End of March Hobby Progress

While March isn't quite over, I've got a blog post to write this evening and have signed up to a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game over the internet on Tuesday nights, so I may as well cover off my painting progress for the month now.

I've finished an Inquisitorial cherub I'd been planning on taking to Purge the Pit before I cancelled out that I'd decided was a shame not to get painted. It's a mix of contrast and more traditional paints, an I really like how it came out. I'm trying to experiment a bit with my side projects, and that's paid off here.

The Shasvastii mentor is nearly done. I didn't wipe off quite enough Typhus Corrosion on the legs, but he'll live. The base rim just needs finishing up and he'll be properly finished. I can then get onto the rest of Operation Wildfire. Once he's done I'm more than halfway through the Shasvastii!

I've also started getting the base coats down on the Wargames Atlantic Halflings. I'm trying to paint in some lighter colours due to mis-hearing some advice from my wife about painting lighter. (She was actually trying to get me to put more light to dark contrast in, and thinks too much of what I do is close to the mid-tone.)

They're lovely, relatively simple sculpts who'll look fine in large numbers. I used Fyreslayer Flesh on the skin and I'm . . . not sure what it's supposed to do? I can't find a skin tutorial that uses it (ironically, the one on the Citadel Paint App for Fyreslayers suggests Guilliman Flesh). It behaves and looks very different when painted on thinly and thickly.

I've also nearly finished the mould line cleaning for the scatter terrain for HATE. There's only two left to go. So close!

My "light" breaking of the "don't buy more than you paint" rule last month was shattered by a combination of a "damaged box" Infinity sale and picking up the Skaven army box before it went out of stock. Now it's about to trying to catch back up.

So, 7 models painted, and 99 is my new target.

I don't mess up by halves, do I?

Saturday Smackdown

The last in an irregular series, showcasing photos I took at February's St Albans Smackdown tournament.

Vague Memories of an Infinity Game: Dahshat Company vs Onyx Contact Force - Safe Area

Back in the Days Before when when we could go out, and play games, I got in a game at HATE against one of the club members who was running their Onyx Contact Force. It's now been ages since then and I can't remember much of what happened...

After putting a hole in my reaction remote, my opponent sent their Greif Operator up to take out the Engineer. They were a little careless and took the shot in the line of sight of my Libertos, who happily filled them full of holes.

But the damage was done, and the reaction remote and engineer were both down.

I was super worried about the Combined TAG, and snuck my Hunzakut up to get a Deployable Repeater up. My hacker then managed to immobilise it, but I then made the mistake of having the Hunzakut move up to shotgun it, allowing it to reset and get out of the immobilisation.

Learning point: sometimes it's fine not to kill a thing but leave it in a place where it will just be an order sink to free up.

There was then a big push to have my link try and take out the defensive Unidron link.

But I over extended and got most of my link killed. It was super close, and I can't even remember who won now. It was certainly down to the last order or so.

It's not just time!

A couple of weeks ago, I snapped this quick photo of a bunch of my Dahshat Company that I'd got out ahead of a game of Infinity down at Dark Sphere. In the end, as the COVID-19 thing was starting to escalate a bit, we decided to be cautious and cancel the game.

Last weekend had been down in my calendar as a massive hobbying weekend for a while. While a lot of my future commitments were getting cancelled my immediate plans remained exactly the same - stay in, paint a ton of minis, feel good about life.

In the end, I played a lot of Skyrim.

You see, reader, it turns out that simply having time isn't sufficient to actually get miniatures assembled and painted. You also need some self discipline, motivation and a plan. I found myself, last weekend, just . . . not . . . quite . . . summoning the motivation to sit down at the hobby desk. I finally did at about half four on the Sunday.

I got a few little bits done - I assembled the classic pit fighter a couple of photos up and got his basing sand on. Hopefully today I'll get his undercoat down. I also got a second prospector done, although he's got a horrid join line on his head I need to sort out with liquid green stuff before I undercoat him. Malifaux fits are usually much better than that so I think I might have done something wrong.

I also got a whole bunch of progress on the creepy cherub for my Inquisition. I'm hoping by next week he'll be done.

So I need to have a little bit of a think about how to try and give myself a sense of structure now I'm working from home for the foreseeable future. (I reckon three months minimum at this rate.) If anyone has any good suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them.

With the prospector done apart from the green stuff, I dug out the crates I picked up from the estate of one of HATE. I'm going to paint them up for the club terrain when we can meet up again, and they're well overdue.

If you check out my "on the desk" page, you'll see that I've completely wrecked my "don't buy more than you've painted" rule. A combination of a massive sale on some soiled box Infinity and a panic buy of a Skaven army box has put me well in the red. I was psychologically setting myself up that it would be fine as I'd get tons painted last weekend, but that hasn't materialised.

Guess I just need to work out how to paint more often now I've got more time available to do it in.

Saturday Smackdown

An irregular series, showcasing photos I took at February's St Albans Smackdown tournament.

EIC Tournament Report Day 2

So, it's Day 2 of the EIC and I've got a 3 game, 200 point tournament to play.  It's a nice and simple 200 point, Limited Insertion event.

First game is against aethelior, who is bringing Corregidor. I have a bad habit against Corregidor, which is that as I play them, I relax because I "know their list" and then get my ass handed to me.

Reader, I got my ass handed to me.

