Making a Liar Out of Me

Within the last few weeks I posted to the Shack (in response to something K0LM posted, I think) that my wife would never voluntarily paint a miniature.  Well, words, if I could find you, I'd eat you.  She passed by the table while amrbean and I were getting ready to play the other night, caught sight of a Kroot Carnivore, and declared that she wanted to paint one.  And she meant it, apparently.

I've been barred from posting closeups until she's completed it to her satisfaction, though.

Uniform Assembly

(Get it?  I'm assembling their uniforms and they're all the same.  I'm so witty.  Or not.)

Five more Fire Warriors undercoated with Astronomican Grey Foundation.  Took me about 5 straight hours on Saturday afternoon, while my wife was out playing with my sisters and mother and the boys were down for their nap.  The left legs of all the models caught far too much primer; really the entire left sides did.  I had to practically free-hand the outlines of the armor panels on their legs, which sucked.  I meant to try and get the white topcoat done on them all on Sunday, but I wound up playing Soulstorm (SP) and Dawn of War II (MP) for awhile.

Assembly Line

I tried a little assembly-line painting last night, and either I'm doing it wrong or it just doesn't work that well with how fiddly Tau are.  The 5 additional helmets you see down there took me a good hour+ to complete and I don't really feel a sense of accomplishment for it.  I'd probably have rather spent the time getting a single model further along.  That said, I'm going to continue trying the assembly-line method for at least these 5 guys (burgers anyone?) and see if it picks up any when I'm painting something aside from helmets.  But I doubt it.

Hmmm...echelon formation doesn't really work with a macro lens.

Not Too Shabby

I got my first Fire Warrior to probably 75-85% complete.  I could spend forever trying to make him perfect, or I could move on to the other 23 waiting in line.  This guy will get a few more dabs of color here and there and a little bit of a Badab Black Wash in at least a few places, but I'm effectively done with him.

For reference, I'm trying for an effect that's an amalgamation of a Star Wars Imperial Stormtrooper and Hikaru Ichijo's Skull 11 from Macross: Do You Remember Love?  I had the brilliant inspiration last night that I should do my (soon to be) 4 XV8 Crisis Battlesuits in Roy/Hikaru/Max/Milia colors.

The lines aren't particularly clean, but WTFever, it's my first one and I'm proud of it.

It kinda looks better in the pictures than in person; the blue and red kneepads and the green optics pop out much better due to the harshness of the flash.

Our model: Skull 11 VF-1 Valkyrie, piloted by one Chu-i Hikaru Ichijo.  Assuming I spelled his rank correctly.  I've got better (read: much more expensive) toy-versions in the attic, but this one is 3-year-old-proof.

And So It Begins

Painting.

Not sure I'll ever be good at it.  Not sure I'm patient enough to ever be passable at it.  Not sure whether or not I enjoy it.  Not ready to give up on it quite yet, though.

I did give up on trying to thin the paint with water on the big piece of tile on the left there.  I couldn't get get a good consistency, and it was drying out real fast.  (That turned out to be a problem in general; I eventually had to close the pot between each dip into it for more paint.)  What I wound up doing was simply wetting the brush, giving it a light dab on the paper towel, then getting some paint directly out of the pot and going at it.  I guess in theory I'm diluting the paint still in the pot by doing so, but whatever, it's such a miniscule amount of water.

This is a Fire Warrior that's been primed black and given a bit of an undercoat in Astronomican Grey (a Citadel Foundation), with an eventual topcoat to be done in white.  I need a brighter light to help with determining what's supposed to be an armor panel and what's cloth; I'm positive I missed some armor.  I'm kind of aiming for an Imperial Stormtrooper-esque look (white armor, black cloth/seams), which is not at all original.  Oh well.  I plan on gussying it up a bit with the colors from the Macross: Do You Remember Love? version of Hikaru Ichijo's VF-1 Valkyrie (the red one, not Fokker's yellow one; sorry for the random link, but those were the best images I could find quickly).  The eye-lenses will be green.

