Infinity Battle Report: Nomads vs PanO

In which the author has trouble booking a table at his usual venue, attends a gaming club for the first time, and roundly gets his teeth kicked in because he hasn't played Infinity for a year...

With my Infinity figures conveniently assembled and undercoated by someone else, it was time to remind myself how this blasted game works. I laid down a challenge on my local gaming store board, received acceptance and arranged a nice 300 point Annihilation mission just to remind myself how all this stuff works. Sadly, my local gaming store is doing really well and is getting all its tables booked out in plenty of time, so I couldn't get a booking. Then HATE (Hackney Area Tabletop Enthusiasts) had venue issues of their own causing them to move to a Tuesday, and my opponent and I changed venues.

HATE is held at Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. It was very welcoming, and a little less busy than usual due to the late change of date.

We set up a pretty typical battlefield - with a mix of my scenery, my opponent's scenery and the club's scenery. My opponent won the initial willpower roll and chose his table side and that I would deploy first, and I in turn chose to go first. My side was the side at the bottom of the photo.

I deployed an invisible Spektr Forward Observer on the walkways in the middle of the battlefield. For those who don't play Infinity, I took this photo to prove to my opponent where the model was, but he didn't get to know where the model was!

On my right flank, a Vertigo Zond, Grenzer Sniper and Reverend Healer on the roof (with the healer lying down so she didn't get shot). An Interventor hid behind the shipping crate and an Alguacile by the remote.

Meanwhile on the left flank, Zoe and Pi-Well hid down the side of a building, behind the Lunokhod Sputnik. A Warcor stood openly on the roof, while my lieutenant, an Alguacile, hid behind the building by the stairwell.

My opponent had an Aquila HMG on the building at the bottom of the picture, with a doctor hiding around the corner. With a mechanised deployment, a Peacemaker Armbot deployed forward behind  the green silo with its companion robot. Further back was a baggage bot, an engineer and some other bits and pieces.

 So, the first thing I needed to do something about was the Aquila Guard HMG. I started off by having my Interventor drop White Noise - the plan was to then use my sniper rifle to take him out, but I totally forgot that the Grenzr has a visor himself, so was also blinded.

The waste of orders was annoying! I also left my Interventor standing out in the open as I forgot about her, causing her to get cut down the following turn, along with the sniper. I revealed my Spektr, who successfully targetted the Aquila Guard, but at the cost of being shot to pieces. I wounded the Guard with a guided missile, but didn't manage to get further - I used a free order to take out the Peacemaker, which I'd also managed to target before it got blown up.

The Peacemaker was then repaired by an engineering bot. My Zero Forward Observer then took speculative fire from a flamethrower. It went badly.

In my turn, I healed up my Grenzr sniper and shot down the Aquila Guard. He was healed up, then finally shot down and killed by the end of the game.

However, my game fell apart as a Cutter TAG revealed itself and rampaged up the field. My best chance was to get the Lunokhod to disrupt it's advance, but it managed to work its way around the Crazy Koalas, shoot them to bits, and storm down the field taking out everything.

In the end, the Warcor and the Lieutenant were the only survivors. The final score was a 9-1 loss. Hopefully a few reports of "unnecessary PanO aggression" might help morale in the face of this awful defeat!

Post Mortem

I was lacking in heavy hitters. I need something with a bit more punch to deal with threats like serious stuff like heavy infantry and TAGs. For now, I'm going to hold off and wait on Human Sphere to come out before I make any purchasing decisions...
 

Setting acheivable goals

This blog is probably a great monument to how terrible I am at setting achievable goals for myself. Here's my progress so far as to the stuff I'm meant to be getting assembled this month.

This is what the target is - finishing everything else in the Easter weekend is just not going to happen! So the good news is that I'm not down about this. I was full of optimism and believed I could do this, but the amount of focus and time I have after work and over the weekends is severely limited.

Probably part of the problem is that I've mostly focussed on little 'quick wins' for so long I haven't done a regiment in forever. Last month I tried to sort out the goblins, and while the sorting out happened, not many got assembled! Hiding behind my paint pots are an assortment of half finished sins...

