Adeptus Mechanicus - Hypaspists in progress

A little forward progress on the Hypaspist units over the past week. With 24 of them to do at once, I really start to notice how similar the various casts are. While they are nice models and I'm not complaining about the detail, there are only three variants, and to be honest at arms length they do all look about the same. Eventually these models will become the Praetorians for the Army and I'm scheming on how I'm going to build the replacements. I have several boxes of the Wargames Workshop Greatcoat Troopers, and at 18 in a box, the two boxes will allow me to build three 12-man units. I'm hoping that with the judicious application of Cadian arms and Pig Iron heads, the to-be-build Hypaspists will end up looking a bit more dynamic than these Iron Brotherhood sculpts.

...But back to the task at hand - the Iron Brotherhood models from MicroArt Studios. In order to keep myself from going completely insane while batch painting them, I decided that I would alternate the cloak and trim colors between the two units. One squad would have red cloaks with white cog trim and one would have white cloaks with red cog trim. Holy cow does painting all those little cogs ever get tedious! I still have the white cogs to do on the first unit, and then an entire pass of highlight red and while for all 24 models. Once that's done however, the rest of the detail work shouldn't take much time at all - the various hoses and lenses, some gold details on the bionics and I think I can call them done!

Our local gaming group recently kicked off a Special Operations: Killzone campaign, so I took a little time and banged out a small campaign map. We're keeping the map campaign rules extremely simple for this initial go - the tiles are simply a means for us to keep score. After 8-10 strategic turns the player who holds the most hexes (via winning games as the attacker) wins. Depending on how that goes, the next go-around we may try to add a bit more flavor to the campaign map with various tiles providing bonuses or detriments, as well as including add-ons such as the bastions, power generators, etc. that come with the Planetary Empires box...

Trying out the Killzone rules

This past weekend a friend of mine and I tried out the rather interesting Killzone rules that the folks over at Galaxy in Flames had put together. I'd been wanting to give them a try as they seemed to be a nice crossover between the full 40k rules, the 3rd and 4th edition Kill Team rules and the significantly thin Kill Team rules presented in the recent Battle Missions book. While we didn't try to do a full-on battle report while trying out the rules for the first time, I did snap some pictures of the table and a couple turns in progress (warning, big ol' pictures, click to embiggen).

As I really enjoy Necromunda where the more terrain the better, I was looking forward to really packing the table. I broke out a couple pieces I don't use too often, including two high-rise, non-rubbled buildings.

  

The first game was an ambush scenario, where my "David and Goliath" team (3 Ogryns and 4 Ratling Snipers) attempted to escape the pincer assault of two teams of Traitor guard, mutants, and other Lost and the Damned troops. While the Ogryns made a valiant effort to protect their smaller abhuman kin, the entire team of snipers were killed. A sole Ogryn made it off the table edge at the end of the battle, the rest of the models were cut down by the combined fire of the traitorous scum.

 

The second battle was (on paper) a little more evenly-matched. I built a 'Faux-Colonel Schaeffer's Last Chancers' team using choices from a veteran squad and a platoon command squad, while my opponent was running an Alpha Legion themed team with a couple marines and a huge pack of chaos hounds. While the guardsmen put up a valiant fight, they too were pulled down and slain by the relentless advance of the traitors.
All in all, a dark day for the Imperium!

Overall we had a good time, and the Killzone rules seemed to be smooth and well thought out. In fact we're considering incorporating some of the rules into our games of regular 40k, notably the difficult terrain movement rules - we both agreed that the 4" movement in difficult terrain sped up the game considerably as my tables generally include a fair bit of difficult/area terrain. We're looking forward to playing more Killzone soon! My thanks to Big Jim and the rest who came up with this rule set - I heartily recommend giving it a try if you haven't already!