ITS @ NOVA Open 2013: Game 4 (Seize the Beacons) vs. Nomads

Out of all my games, this one was the closest, against a very good Nomad player. It all came down to the very last turn, and this was a case where going second was an advantage to me. At the beginning though, I lost the Initiative (again) and ended up going second.

 NOMADS
──────────────────────────────────────────────────
 GROUP 1 (Regular: 10/Irregular: 0):
 INTRUDER (Lieutenant) Combi Rifle + Light Flamethrower, Grenades / Pistol, CCW. (36)
 TOMCAT Engineer Combi Rifle + Light Flamethrower, D-Charges + 1 Zondcat / Pistol, Knife. (28)
 ZONDCAT Electric Pulse.
 TOMCAT Doctor Combi Rifle + Light Flamethrower + 1 Zondcat / Pistol, Knife. (28)
 ZONDCAT Electric Pulse.
 WILDCAT Engineer Combi Rifle + Light Flamethrower D-Charges / Pistol, Knife. (23)
 WILDCAT Heavy Rocket Launcher / Assault Pistol, Knife. (2 | 31)
 ZERO (Forward Observer) Combi Rifle, Antipersonnel Mines / Pistol, Knife. (21)
 LUNOKHOD Boarding Shotgun, Heavy Flamethrower, CrazyKoalas (2) / Electric Pulse. (29)
 TSYKLON Spitfire, Marker / Electric Pulse. (1 | 37)
 REAKTION ZOND HMG, Antipersonnel Mines / Electric Pulse. (1 | 28)
 REVEREND CUSTODIER Hacker (Hacking Device Plus) Combi Rifle + Marker / Pistol, Knife. (0.5 | 38)
 4.5 SWC | 299 Points
ARMY CODE: eNolysENACAIQ9FpytEEBJTFPDm8gJf/0qTGgERAh8HJiO8k766q/+E0E7Y+SKbQz2p2PXD0AbPrEYs=




Deployment, IIRC. I admit, I do not know Nomads as well as I should.

He started out claiming his beacon and setting up to prevent me from claiming the center objective.

One thing I’ve learned against playing Nomads – when faced with CrazyKoalas, just throw cheap troops at it, since the only way to deal with them is for one of your guys to die. I threw my Galwegians at him and they died, against both the CrazyKoalas and the Lunokhod, but it paved the way for my Chasseurs to claim the center objective. My Tankhunter lieutenant on top of the building seized the beacon on top (while prone) before climbing down. My Para-Commandos came in on a coordinated order, Forward Observed (for my Secret Objective), and shot his Wildcat in the back.

In his second turn, his Tomcat came out and shot at my Para-Commandos. My Forward Observer died, but my HMG survived and killed the Tomcat. My HMG actually survived for quite a while, considering all the attention being paid to it. My opponent threw his Tsyklon at the HMG and eventually killed him, but it prevented him from spending orders on the rest of my army. I spent my second turn trying to deal with his Tsyklon and eventually killed him. I spent the remainder of my orders consolidating my forces.

His last turn was to grab the center objective, thus grabbing the win. My only hope was to grab the center beacon, which he had placed a number of mines around. I tried to disable his mines with my Tankhunter Autocannon, who ultimately failed. In a last gamble, my Tankhunter committed suicide on the mines, allowing my Chasseur to run up and, on the last order, claim the center beacon and the win.

I won the game 7-2. I eventually played (and lost to) my opponent again in the team tournament, but he was overall a fantastic opponent. This probably ended up being my favorite game of the day, as it was so close and nail-biting to the end.

Nomad Spektr Update

Sometimes Infinity models can be taxing. Sometimes high standards can be taxing. 

The level of detail and intricacy of Infinity models can be very demanding on a painter and I've decided to call this gent a done deal...for now. 

I need a break. 

Next up on my painting table is a nice change of pace - a 40k Dreadnought. It'll be a welcome change before I bring brush to Infinity figs. 

Airbrushing Infinity Miniatures Follow-up

Following up from my previous post about airbrushing miniatures, here is another picture of the Nomad Spetkr in progress. You can see the foundation of the airbrush work is still there, but I have accentuated the lights and darks and added a lot more color with a traditional brush. 

Because I have sprayed highlights from above, it helps reveal where the light hits the model and takes out some of the guess work of zenithal highlighting. 

Any questions?

More to come soon.

Next topic: First Impressions of Matte Medium!

Airbrushing Infinity Miniatures

Airbrushes have come from the realm of scale model painting to a well-established position in the tabletop miniature hobby, and rightly so. Airbrushes not only help speed up the process of painting, they also lay down such gentle and thin layers of paint that don't obscure the delicate detail of Infinity miniatures.