(I guess captions go below pictures.)  Ready to begin.  Hello, Shack!

Still getting used to this whole macro lens thing.  Need a flat-topped thingy to blu-tack the model onto.

Not sure what I'm going to do with the backpack.  I mean, god damn, the lines and dots there are tiny.

I'm undecided on whether or not to keep the seams on the helmet visible.

Don't know what I want to do with the gun.  Trying out a few patches of (what will eventually be) white in an asymmetrical pattern.

I am Fire Warrior.  Rawr.

Magnetoengineering for the Greater Good

My first foray into magnetizing was a qualified success.

I started following this guide which is currently hosted at Eastern Empire.  It went relatively smoothly, though as you can see from the pics I didn't get one magnet quite right and had to plunk a second one down next to it.  (The first magnet was the one closer to the lip, which wasn't making a solid physical or magnetic connection to the one in the hull; the second one seals fairly nicely.)  So far all I've done is the jaw/locking piece and the extension for the chin/multi-tracker.  Unfortunately I'd already assembled both the railgun and the ion cannon before I found this particular guide, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to modify the instructions in order to "properly" magnetize those.

Lessons learned:

1. It's nothing to be afraid of.  I was oddly nervous before I made my first drills.
2. Old super/krazy glue is a bitch to work with; I need to buy a new pot.
3. The magnets are tiny.
4. I found the easiest way to get the magnets into the holes was to triple-check the polarity, attach the magnet to the pin vice's drillbit, set the magnet into the hole, then kind of scrape/drag the drill bit off until I could get a fingernail in to hold the magnet down for the final release.  Toothpicks would've been ideal or that last bit (I have stumpy fingers), but I keep forgetting to buy them.
5. A needle or something else sharp/pointy (oh hey! the tip of the X-acto would've worked) to start a guide pinprick would have been helpful.
6. Need a ruler with clearly-marked mm.  I was using a measuring tape that I think was inches on both sides, but with a finer delineation on the flipside.

Done.  My not-quite-3-year-old brought me the toy airliner.  Actually he brought me a twin turboprop (sorta like whatever they were flying in Air America; C-37 or something?) and then decided that he wanted that one and I had to take the airliner.

This one was fairly easy to do...

...but this one required a Mulligan.

Multi-tracker with additional piece of sprue in order to make a set of teeth that would prevent it from slipping out.  I see that I forgot to include a pic of that piece.  Oh well, you can see it in the guide.

Fully assembled!

You can't really tell from the pic, but the whole magnetized assembly is hanging over the edge of the table.

Albino Kroot

Pretty much finished priming all the assembled models I have this afternoon.  Unfortunately the white Rustoleum "plastic primer" I used on the Kroot was real thick, and it globbed out most of the detail on the models.  Part of me doesn't care 'cause A) I don't like Kroot and 2) they're much more complicated to paint than FWs and battlesuits, so my desire:patience ratio to do so was already very low.  But the perfectionist in me is eventually going to want to try the stuff discussed here. 

My ad hoc priming station.

Poor Kroot.  Those are the veteran FWs that survived this past week's game vs Mike.

Mechanized elements ahoy!  The one with the burst cannon attached is my Devilfish, the other is a to-be-magnetized Hammerhead.

The real reason people love and play Tau.

A Moral Victory

Battle 02 was played last night vs. Mike’s (aka amrbean) Space Marine chapter.  Points limit for the evening was set at 750; he came in at exactly 750 while I was a mere 749.  We rolled Capture and Control for the mission, Spearhead for the deployment, and I won the roll-off, choosing to deploy first and take the first turn.  Mike set his control point in the far corner of his two legal table edges (using his wedding band), and I offset mine a bit towards center to take advantage of a bit of blocking terrain (using an Ethereal painted by my Scottish friend Tom, who first introduced me to 40k several years ago via the original Dawn of War RTS).  I was slightly preoccupied being Dada, so to get things rolling Mike setup the terrain features for both of us, and he allowed me to move one of the trees down near his table edge to beef up the foliage there (for a plan of mine that didn’t work out).

