Monday 18 September 2017

More purple stuff, but at a different scale

As I mentioned in my last post, I've bought a fair amount of Dropzone Commander stuff recently. Seemed like the next thing to do was start painting it, so here we are.

Assuming anyone is still reading by this point, let's have a look at what I've done.

First of all, half a dozen of these fellas:

Stompy stompy, blasty blasty

These are Ronin - armoured battlesuit things. At some point in the future, everyone seems to be agreed that armoured battlesuits will become vital. Not quite sure why that should be the case, but there we are. This version is good because it can appear from being transported and shoot stuff in the same turn, which most things can't normally. So that's nice.

Continuing the "things that are apparently a good idea in sci-fi" theme, we have a walking tank!

More stompy stompy, more blasty blasty
This is a Coyote Command Walker. I feel quite safe posting this here even though I'd normally hide it until it makes it onto the table. This is because I've been bemoaning the lack of one of these for so long that no one would believe I didn't buy it anyway. This is good in the game because it's a lot tougher than most things in my army, and also because it has an ejector seat, so the commander inside can survive for a bit longer when it is inevitably wrecked around the mid point of turn 2.

There we are then, short and sweet, but it all adds to the numbers...

Painted: 154
Acquired: 162

I'm planning to do Zomtober again this year! I didn't do it last time round (in fact I'm not sure when I did last do it) but I've got plans for this one, so keep watching here...

Friday 8 September 2017

Plagued by Value

It's been a difficult few weeks for my goal of painting more models than I acquire in 2017.

The problem has been Dropzone Commander. It's a great game, but for some time I've struggled to do well at it. Because I'm an excellent workman, the issue has obviously been my tools, specifically the lack of a solid core to base my army around.

This nagging feeling that I could do better at the game if I just spent more money left me very receptive to a series of surprisingly good offers on Shaltari models. I'm not sure why these all came at the same time from different sellers, but the upshot is I've added 41 models to the pile. On top of that, I ended up with 3 freebie models at Partizan, so all told my "acquired" total has increased by 44. This isn't exactly what I had planned.

Fortunately, I had a creative solution, made available by Hawk Wargames' other offering. As you can't miss if you've read my blog at all recently, I've been building up my Dropfleet Commander fleet, so first of all I added another 3 frigates, to round out a couple of groups:

3. That's a start

These are pretty small, but I thought I could go smaller. So I took things down a level with some bombers...


3 + 12 = 15. Getting better

This both improved my numbers, and guaranteed that people would complain that these "don't count" as models. I found both to be pleasing, but I thought I could go further with both, so I went to the fighters:


3 + 12 + 15 = 30. That'll do!

These can't sensibly be described as anything other than Very Small. Their diminutive nature allowed me to rattle through them very quickly, and I suffered only temporary blindness as a result, which was nice.

So, what's the end result of all that on my numbers?

Painted: 147
Acquired: 162

Certainly not the direction I'd have liked it to take, but I'm only 15 models away from evening things up again. I have some of the Dropzone bits on the go now, so hopefully it won't take me too long to close the gap. On the other hand, recently an excess of real life has limited my available painting time, so there's still a reasonable chance that I run out of year before I get things back on track.

Oooh, it's tense!