I typically use an airbrush as a beginning stage to lay down my foundation color on large areas of the miniature. Join me and I'll take you through my 5-step process that gives me a nice base-color with a little shading and highlighting as a basis for the rest of my shading and highlighting work.

Step 1 - Choose your colors.
You need your base color, a shading color, and a highlight.
In this case, my base color is the now out of production (OOP) Hawk Turquoise from Games Workshop.
To shade it, I chose OOP Dark Flesh from Games Workshop.
Side note: lately I haven't been using black to shade my models, but instead choose a color opposite of my base on the color wheel for shading. More on that at another time.
The third paint I chose was Vallejo Model Color Pale Blue, which is a really nice Turquoise with a little more green and white in it than Hawk Turquoise - perfect for highlighting.

Step 2 - Base Coat.
Mix your base color with some thinner (whatever you use - I use a mix of water and isopropanol) in a cup and load your airbrush. Apply a decent coat over the entire model as I have done below.

Step 3 - Shade

Mix your shade color into your base color and add some thinner. Don't over do it, you don't want your transitions to be too stark. In my case, I added OOP Dark Flesh to my OOP Hawk Turquoise in about a 1:2 ratio.  

This is where the fun begins. Apply this color only in the lower parts of the model and the areas that would actually be shaded. If it helps, try to spray from an angle underneath the model, shooting upwards. This is why I have attached my models to these old paint pots as I can handle the models well spray and get different angles that I need. 

See below. 

Stage 4 - Highlight

Pull out your highlight color. In this case, I didn't mix my highlight into my base color, since they are already very similar hues of color, but different values. 

With the highlight, I hold the models at an angle and spray downwards onto them. I do this from varying degrees until I am happy with how it looks. At this stage, the contrasts will be a little too strong so we are going to tone it down a bit. 

Stage 5- Tie it together

As a final step, I mix my base color with a lot of thinner. I want a translucent coat to go down, that won't remove all the work I've just done. 

Now what I do is spray the model all around at a 90 degree angle, hitting the models mid-section and lower. I leave the brightest highlights alone at the top of the model. See how it looks below. 

And that is how I get a nice foundation of my base color, shaded and highlighted before I break my traditional brush and go to work. I'll still do a fair amount of shading and highlighting - especially some hard-edge highlighting, but at least this gets me 75% of the way there. 

I hope you've found this useful and inspiring. Get out your airbrush and see what you can do!

Everybody was Kuang-Shi Fighting!

 Another post celebrating a awesome time at Adepticon.  First- a photo of (some of) the players and organizers.  John, the TO, is second from the far left, with his back to the camera.  Two of our regular crew are also pictured here.  Sure, we didn't get the giant conference hall / ball-room, but we also didn't get gamer stank.

Next batch of armies-  This is Tim's Yu Jing force.  Sadly, the vivid green boxtop made it rather difficult to get a good photo.  Bad Tim! Bad Tim!  Doesn't make much difference, since his Su Jian has already been featured on the blog.  He just needs to post pics of his more recently completed figures...

Lost Cateran brought his Aleph army... no, just kidding, it's his Ariadne force.  Check a few posts back to read his battle reports.

Kevin G brought his Nomads.  Good natured to the end, G took the far opposite of first place and walked away with an Inquisitor Sketchbook and Warhammer Fantasy paperback for his pain.  He seemed quite pleased, though on the Infinity Forum he posted a photo of a baby seal...

Adepticon Infinity Armies

First and foremost, I have to say the Infinity tournament at Adepticon was great fun.  Kudos and thanks to John and Co. for running it so well.  I won't bore anybody with battle reports (yet), but will go ahead and post some photos of the armies that showed up to play.

My first opponent, Andre, brought his Nomad army all the way in from Germany.  Andre teaches demo games back home and was helpful in setting me straight with some of the rules that I had been fuzzy on.  I had to apologize several times for being so slow in round 1.

In round 2, I faced off against Milan's Kazaks.  I learned the hard way how tough Dog Soldiers can be, and how chain guns can burn Kuang Shi out of trees with relative ease.  See that hot medic in the middle of the photo?  Sexy, but deadly- to her own troops.  Apparently Milan lost not one, but two of his own troops to her failed medical rolls.

Final opponent was Brian, the younger and more devious brother of Lost Cateran.  I played this game a bit more aggressively, but wound up losing due to a crap close combat roll by my Ninja and really awful deployment of my Yaokong.  Oops.

This was the army I took.  Their performance was middling, but apparently their livery was well received.