Antares: Creature Feature and Reinforcements!

THE WILD KINGDOM OF YADROLLA

I remember back ages ago reading an article in White Dwarf about the Ambull.  For those that don't remember this beastie, the Ambull was a subterranean creature that you could throw into scenarios to mix things up.  The Ambulls could burst out of the ground to attack the troops or you could have the whole battle set inside of a warren of Ambull tunnels.  Of course this was back in the Rogue Trader book for Warhammer 40k so it was more than 30 years ago.  Since the closest real gaming store that I knew of was two states away, I was never able to get the Ambull mini but I love the concept.

Moving back to the present, it kind of feels like Antares is doing something similar with the fauna from Xilos and the new plants from the Dronescrouge supplement and I think its awesome!  It has also inspired me to look in my own collection to see what critters I can scrounge up to inhabit Yadrolla.  Since its a swamp/rainforest, I want to stay away from the myriad of bugs that I have except maybe the ripplers.  That's right, giant mosquitos for the win!

"Anyone bring a can of Raid?!?"

These I don't have a lot of these as they were released towards the end of the Starship Troopers mini game, but I should have more than enough for random encounters.  I've also been thinking about painting up some of these to use for Mars Attacks (namely the giant bugs random encounter card) so this will let me kill two birds with one stone!  It did wind up being a bit larger than I remembered once I had it assembled but I suppose they could just be giant space wasps.

I also have some of the old Tyranid ravagers which will fit the bill.

"Snakes... why did it have to be snakes..."

With their serpentine bodies and their giant scything claws I can see these being some kind of a snake-like predator, perfect for the swampy terrain.  I'll need to grab some more of the smaller arms for these but I think they will work.

And last but not least, I have some Growlers from when I was dabbling with Vor from FASA.

Here's a stock image of the Growlers since I still have to assemble mine.

I had picked up two of the starter sets so that gives me a good number of Razorbacks to throw into the mix.  I'm thinking of them as xeno-gorillas on some serious steroids.

Of course I still need to put together some stats for these but since they are just for fun it should be easy to do.  I'm not trying to make balanced units for an army, just something to add a twist to the game.

REINFORCEMENTS HAVE ARRIVED!

Besides adding to the menagerie of Yadrolla, I've also got more troops to throw into the fray!  Nothing major but I wanted to get a support option to round out their ranks so I picked up the X-launcher team for my Algoryn.  Add this team and the targeter shard to the troops from Strike on K'Ara Nine gives me a good 500 point block to start with.  It's taken longer than I'd hoped but life happens sometimes.

And the AI aren't the only ones getting more love.  I also picked up an X-launcher team for my Concord troops.  It seems like people consider this one of the mainstay support options so it made it an easy choice for both armies.  This also rounds out the core of my Concord army though I've still have a good number of sprues left thanks to the Summer sprue sale.  Maybe I'll paint up a strike squad as a special guard unit for my NuHu Mandarin...  Not a bad idea but it'll have to wait until I get my core troops painted.

Random Updates: Where Did The Weekend Go?

So I had plans to get my Algoryns painted up, start working on some of the alien lizards for Bastion, and maybe even start my NuHu Mandarin.  And then Starbound happened.

Title screen to Starbound.  Exciting, isn't it?

For those of you that haven't heard of it, Starbound is an open universe exploration/combat/crafting game.  Kind of like a side scrolling version of Minecraft with a sci-fi flavor.  My daughter introduced me to this game before but I haven't touched it for a while... until this weekend.  On a positive note, I did get the real life responsibilities taken care of, but by the time I sat down to paint, the lightning was against me.  I desperately need to get myself a desk lamp for my workspace because this isn't the first time that I've had this problem.  Which I did!

I finally have a dedicated workspace again!  With light even!

As can be seen, I've got a few things that I've been trying to get to which has been getting harder as the days are getting shorter so hopefully this will help with my productivity.  Then I just need to work on actually getting a game in!  Well, other than my weekly Dungeons and Dragons game that is, so its not all bad.  It'll be nice to get some minis back on the table though so I'm looking forward to squeezing in some painting time in this weekend.  Baby steps but at least things are still moving forward.

Antares: Algoryn Paint Scheme and Even More Independent Contractors!

(In the three and a half months that this post has been up, it has been viewed almost 700 times!  Now this seems a little ridiculous since all of the other posts have less than 50 views.  So what's the difference?  It had "mercenaries" in the title which seemed to be attracting a lot of attention from some parts of the world.  As a test, I decided to switch that part of the title to see just what happens.  And now back to our post already in progress...)

This past weekend I finally worked out the paint scheme for my Algoryn, with my daughter's help of course.  Can't decide on a color scheme?  Ask an aspiring artist!

Here are the two paint schemes... original on the left and the new one on the right.

The original scheme didn't jump out enough for me which is one of the things I'm finding I really enjoy about Antares.  So many of the paint schemes that I've seen are so bright it really made me want to do something more eye catching.  For this force, I was taking inspiration from the colors you'd find in a typical rainforest; parrots, frogs, and the like.  Unfortunately I stopped short on the original scheme so I threw another drybrush on the green and then undercoated the red and yellow markings with white first to really make them pop.

A freshly repainted squad... and they even go with the tablecloth!

In some ways its a subtle difference but overall I really like how much more striking the colors are.

I also finally had a chance to start digging into the mountain of stuff that is in my workspace only to find even more of the mercenary minis I had stumbled across.  Now I have enough to actually field a three squads of the Traahiri mercenaries if I wanted to, plus I found four of them in power armor.  Not sure how this would translate into Antares but its something I'm going to brainstorm on.  I do think that it would be cool to be able to field them as their own army as well but given the figure count I think it would be a stretch.  Of course I could always use them as allies and tack on a C3 command squad.  Have the Concord troops acting as advisors for the Traahiri.  Hmmm...  definitely something to think about but first I should get some paint on them.  This weekend I'm going to wrap up my Algoryn repaint and start work on the Traahiri.

Blood Bowl and Antares: The Rats Are Taking The Field! And Hey, That's The Green I Was Looking For!

It's that time of year again and friend of mine sent me a message with two words...

Blood Bowl.

It's been years and I think six editions since I played but I still have my Skaven from all those years ago.

Behold!  It's the...  um…   well crap, they had a name once... been too long...  the Rat Bastards maybe?  The Dirty Rats?  Gonna have to think about that one....

They still look pretty good, especially since I painted them 25 plus years ago but I'm thinking about changing them up a bit.  The original colors were... something acrylic?  But I don't even know what company made them much less what shade they are.  Since I have to repaint the ref/blitzer in the front, I think that I'm going to go with a brighter shade of green.  Seems like it would fit the warpstone greenish glow more than the dark shade I'd used before.  I also want to rebase them since the current edition uses 32mm bases instead of 25mm.  Thankfully I have a number of 30mm bases floating around so these will do nicely; really don't think that anyone would argue about the 2mm difference in size.  I've also got an old rat ogre floating around in my bits box so this is a good opportunity to finally get him assembled as well.

And On The Antares Front...

On a more sci-fi note, I've been taking a good, long look at my Algoryn and I'm really not happy with their final color.  It's just too dark so I decided to see what other shades of green were in the P3 range.  It took some digging but I did manage to find a shade that would work well... except it seems to be out of stock everywhere.  After digging through three online stores plus the Privateer Press website itself to try to figure out how I could get just one bottle of this paint, I decided to inventory the P3 paints that I owed... only to find the very color I was looking for.  And the moral of the story?  Look in your own paint collection before you start digging through the internet to find one color.