So, lets recalibrate our expectations a little bit, shall we? Timed goals aren't great, as the real world getting in the way seriously messes up plans - it's not like work where it's your top priority for a certain number of hours a day!

So, first real goal - prep a goblin! This is a gorgeous Bob Olley sculpt that was done for GoblinAid. Most of my goblins are single piece sculpts so are pretty easy to do in isolation. It's just there's a lot of them! There's a bunch of half finished ones sitting on the desk, so they'll be the first targets. It's a nice thing to do around bigger projects and gets adorable little sneaky murderers ready for paint - which will start stocking up on similarly easy to paint things ready to go when I'm in the mood for it!

So there's actually a reasonable amount of stuff sitting in the 'ready to paint' pile. Most that weren't commission assembled are small single figure pieces, but the good news is that there's a nice backlog set up there.

The key thing, I think, is to plug on through the big unit of Forsaken, get them assembled, then split them into slightly smaller groups for painting. Meanwhile, keep knocking through individual figures to keep the progress going. Clear out the backlog of half finished things to start off with, then move on to other bits and bobs.

The Infinity stuff is basically done now - sadly, I've not been able to get a table at Dark Sphere this week - their gaming hall is thriving and you need to get in early! Current plan with Infinity is to wait for Human Sphere to come out, play some games with my current models and some proxies, then start thinking about what to get next - and definitely keep paying someone else to assemble all my stuff!

Meanwhile, getting these two little dudes painted will bring my Malifaux crew up to a full 50 soulstone painted crew. Teddy will need to come through, and the Coryphee and Performer are currently waiting for smaller drill bits to arrive from Hong Kong...

I am getting more stuff done than before - but I'm still not at a steady pace that I'm happy with. It feels like an engine trying to stutter into life.

Art

 I want to tell a bit of a story, but it doesn't have a start, middle or end. The words are a jumble in my head, the sentences could come in any order.

I'm sitting at my computer desk, in an uncomfortable dining chair because my wife is using the one office chair in the study for Actual Work. I'm drinking peppermint tea and recently finished a cupcake with a flower design on, and the middle of the flower was a smartie.

So, currently scoring around 'moderate adult'.

Sometimes, I walk home from work. My job can be pretty stressful at times, and it's a good way of clearing my head. It takes about an hour and a half or so, and I usually end up listening to some podcast or other.

I'd been listening to the Independent Characters latest podcast, which talks about oil washes and different paint brands, so I was feeling a little bit in an artistic mood. I'd also chatted a little to a couple of people at work about miniature painting and very much in my head was feeling like the painting I do is art (irrespective or not of whether it's any good).

Then I started taking photos of things. It started with a parked up post office van which had some interested sun fading on it in the yellow street lights. You don't see 'faded red' as a paint job very often - I suspect because it's really quite difficult to do. Perhaps it's something I'd like to try one day. The dust pattern along the bottom of the van was also pretty interesting from a weathering point of view as well.

Then the Independent Characters podcast finished up, so I decided to listen to the Radio Free Burrito for the first time. In it, Wil Wheaton talked a bit about some art he was thinking about involving old film, projection and so on.

This got me thinking a whole bunch about the art projects I've never gotten around to doing. When I was at school, I was one of those kids who constantly had grandiose plans I never followed through on. One of my teachers did push me over a cliff on that once by then signing me up to direct and produce a play on my own. That was good for my soul. I need pushing into things, I think. I'm inherently pretty lazy.

I took a bunch of photos with light and shadow and machinery and things. I've put some up on a Tumblr account I created a while back I've never been quite sure what to do with. I don't really know if anyone reads it. I don't like the interface. I'm not sure really why I have it other than for posting photos I want to be able to find later but don't want to leave on the blog because I think that they'd be filler that would kill traffic.

But tonight, I'm thinking about art and writing stream of conscious and I don't care about my traffic stats. Which is weird. I usually do. I mean, I don't, but treat it as a kind of score for how well I'm blogging and how good my content is. Rubbish view scores are a motivation to up the quality of my content. Competing with my past self, really.

Oh. Things I mean to do that never have. Write a blog about fiction and books I read. Write actual fiction myself. Do that painting project where I follow all the painting tutorials in the old GW Masterclass book.

