Welcome back to the CollardHammer Special, my fortnightly blog of hobby progress and gaming! Since the last blogpost, things have thankfully calmed down a little bit for me, even though work continues to be intense. With that in mind, I’ve managed to get a good amount of hobby done and played some boarding actions, so let’s dive into it!
The overall projects are progressing nicely. For Emperor’s Children, I finished painting Lucius and undercoated the Infractors and Flawless Blades. I still have a third unit of Noise Marines to assemble, but at this point they are relatively low priority:
I focused a bit more on the general backlog over the last couple of weeks, particularly getting Imperial Agents done:
I finished painting the Deathwatch veterans, painted a unit
of Navy Breachers and prepared all of my remaining Sisters to be painted. I
also painted a Priest and a Repentia Superior for Sisters, mainly so I could
field a fully painted penitent boarding patrol. Overall, I have a total of 16
tickets remaining across both projects and have completed 10 so far this year,
which I think is good progress. I have also nearly finished all my Imperial
Agents, with only a Corvus Blackstar still outstanding.
Lucius was a really fun painting project:
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| Lucius the Eternal |
Like all the new Emperor’s Children, the model is covered in
lots of different textures, particularly lots of different fleshy areas. In
addition to his own skin, which is covered in scars, he has lots of flayed skin
and of course his whip. These are areas that I generally struggle with, so I
put quite a lot of attention into getting his head and face right. I also went
with the same NMM technique for the Laer blade as on the Flawless Blades and on
Fulgrim. I mentioned in the last post that I wasn’t that happy with how it had
turned out on Fulgrim, but I think it went a bit better on Lucius, most likely
because it’s a smaller area on the model. Overall, I am really pleased with how
he came out and am looking forward to getting him on the table.
For the Agents, I mostly did speed painting to get them done:
Speed painted black, with just a few details picked out
I rattled through the Veterans while my wife and I were
watching the live-action One Piece (she is a longtime fan of the anime, but we
would realistically need it to be dubbed and subbed into two different
languages to watch together). They are probably a bit rough in places, but they’re
good enough to play on the tabletop. Similarly, the Navy Breachers were a batch
painting job:
I batch painted the unit in halves, doing all the brass, the
red and picking out the details, before tidying the white, doing the bases,
washing and drybrushing. Overall, the unit took a couple of nights of hobby
work, which I think is fair for what are essentially guardsmen. I like the
breacher kit quite a lot, so I might pick up another box of them at some point.
Of course, I’d like to see how Agents get treated in 11th before
buying anything for them.
Speaking of 11th (and also buying things for
Agents), the Adepticon reveals were very exciting, even if they were easy to
see coming. Most of you reading this probably won’t know, but before taking a
long break from 40k in 2016, I mainly played Imperial Guard, so I often find
myself considering getting back into the faction. The new vehicles look awesome,
and I would strongly consider the battalion box, but we are a little hard up at
the minute. Moreover, the new edition is bound to be an expensive time and the
new Defiler for EC, and the new Inquisitor and named Dogmata that were revealed
also have a strong draw. Overall, 40k seems to be on a really strong run of
releases right now, and I am excited to see how it continues. As for the new
edition, I have some feelings about the rules revealed so far and am obviously
very pleased that the codexes will carry over, but also that it is hard to
understand how changes will affect the game without seeing the new ruleset in
its totality.
In addition to painting, the CSM player in our crusade came
over for a game of boarding actions. I took the heavily melee slanted list for
Sisters, with Repentia, Arcoflagellants and Priests versus their balanced Chaos
patrol, playing one of the asymmetric missions. These scenarios are fun, but
the balance often feels quite a long way off the mark, and this game was no
exception. As the defender, I just had to wait for a couple turns and then
throw my Repentia into melee, killing most of the CSM on my second turn. I
think that both starting with the objectives under my control and going second
(which is often an advantage in BA due to the way hatchways work) conspired to
make the game functionally impossible for Chaos to win. I really enjoy playing Boarding
Actions and hope it gets integrated into the new edition, but I hope that they
revamp the missions.
That pretty much sums up how my last few weeks of hobby have
gone. I am going to be quite busy over the next couple of weeks, but I have more
Boarding Actions set up for later today and a full game scheduled for Tuesday.
There is also the Easter weekend approaching, so I am hoping to get some
painting done, most likely painting some more stuff for Sisters or maybe for
Emperor’s Children. In any case, I hope you have a great week of your own
hobby!
Much love,
Ben
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