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Good luck man! I'm quite interested in your endeavour, very open-minded.

Got the green airbrushing done this morning. Taking a break to play a game with Thing 2... then I'll probably hit it with a coat of satin varnish before lining it. This is just an insanely complicated model. Having one heck of a time trying to get the armor plates to fit correctly on the sides of the track housings.

Those green shades look great, Gits. Have fun in your game with Thing 2! Excited to see this Vindi come together.

Looks good, nice airbrush work!

Painting stuff prior to assembly works fine, you may just need to scrape off a bit of paint where the glue is applied. The vindi is looking good (airbrushes are great aren't they?). I remember building some of the old rhinos and never liked the gap between the track sections and the body. Refurbished an old vindicator for my chaos army and filled them bits in with green stuff to make it look more solid.

Yeah, I have the same issue with the old models. Just not certain if I'm going to bother patching it up at this point. We'll see when I get to the assembly stage.

Looks good. Really shows how you approach your Zenth.. lighting.

I try to green stuff most of the gaps on most of my vehicles. Doesn’t look right that armor would have these gapping seams.. The new kits have gaps as well.

SL

That's a purdy tank

Well, it's not a tank yet, just a collection of bits.

Unfortunately I didn't make any progress over the weekend what with the big game with Thing 2 and mundane commitments. I'll try and make some progress this week in the evenings. Game with Thing 2 went OK. He gets so discouraged when he takes losses that he stops playing, then has to cool down for a bit before being ready to start up again. Of course with Nids, losses are inevitable. If he wanted to be able to slaughter people without taking losses he should have started Space Wolves or something. In any case he toughed it out, came back & suffered a narrow loss to my vanilla marines 5 KP to 7. Granted his army is far from optimized... but so is mine so it's a pretty fair fight. I think we need to get him another Tervigon and paint up at least one of his other Trygons... he's still way too cautious though. If he'd have just charged everything forward and not worried about the casualties, I would have been completely overrun by turn three. He just can't bring himself to do it. Best performers for me were the sternguard, scout bikes and my devs (4xML)... at least until they got eaten by rippers. His accolades were more evenly distributed, but props to his stealers with brood lord who took out two small tac squads and tarpitted my Iron Clad. I just hate Nids... they're such a PITA to run... a million special rules, no consistency. A mess.

Thing 1 is gleefully laying out 3000 pts of his Doom Eagles using the BA dex. I helped him with some of his build based on what I've learned in preparation for Adepticon. I expect to get spanked soundly. To get him to 3000 requires a lot of land raiders and terminators. To get me to 3000 requires a lot of scouts.... ouch.

Hopefully an update tonight. Am going to work on the tracks and major metallic features, we'll see how it goes.

Yeah, it's like playing Guard vs. Orks, Charging with Guard is death, and shooting with Orks is death, gotta know how to play blob armies.

dsteingass wrote:Yeah, it's like playing Guard vs. Orks, Charging with Guard is death, and shooting with Orks is death, gotta know how to play blob armies.

Lol, I've been decimated by Ork shooting and I've done decimating with a power blob guard squad...

Generally (so more than just 1 lucky game) the ork shooting (60 shots from a 30 boy shoota squad) hits about 15 times, and then wounds almost half the time, so 7 or so wounds on a 10 man tac squad, even if I pass half of them I lose 3 marines, which forces a leadership check that I generally make, but it means that next turn I'm going to be assaulted and outnumbered by more than 3 to 1.... But generally, yes Ork shooting isn't that good...

Gits, I know Thing2's pain... I hate seeing models leave the table... and coming back to almost beat you is not a bad way to end the game... He's gotta remember that those 30+ gants aren't worth a kill point each... I'm sure once he's a little older and he better understands the missions, he'll be consistently kicking your butt

He will... he's been more aggressive in the past, I just think he's so attached to his Nids he just can't stand to see them taken off the board. I should play them a few times myself to see if I can adopt a better approach with them that I can teach. Though, he was down 4-0 on turn 3 when I kind of "helped" him with his movement & really got him committed to a massed assault. If he'd hit me on turn 3 with what he hit me with on turn 4 (which he could have), I'd have had fewer KPs and he'd have had more & I think the results would have been flipped.