Everything is a bit of a muddle. I think the weekend will be focussed in on sorting out little things I've not finished. Making things more ordered. Tidying. My mind is stressed and having trouble focussing and little successes are needed to give that little happy bump of 'done' and 'organised', rather than the big project of doom which takes a lot of effort to get done. Remember the lazy thing? But I need some success about now.

What I do is art. Be that writing on the blog, photos I take or painting miniatures or telling stories. Is it good art? That doesn't matter. It's art, and I did it.

Changeling Proxy finished, and a bit of a dilemma

So, this little trouble maker is why the blog wasn't up on Monday. I'd taken the original photo to display him, and suddenly spotted a horrible splodge of purple on the orb he's holding! I couldn't cope with this, so had to take some time to fix him, by which point it was too late to finish the blog post.

He's a demonic familiar from Heresy Miniatures. I'm using him as a proxy for a Changeling in Malifaux until the correct model comes out. The base is a Scibor "rocky" base. I spent a bit of time on the base experimenting with washing and stippling, and enjoyed learning a few new tricks I might be able to use.

I also learned a little bit about going the extra mile. Here's an earlier version of our creepy little friend, back when I spotted that splodge of purple on the band of the metallic gubbins he's holding. When I patched it up, I also did a teeny bit of edge highlighting in Runefang Steel to bring up the metal, and I think it really worked. Before I even did this, I'd asked my wife for feedback, and she felt the face was too dark. That resulted in the highlight on the lips, and the yellow edge highlights on the bottom lines of the hood side flaps, and over the joint of the nose and eyes - again, adding stronger, better highlights to a tiny extent really improving a model!

My weekend productivity was helped by, when I finally did get down to some serious Forsaken assembly, setting up my iPad to watch the Beasts of War 2015 Gaming Awards, then their latest Infinity battle report for Operation Flamestrike.

I found this particularly helpful as it meant I had a second thing to focus on while I scraped mould lines clean, but also it meant I didn't get tempted to read blogs, Twitter, Facebook and G+. I suspect that if I was actually manage to focus for longer, I'd get a lot more done. I'm hoping that the watching videos plan improves productivity.

Meanwhile, my most productive avenue for Getting Stuff Done, the ever reliable Paying Someone Else To Do It has continued with a bit of assembly. I decided to give Peachey Models a go to start clearing some assembly work. I started out with these desert insurgents by Miniatures of the North. They came back well assembled for the price - a tiny bit of clean up missed (less than I'd usually miss and have to fix halfway through painting) and one gun knocked off by my particularly brutal local post office.

But this leaves me with a problem. I'd originally planned to use these as chaos cultists . . . but they just don't feel right for that. There's nine of them, so they don't suit as Imperial Guard veterans. I think they might work as a "Renegade Marauders" squad from either the Lost and the Damned or Tyrant's Legion list - but I don't know off hand how many models that needs.

I really like the models and want to paint them and think they deserve to see some table use - I'm just hard pressed to work out what to use them for...

Anyone got any suggestions?

A new basing experiment

Long term followers of the blog will know that I've previously experimented with Agrellan Earth with varied degrees of success. The Bloodletter experiment mostly lead me to swear that all crackle bases would be done separately to the model...

So, with a big unit of Forsaken needing assembling for my Warriors of Chaos, I decided to dig out the pot that had been languishing in a bag for over a year and give it another go.

My old pot seemed to have separated out a bunch. So I used a clay shaper to ladle the stuff onto the bases in random blobs to see how it turned out.

An experiment with pouring it ended . . . poorly. As I was trying to catch up on TV at the coffee table at the time, a sweet wrapper was swiftly used to avoid getting paint everywhere. I did have to be rescued. It was a little embarrassing.

I put some new lumps on the two failed experiments and then left them to dry overnight.

In the morning, it was looking pretty positive! The separation you want from Agrellan Earth had happened, and it was time to do the rest of the work.

Here they are ready for models - I used a few rocks from a Games Workshop basing kit, Vallejo Coarse Pumice and Vallejo Sandy Paste.