It was with no small amount of trepidation in my mind (and a hungry 3-month-old in my arms) that we shook hands and had at it.  We were so absorbed in playing the game that we didn’t take pictures at some key moments, but whatever; we’re still new at this.

Pre-Game
Mike is setting up terrain.  That upside-down-bowl looks vaguely like a Tau building, don’t you think? We’ve already deployed, so this is effectively also a top-of-Turn 1 tableau.  It didn’t matter (as he never fired them), but my Broadside has a Twin-Linked Plasma Rifle rather than the Smart Missile System as modeled.  (I was disappointed with the Hammerhead’s SMS; 24” range was awfully short for my heavy support long-range guy).  We livestreamed the game via justin.tv; that’s what the Macbook is for.  Next time we’ll even try to have the audio working.

Turn 2 (Yes, we forgot to take pics during Turn 1.  Shaz’bot.)
This is the bottom of the turn; I think Mike is looking up some Sniper-related rules at the moment as he gets ready to shoot at my Broadside.  Notice the lack of visible ASMs; Hammerhead submunition rounds took a pretty bad toll already, and the survivors are using the Tau building as cover during their advancement on the Devilfish.   Look closely; see the beautiful patterns all that lovely smoke is making as it billows out of the smashed Predator?  I can’t remember if it was the Hammerhead or the Broadside, but I scored a Crew – Stunned in Turn 1 and a Destroyed – Explodes! in Turn 2.  Now Mike knows how my Devilfish felt in Battle 01.  Somewhere in here I completely forgot about the Kroot for a turn, which let Mike amble on up and chip out a model with his Razorback’s Storm Bolter.

Turn 3
ASMs were unsuccessful in their grenade attack on the Devilfish, who promptly skimmed the hell out of there.  This is where I failed to win the game by not making a beeline for Mike’s objective; I let myself get distracted by the smell of Space Marine blood in the air and worry overmuch about the Land Speeder (in my defense it was armed with a melta weapon).

A few different shots of the end of my Turn 3 player turn.  Scouts dead, but not before Pinning my Broadside.  We didn’t want to stop to look it up, so we agreed that he would’ve been pinned before making the fall-back morale check and then later that at the end of his pinning he was back in play instead of making another morale check for falling back or not; either way it was a moot point, I don’t think he ever managed to get another salvo off.

Turn 4
I moved the Hammerhead in to cockblock the Razorback from having a straight shot at my objective, having remembered that it was crammed to the rim with a full 10-man TSM squad.  That last ASM had managed to shove a grenade up my Devilfish’s tailpipe, which removed any hope of an outright scenario-victory for me.

I managed to wreck the Razorback during my shooting phase, and you can see the TSMs piling out.

Turn 5
I’m sorry, is that a Direct Hit on the scatter dice in the midst of the TSM squad?  Why yes!  Yes it is.  Actually it’s my second direct hit of the night, the first having been earlier vs. the ASMs.

Those Kroot are getting awfully close to the Captain over there on the far side of the table.

Turn 6
Mike rolled us into Turn 6; good for me, not as good for him.  Except that somehow my stupid far-sighted Hammerhead managed to miss the Land Speeder while blocking LOS for the Broadside.  Trying to save his Shas’la, my Shas’el assaulted in and took out 2 TSMs.  There are plasma blasts and missiles landing just about everywhere except on that damn Land Speeder!

Somehow that single damn Kroot passed his leadership check vs. morale.  A Shaper in the making?