Corregidor had first turn and sent McMurrough up the field to murder my doctor and Lieutenant. I managed to use my McMurrough ensure werewolf mutual destruction, and then he dropped a Hellcat with Boarding Shotgun into the back of my link team. It ended in a 6-0 loss with me only having 18 points left alive on the table...

Next up was Supplies, where I faced vito, who was running Druze Bayram Security. Again, an army I play and know but this time I was cautious.

The Druze Saito Togan managed to grab a supply box, hand it off to some other shmuck, then run away

My link team brutally murdered pretty much everyone in their way and picked up the other two supply boxes . . .

Saito snuck out and demolished the Rui Shi, who could see through all his clever invisibility tricks, but he didn't have enough orders left to slaughter everyone else, so he had to sneak away.

I then answered the vital question of who wins a Werewolf vs Ninja fight. It's the Werewolf. I grabbed the last box through the ancient art of "murdering the person holding it", and ended the game with a 10-1 win, with poor vito only left with 44 points on the board and my Rui Shi the only casualty.

The final game was Countermeasures in a strange (it turns out rather last minute) board set up to be a training arena, with lots of big blocks, weird hiding holes and tall buildings. My opponent was vettel, playing US Ariadna.

My left flank turned out to be the main route for fighting, with his troops advancing under smoke there, then mine putting down smoke to clear out the ARO pieces with the Rui Shi. McMurrough got killed again, but I'd blunted his ability to move around and do much more.

I was obscenely lucky, having forgotten about Van Zant, a special drop trooper who can walk on from the enemy deployment edge. I managed to shoot him back using the fireteam granted Sixth Sense rather than getting unopposed shot to  death.

Second turn, I pushed up to get my data tracker mission, killing his 112 biker on the way . . . and accidentally putting him into retreat. I thought for a moment I'd won, but he'd also scored his data tracker objective, making the whole game a draw, 6-6.

As it was, I came 5th overall (a win in the last game would have crept me into 4th). All in all I was pretty happy with the result. The EIC was an excellent event that I absolutely love. Sadly, they've announced they're planning something different next year, but I'm waiting to hear what the plan is, because they run good events.

I'll miss the spa hotel if it moves, though.

Next steps in Infinity

Information is starting to come out about the upcoming March release of "Code One", a simplified version of the Infinity rules. This is intended to make it easier to get into the game. Then, in August, we'll see a new, fourth edition of the game.

With there now being a reasonable amount of information out now, it's got me thinking about what I'm going to do in the next edition. It's also a good opportunity to take stock, and the combination of the two was enough for me to write up a blog post documenting it.

Where I am now

Primarily, I collect Nomads and NA2 Mercenaries. With Defiance coming, I picked up Operation: Wildfire for the Shasvastii models, so have a small Shasvastii and O-12 contingent as well. Due to the breakdown of the models available to the NA2 factions I play, I can also field a Qapu Khalqi force from Haqqislam, given it consists of mostly Mercenaries. I'm painting the Shasvastii myself, and plan to paint the O-12 and Nomads. My NA2 mercenaries I get commission painted.

I'm mostly playing my Dahshat Mercenary Company seriously at tournaments this year, and signed up to play my Nomads in the HATE League because I missed them.

First steps

The first thing I'm going to want to do once N4 comes out is to get in a "test" game with each of my forces. QK are at the bottom of the list, as they're currently officially out of print, so won't get their list released on Day 1. I don't intend to do anything hugely clever in those first games - basically, take a stereotypical list for that faction, and see how it shakes out.

Painting

While I've painted none of my Nomads and a handful of my Shasvastii, I still don't own enough Shasvastii to run a sensible list. I'd originally been assembling the Shasvastii myself, but having proven to myself I can do it, I'm going to get them shipped off to my commission guy to get assembled. I can spend more of my time painting that way.

All I'm missing, in practice, for my Shasvastii is a smattering of remotes. This isn't a pricey or difficult purchase, so as soon as I'm further along with the Shasvastii painting, I'll get them in. The idea is to get to the point that when Defiance ships in November, I'll have all the current Shasvastii releases painted.

Meanwhile, while I love my Nomads to bits, the Shasvastii painting objective is a bit more achievable and would mean I could get a faction done. I've still not decided on my Nomad paint scheme and some test paints are absolutely on the "to do" list. Once I've decided the paint scheme, the idea will be to paint up a workable list, play it, then work out what to paint next to expand it.

Things to get

Outside of the very basics of Shasvastii (the Beyond box and the remotes), there's nothing I really need to get right now. The only purchases I plan to make until I've got more forces painted up are anything that's either limited edition or going out of production to mean I don't end up paying eBay prices later.

I'd like to play around with Puppetbots and the Zondnautica in Nomads, but what's the point in getting them now? I've got stuff queued up for my commission guy already that I'll get to play sooner. I'll pick them up with there's a space in the commission schedule, and preferably once I've worked out my Nomad paint scheme and have painted up a full list.

In summary

I'm really positive about where I am with Infinity. I'm enjoying the games, I'm getting stuff painted myself as well as through my commission painter, and there's a new edition coming which will mean that I get lots of fun new interactions to learn about. If anything, this means I can take my foot off the gas at the games a little bit and focus more on the modelling and painting aspect as I get ready for the new edition. But that's fine, both are fun!