The next step will be to pin the assembled models to them, then undercoat the lot before painting.

Goblins, Snorklings, month and and next month's plans...

So, I'm continuing with trying to get a model a week painted so there's something pretty for people to look at when they come to the blog. Or in this case, ugly. Here's some Snorklings, sculpted by Kev Adams. I got these with the Kev Adams self portrait sculpt I painted a while back that Foundry sold for GoblinAid.

I painted these up to check I was happy with my planned colour scheme for the goblins. Quite happy with that!

The main activity of the weekend was goblin assembly. I spent a bit of time trying to work out how this Goblin Spear Chukka went together before realising that the central piece of it was missing. I bought it cheap, sold as seen, due to a damaged blister. I'm going to have to be creative to sort this one out!

I was hoping to get about twenty or so goblins assembled this weekend. I've managedt complete these four shaman and a squiggly beast familiar. An internet gold star for anyone who can name the company / caster for all of these! (This does really show off the sort of thing I'm looking for with my goblins - a rag tag bunch of greenskins from many different suppliers!)

The plastic GW goblin shaman needs to stay in the pieces he's in for painting, as getting a paint brush into some of the nooks and crannies would be otherwise near impossible! There still needs to be a little work on the mould lines on the staff, but it is super fiddly, and I didn't want to rush it!

So, with the February project having been goblin assembly, I've not been hugely successful. They are at least organised, and I know how much effort assembling and painting them will be. For now, I'm going to keep a handful on the assembly desk as I move through other things, trying to get a few done a week until I've got a couple of units assembled up.

I've also put a little bit of fiction on my goblin project page. As units get assembled and / or painted, I'll get pictures and background put up there.

This is the March target. It does look like a lot when you pile it all together. Not all of it is purchases - due to being away at Christmas, we had a late family Christmas in February, so I have many presents! The idea is to get this lot all assembled in the course of the month.

It can be broadly broken down into:

• The Chaos models I wanted that went onto Last Chance to Buy
• An Age of Sigmar force using Bretonnian peasants as survivors of a lost kingdom of the mortal realms (because I was afraid they were going to become Last Chance to Buy)
• Skitarii (present)
• Arcane Ruins (present)
• Arco Flagellants (present)
• Arcworlde Boglin Bazaar

This is certainly an ambitious target. Some might say "brave". But I'm determined to start dealing with  models as they come in! Hopefully, I'll get a couple of speed paints in as palate cleansers as I slog through the mould line removal and gluing!

Wish me luck...

The Infinity Problem

Some of you will remember that this time last year, I got all excited about Infinity. I played (and did rather well) in a slow grow league. I attended Wartrader's Winter Challenge. I also went to the first Totally Crit Open. And then . . . silence. What went wrong?

Well, lets be honest - the first big problem is model assembly. It is an absolute pain and while I can slowly but surely put one or two together over a bunch of time while doing something else, getting a full force together has proved painful!

So, first decision - I still want to paint my Nomads, but they can go off to someone else to assemble. I'm shopping around for quotes at the moment and it looks quite reasonable.


I also keep looking thoughtfully at other armies. I am liking how Nomads play, but it does feel like a lot of people play Nomads and as most of us got into Nomads through Icestorm, there's a lot of similarities between forces.

Still, I could keep them and keep growing the force. There's plenty of models I've not tried yet, and ways I could expand the force. I kind of feel paralysed a bit by the incoming Human Sphere as part of me would like to do a Sectorial, but with potential rules changes and a bunch of figures already bought that cross all the potential Sectorials, I have put work and money into stuff I then wouldn't be using. Jumping between vanilla and sectorial is still a valid option, though!

Then, because I bought Icestorm, I do still have PanOceania models. They don't seem as popular as Nomads, and despite being the 'generic' faction, don't seem to get much love. I certainly wouldn't pick them as a first faction, as they are not my usual play style at all, but I am rather interested in giving them a run at some point to try and understand them better.

The other problem is that I'm a contrary person who likes playing factions no-one else is playing. When Corvus Belli published the 2015 ITS statistics about who plays what, among other things, I started looking at the forces that hardly anyone plays. I ignored the lack of USAriadna as they're a new faction, and steered clear of the massively in need of a re-write Shasvastii, but started browsing the Imperial Service, Acontecimento and Haqqislam in particular. I even had a glance at the Merovingians!