The surviving TSMs assault and manage to take out one of my Shas’el’s drones while the Land Speeder scores a second Immobilized hit on the Devilfish (I think Mike was trying to blow it up in order to inflict casualties on the Fire Warriors), taking out the burst cannon.  And the Captain didn’t have any trouble repelling the Kroot’s assault and taking his head off.  Ah well, I guess he wasn’t shaping up after all.  Ha ha.

End of Game
I roll for Turn 7 and come up short; the game ends immediately in a tactical draw, with no one controlling any Control Points.  It’s only just now occurring to me, 2.5 hours after we finished playing, that neither of us technically controlled our own control points.  Oops?  There’s so much to remember.

Post-game analysis, bragging, and commiserating.

Conclusion
This is a damn fun game.

I was convinced going into it that Mike was going to mop the floor with me, but most of my units made good turns of the bad tactical situations I put them in.  I'm laughing (through my yawning) at the fact that neither of us was controlling our own point, but live and learn.  There was plenty of fumbling for the rulebooks, but our fundamental grasp was orders of magnitude better than it was just 10 or so days ago when we played our "prologue" introductory 550 point game.  Tau army lists seem to work a lot of the edge cases (complex units with multiple-wound and single-wound components: can I put a wound on a Shas'el two turns in a row, then put a third wound on a drone during a subsequent turn in order to save the Shas'el?) which it falls on me to be clear about.  I also lost sight of the actual victory conditions early in the game, which led to enough blunders that it snowballed into me needing a complete kill in order to win.

We need more terrain.  I won't be buying any, but even though I consciously tried to bring out lots of stuff to use as terrain features the table was sparse compared to what I see in other battle reports.  That's something else we'll get to over time, I'm sure.

Mike purchased Planetary Empires last week and brought the rulebook for me to skim.  The elegantly simple campaign rules it has look pretty damn fun.  We're going to try and get a campaign going, but it might be difficult to drum up another player who's willing to approach it as, "Let's play a game together!" rather than, "Let's see who I can crush beneath my armored boot."

All in all I feel as though I won a moral victory; I didn't lose the match outright, and I could've easily come closer to victory, if not actually achieving it, if I'd not been so caught up in bloodlust.

Paint It Black

I see a grey tank and I want it painted black
No greyscale anymore I want them to turn black
I see the tanks skim by ranked in their warring rows
I rotate my railgun until my target blows

More priming.  There are a few places I'm going to have to spot-check (inside nacelles, around movable turrets, hatches, the like) when I don't have a 4-month-old a few feet away in a bouncy-seat and a 3-year-old careening about demanding Dada's attention.  All in all, though, not bad for a rank novice splitting an hour's time between the kids and the hobby.

In the background are a GF9 GFT030 pin vice, bit, and rod set and some neodymium magnets of various sizes.  I'm going to try magnetizing the Hammerhead's multitracker (registration now appears to be required to view the forum, which wasn't the case earlier today?) so that it's convertible to a burst cannon, allowing the tank to moonlight as a Devilfish.  Unfortunately when I assembled the current Devilfish several months ago I glued the commander hatch in place, so if I want to make it convertible (into a Sky Ray, unless I can dig up another turret or figure a way to convert the Sky Ray's missile wing turret into a Hammerhead turret) I'm going to have to do something funky with the hatch.  Like...chop it out.

I think I've got a better grasp of what a macro lens is for, even though I still don't have the least idea how to make proper use of it.  The first 2 were done with the Nikon D50's kit lens, and the other 4 with an AF Nikkor 50mm.  Whatever that means.

Uninspired First Post Title Goes Here

Had a busy 40k evening.  Did my first-ever mini-painting in the form of priming all 24 of my Fire Warriors, then scooted out to Home Depot to pick up an 8'x4' sheet of .5" plywood.  Had them rip it at the 2-foot mark, of course, so now we've got a regulation size standard playing surface for the rematch scheduled this Thursday (which will be streamed via justin.tv).

My wife's reaction was a predictable, "You realize that storing it in the open is so not an option."