is considerably smaller.

In the meantime, I absolutely enjoy the sculpts and the look of these models in this scale. I cannot wait to start painting these.

Of Mass Conscription and Plague

Conscripts going through basic training.

Ugh, I'm sick as a dog lately. I've spent almost the entire holiday season completely nailed by some ugly cold thing and congestion the likes of which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.

I'm sick of feeling crappy, so decided to really get into the groove of working on my DZC Shaltari. Today I managed to completely base and put the wash on them. I'm still not completely sure of what my list is going to be for Adepticon, but I've got a good idea. I know that I'll always have 2 units of Pungari (A gift from my mother-in-law, that she jokes that they are miniature mother-in-laws), and likely 2 units of Firstborns. But I also managed to get a Shaltari Spire, Fire Drake, Coyote, Dreamsnare/Leopard, Jaguar, 3 Kukri, 4 Yari, 3 Haven Gates, and 2 Tarantulas all done up.

I really want to do up my Firebirds but I'm having a really hard time finding room for them in my list. I just LOVE how they look; like 2 tailed wasps. We shall see. Either way, it'll give me a chance to get the vast bulk of my Shaltari core finished and I can choose from there.

Firing up the War Forge

Gates! Pretty happy with how these look on the table.

Lots of activity over the last little while planning for Adepticon. First off, I placed my order for my Dark Eldar for Epic. I'm stupid excited about receiving those!

While I wait for them to come in I settled into painting up my Shaltari, mostly focusing on the ground forces for Dropzone Commander. In the end I decided to stick with a Fall kind of burnt leaves look which was inspired from the Blue Table YouTube video that they posted a few years back. I modified the paint scheme a little bit to add just the tiniest bit of flair but wanted to ensure that I didn't totally lose myself in the details, which I have a habit of doing. Afterall, I do have 3 whole armies to paint up in just under 3 months!

So with that in mind, at the encouragement of my wife (who was likely sick of hearing me agonize over this or that list detail), I started in on the core of the Shaltari stuff that I have that I know that I will be using every game; the Gates.

They painted up quickly too! With just 8 colours and 1 wash, I use four of those colours with my airbrush, which, at a stage, also gives me the opportunity to base some Shaltari DFC ships while I'm waiting for my wash to dry on my ground forces.

4 Eden and 4 Spirit Gates

In the end, in just a few short hours I did manage to pump out 8 gates! 4 Eden and 4 Spirit gates.

I was pretty concerned about using the dullcoat on them. Historically I've had absolutely terrible luck using dullcoat, as I'd talked about in my post in the Spring. This time though I stuck with the tried and true Testors stuff. It's worked like a charm.

Typically I enjoy using the Testors glosscote, which I receive no end of teasing about, but I don't care. I really enjoy that candy gloss, especially on stuff that has a lot of panel lines like the PHR. This time, however, I wanted to really show up the gradients in the shading up from deep red-brown up to a sunny yellow... Like a leaf in the Fall.

Here is the paint scheme for those who are interested:

Paint Scheme:

Airbrush Model Air  71.039 Hull Red

Wash with Dark Wash

Airbrush edging with Model Air 71.038 Medium Brown

Lightly Airbrush edging with Model Air 71.032 Golden Brown

Even lighter airbrush edging with Model Air 71.078 Gold Yellow

Paint the gem and canopies Game Color Electric Blue 72.023

Mix 50/50 Game Color Electric Blue and Model Color 70.951 White Stripe gem

Use Model Color White with a small stripe

Game Color Silver Detail lining

Small gem details Model Color 70.967 Olive Green

Lightly varnish with Testors Clear Coat/Dullcote 1260C

Adepticon 2018 Planning

Man has it been a while. I have been gaming, quite a lot. I bounced from minis to rpgs and back and forth.

But today I want to talk about one of my favourite things that I did last year; going to Adepticon. I registered again and this time I'm going to play in 3 events; The DZC scenario event on Thursday, the Dropfleet Commander tournament on Friday and the Epic Armageddon tournament on Saturday.

I'm excited about these events but I do have a pretty ambitious goal of getting three different armies/fleets painted up for these events in just under 3 months!

This year for DZC and DFC I'm going to have my Shaltari painted up, which will round out both games nicely with 2 factions complete. That will make demoing either game a great deal of fun with fully painted fleets.

I am SUPER excited about playing in the Epic Armageddon tournament! I'm going to play me some Dark Eldar from the Onslaught miniature range. These minis are very modestly priced, gorgeous, and I have to say that the company owner Don is a really nice fellow.

The first on the painting table will likely be my DFC Shaltari as I've already started some of the models and just about everything is assembled for them. They have been a very interesting faction to start playing and a big contrast from what I'm used to with my PHR. I got OWNED last year by a Shaltari fleet when fighting for top table and I'm now curious as to how balanced they are with all of the (welcomed) errata changes.

I've definitely chosen some finesse lists here. Shaltari are like the Commander equivalents of Eldar and Tau combined. Lots of firepower, but relatively weak armour and wicked fast. They use their speed as a way of ensuring their survival. They also have some great mechanics on the ground with teleport technology that should be fun to pull some sneaky tricks.

In the skies the Shaltari feel like playing a wolf pack of submarines. With their very long sensor range and their quite small signatures, they can absolutely use a long arm kiting tactic to pummel the enemy from range while their Voidgates take the cities and objectives.

The Dark Eldar are the pinnacle of finesse in that they are incredibly fast and maneuverable and absolutely deadly in close combat engagements, but they have paper-thin armour and will wither under any concerted fire. I've only played the Eldar in the Epic range, so it should be fun to be able to lean even further into the Eldar finesse philosophy.