I am definitely not going to dive into a new faction now, but it occurred to me that this could be a good use for the Anvil Industry Afterlife figures I picked up in their Kickstarter. A few proxy games will let me work out if I love to death one of these factions more than the Nomads, without investing years of my life in collecting and assembling!

Learning to paint Reaper Bones

So, I mentioned last time I'd painted a Reaper Bones Medusa. The material is a bit different to what I'm used to, so I had a quick google and read through some threads on the Reaper forums looking for advice. This is more about confirming what worked for me than trying to supplant the advice there - it's really quite thorough!

(If you want to buy this figure yourself, you can get it here if you're in the US. In the UK, the Dice Bag Lady stocks sensible female figures, but will order in other models on request. Miniature Heroes stock a wide range of Reaper, but I can't for the life of me find this one!)

I cleaned mine up using a scalpel blade because that's what I have. I really should get some better files for clean up...

Anyhow, I was then an idiot.

 

 Not fancying paying a bunch for a different undercoat spray to the one I usually use, and skim reading the advice, I went and bought this medium and tried to use it as an undercoat. Of course, medium's job is to evaporate, so unbeknownst to me at the time, this will have done precisely nothing useful.

Fortunately suspicious, I didn't wash down my base coats - they had a little trouble going on, but it was usually fine on a second pass. Once the first coat of paint is on, the next one does just fine because it's sticking to the paint and not the water repelling plastic...

Anyway, next ones I paint will probably use a different undercoating method that actually works, but this at least covers my somewhat foolish experiences. Good news! It's not that unforgiving! You can mess up and still turn out an OK paint job.

As a note - the details on these are not great, and clean up is a pain. Their merit is in the fact that they are cheap, doubly so with the bigger monsters. However, I don't look down on them for that - they have picked a particular market and they're very good for that. I would definitely recommend them for the gamer on a budget, but advise at least being a little cautious with them and trying out what works and what doesn't.

Shamelessly painting models for clicks

The problem with an assembly blitz / focus is that it turns out that lots of pictures of well cleaned up part assembled models really doesn't drive blog traffic. So, to shamelessly pander to what gets clicks, here's a Reaper Bones Medusa I painted up this weekend. It's just a basic paint job, but I had mostly bought her at Salute as a model to learn how to paint Bones on.

I also think she might be the first ever model that I bought at Salute that I've painted myself. That's probably bad, right? I should probably fix that.

I also got in some solid progress on Myth, who is my Tiefling Bard. He's a Heroforge 3D print. I want to get more detail done on him, and some of the base coats are quite rough. I'm also really not sure about the colour I've done on the gloves. Anyone got any ideas?
 

I've previously mentioned my . . . somewhat crowded 'painting table'. It's the dining room table, and half of it should belong to my beloved wife. This is not a source of harmony in my life. So, time to make a bit of a dent in it!

The mess, not the table. The landlord would get grumpy.

Those of you who remember my Goblin Accident at Salute last year will see some familiar suspects on the right of this shot. So... Lets get that sorted out.

 First, I cleared a space and put some stuff away so I actually had enough room to do some organising. I should probably do some more of that clearing and putting away thing in the future, too!

Then I grabbed some foam trays and started sorting the goblins out into sections. I now have a good idea of how many goblins I have, groups they can be sensibly assembled and painted in, and so on. The foam trays take up much less space than the piles of poorly piled up blister packs, so they can go away and take up far less space.

I didn't quite have enough bases, so I put in a small base order with Heresy Miniatures, who, it turns out, stock a good number of different types of bases as well as awesome models and stuff.

I'm feeling really good about my hobby progress this weekend. I've got a finished painted model, another model up to tabletop quality and ready for details and faffing about, and the Goblin Problem is now a Manageable Goblin Problem With a Plan.

It turns out that doing hobby stuff and getting successes in turn makes you feel more enthused, so you end up wanting to do more hobby. This feels like a good positive re-inforcement circle I should continue...