Workbench: Painting the Concord for Beyond the Gates of Antares

One of the good but challenging things about Gates of Antares is how wide open the paint scheme can be.  There are the studio paint schemes for the various factions but they commonly encourage you to paint them how you want.  Its great to have all of the options available but I've got to admit that for me it tends to lead to the "Well, crap" moment from too many options.

I decided to try digging into the fluff to see if I could glean some direction from that but for the most part that is wide open as well, but while looking on the FB group I stumbled on a reply from Nick Gardiner about how he was inspired by Clone Troopers.  He did a great job with them and it inspired me to do something similar with mine.

I initially was going to go for Stormtrooper look as well but after doing some layered dry brushing I decided to only go up to a light grey instead of white.  I went back over their weapons, joints, and some other details with a black wash, and then picked out some details with red.  I also marked my leaders with red shoulder pads to make them a little easier to pick out while playing the game.

Front view of the strike squad...

...and the back view.

This is a pretty basic scheme but it will make it easy to knock out more figures when I expand my Concord force, plus it fits in with the story that I developed for them.  While this definitely isn't something that you need to do, I've always enjoyed adding something more to my forces so that they aren't just generic army x.  I find it personalizes the army and lets me feel more invested in the story of the game.

In the Antaren universe, the Concord are one of the two major powers with their territory containing a vast number of worlds.  Since I'm also collecting Algoryn and Ghar armies, I decided that I wanted to create a shard that would face these two opponents on a regular basis.  Both the Algoryn and Ghar are very militant and potentially hostile races, so I imagine that a Concord world bordering their space would be similar as they would have to be ready to deal with incursions on a regular basis.  In these harsh conditions the IMTel would be focused on maintaining and regulating order so the military would be able to respond as quickly as possible to any outside threats, hence the no nonsense aesthetic that of my troops.  I'm going to try to write up a little bit of a back story for them as well, but first I want to get some paint on my Algoryn troops as well.