Fleet Parade

It is a happy thing to reach a milestone when involved in a large painting project. Today I feel as if I've reached a decent milestone.

I now have enough versatility in my painted PHR fleet that I can field a variety of options, including more frigates and different configurations of troop landing ships.

I do feel a bit short on Medeas though, really I do need two more to round out the fleet number to a healthy eight.

1500pt PHR Dropfleet Armada!

I managed to get 2 Calypsos done in 2 days during the work week, so I'm pretty happy with being able to have that progress. With the Scipio that I completed last week, I'm now able to field a 1500pt fleet for the gaming session that I was invited to on Thursday. VERY much looking forward to being able to play!

I'm horrified at the thought of how many damned gravity nullifier panels I have painted in this fleet.

I'm also thinking on whether or not I want to get a pack of the normal Echo corvettes. I am not in love

Close up of the Calypso

with the aesthetic of them, kind of preferring my weird Alien-esque scratch built ones but I'll admit, they are a horrific pain to build and the thought of building another 2 to 8 of them just exhausts me.

What do you guys think? Do you like the weird Echoes or should I be a conformist?

The Scipio is a nice centre piece model, which I'll admit, I feel like I was lacking a little bit in my Adepticon list last Spring.

What are you guys interested in seeing me paint next? I have the following on my plate:

• Finish the PHR fleet.
• Start the Shaltari fleet.
• Start the Shaltari ground forces.
• Start the Warhammer 40k Tau.

I'd love to hear your comments.

A New Project: Robots of a Different Make

Starting with some Fire Warriors. Always a good choice.

It's been a good while since I've updated the blog. I went into a bit of a busy period just after Adepticon having changed employers and we had a garden to build.

Now that the dust has settled though I have a chance to update you all on some things that I'm doing:

• Adepticon: It was amazing! I'll definitely aim to go back next year. All told I came in about middle of the pack for both Dropzone Commander and Dropfleet Commander. At one point I was competing on the top table for Dropfleet but got my ass handed to me by a (Ahem) fairly beardy Shaltari list that really focused on gate spam. I met some really truly great people though and had some excellent games! Well worth all of the effort!
  
  In the end I got Best Sportsman in both tournaments! So I'm pretty chuffed about that!
  
• Dropzone/fleet Campaign: My friend James and I have decided to make a little bit of a campaign for ourselves utilizing some of the campaign rules for Dropzone/fleet. We play our first game on Thursday. I'll post separately on this as James has written the first scenario and it's pretty awesome! We're starting off small and then escalating into full scale tiny war!
  
• Robots of a Different Make: I LOVE DZC/DFC but I'll admit, it's pretty hard to find a community of regulars and I miss the hell out of being able to drop into a store and get a pickup game on the fly. After doing quite a bit of reading and hearing some seriously good things about the new 8th Edition coming out for Warhammer 40k I have decided to pull the trigger and get back into the hobby! After quite a bit of deliberation I opted to get back into one of my very favourite factions: The Tau. I LOVED the Tau when they first released and seeing their range of models now has only solidified that for me.
  
  I have started off with the basics: Troops and transports. Since I don't know what the options are going to look like for the Tau going into 8th, I figured that you can't really go wrong with painting up a bunch of troops and Devilfish. One would presumably always want abundant amounts of both! Plus troops can really wear on a person after a while so I figured I would get a head start and work on them in earnest while my enthusiasm is high. That way I can reward myself with the cool robots later.
  
  It's always such an agony picking out colour schemes. In this instance I have opted to do a variation of StrikingScorpion82's scheme. I'm still undecided if I'm going to go with an orange or a turquoise scheme at this point. My original Tau way back in the day were turquoise and looked fantastic but I've also never really used orange as a main colour before and in keeping with my projects over the last few years I've been trying to use colours that I don't usually use.

Dropzone PHR Army Finished!

1500pt PHR Army for Adepticon

Well it was a bit more down to the wire than I'd initially anticipated but I finally got my PHR Dropzone army done for Adepticon.

I'm pretty happy with it, I did manage to at least get one game in with one of the best players that I've faced since I started playing DZC.

What I enjoy about this list is it has all the toys I want, more or less. 1500pts is a point limit in Dropzone where you still have to make some hard choices in your list; at least that's what I've always felt with the PHR at least. I imagine that Shaltari will show a similar meta when I start painting them.

This list essentially allows for a nice, solid brick of anti-tank assets in the Command squad to jump around, throwing some decent railguns at targets up to 36" away. It also has a strong anti-aircraft core in 3 Phobos to put up a back and mid field anti-air umbrella, and 2 Helios to either go hunting or plug up gaps where they might crop up in the umbrella.

Command Squad: Hera, Guardian with 2 Apollos in escort.

My Mercury Drones, a unit that is often fairly under-appreciated, can provide me with 3 potential
objectives:

• Aid my infantry in searching for Objectives or Intel markers.
• Provide ancilliary AT support in the Triton's indirect fire Sky Hammer Missiles and,
• Scout for my 4 Thors.

The Thors are beautiful. In a group of 4 those Thors can do decent amounts of damage to a building (The Njord that transports my Heras and Apollos can help, if not firing at targets), but also threaten a decent number of tanks, infantry and the like.

Decals on the Hera demark Commander's
and Guardian's Walkers.

While I find the PHR chronically out-matched by other faction's infantry, I do have a decent core of Valkyries, Sirens and Immortals to go grab objectives and bring them home. Obviously the Valks occupy Scout slots in my army list so they can also help scout Thors, through this is a distant secondary objective to finding objectives.

You'll notice that I put some decals on the Commander's Hera and his Guardian companion in order to differentiate between the two.

All in all I'm pretty excited about Adepticon! So soon!