Question for you Nid players out there. Do Nids have "drop pod assault" like the marines do?? (i.e. half your pods come down on turn 1 automatically)

Yeah, dont discount guard in large blobs in CC, they can be mean, once when i played Elluj i had a power blob with 8 power weapons(4 sarges and 3 comissars and yarrick), with Creed who gave them furious charge and yarrick who let them re roll to hit. Now this is a pretty rare scenario but it can be done.

@Gits: the vindicator looks great so far, i look forward to seeing its completion. But I am not surpised by this, as i have not yet seen anything on this thread an thought "thats ugly" its usually more along the lines of "holy crap, thats raw"

Im pretty sure theres no drop pod assault rule in the nid book, lemme check.

edit: checked, its a no im afraid

Gitsplitta wrote:Do Nids have "drop pod assault" like the marines do?? (i.e. half your pods come down on turn 1 automatically)

No. The best you can get are bonuses to your reserve roll. Tyrant with Hive Commander grants +1 and allows a troop unit to outflank (like a Tervigon). Swarm Lord grants +1 and allows you to reroll which side the units outflanks on. Then lictors grant +1 to reserves and avoid scatter when units are DS near them...However, Lictors must be placed in reserves and must be on the table themselves in order to get any bonus...thus they are bunk.

Personally, I am not the biggest fan of SP. They cost more than DP and are much, much, much more fragile. At T4 and 4+ save they die at the slightest breeze.

OK, we did it right then.

My theory was to put in two pods and the trygon so that he had a fair number of things that didn't have to foot-slog it across the field... they could just appear amongst my troops and it would be brown-trouser time for the Mantis Warriors. Unfortunately the rest of his army was slow to get across the field and he didn't really drop as close as I was hoping he would... so really only the trygon showed up in my backfield. The sternguard, with nothing better to do... blew it to Kingdom come with their combi-weapons.

I think I'll start encouraging him to field his unpainted figures to see if we can't explore some other military options. He has a trygon prime built and ready for painting... if two trygons show up in my backfield I think I'd only be able to deal with one, leaving the other to run amok.

Ah well, really a discussion for one of my other threads.

You've heard that the British wore redcoats to hide the blood when they were advancing right? That the same reason the French wear Brown Trousers too!

LOL!

if two trygons show up in my backfield I think I'd only be able to deal with one, leaving the other to run amok.

Make sure that you pay for the Hive Commander upgrade then. That +1 to reserves will be important in making sure that the Trygons show up at a reasonable time. If reaching for points, then don't pay for the "prime" upgrade...just field it as a normal Trygon.

dsteingass wrote:You've heard that the British wore redcoats to hide the blood when they were advancing right? That the same reason the French wear Brown Trousers too!

Gotta love that myth! (Both of them!)

@dstein: Perhaps, but unfortunately for them they also had a big white "X" across their chests... which apparently made aiming very easy for the colonial forces during the revolution. That part I don't believe is a myth. Not sure how prevalent rifles (meaning guns with rifled barrels) were back then though... aiming a musket is a dicey proposition... good target or not.

More practice would help. very the objective and teach him the strategy behind the objective.

He's young, but catches on quickly. As his skill grows so will his confidence.

SL

Doesn't he have 2 pods?

It was just a joke guys, lets leave it at a "haha" or a an eyeroll!

Its been argued that if the Brits used English Longbows rather than those muskets then they would have been a lot more successful.

Those musket-balls were brutally lethal, but about as accurate as an ork shoota... and about as reliable.

...maybe less.

Solar_lion wrote: More practice would help. very the objective and teach him the strategy behind the objective.

He's young, but catches on quickly. As his skill grows so will his confidence.

SL

Doesn't he have 2 pods?

Yep, took both plus the trygon.

It actually worked decently, he just didn't have enough support to drive in for the kill. Trygon, fex and zoanthropes all showed up in the same turn. I only had the fire power (and position) to deal with one, so I took out the trygon. As a result, the Fex (over 2 turns) took out a dread & the zoey's peeled bits off a razorback & took out a LS Storm. The real difference kill point-wise were two easy pod kills by the devs & two medium sized termigant squads that were taken out by the sternguard & scout bikes respectively.

Look at us, getting into Historical discussion!
Don't worry dstiengass; it was taken in jest. What's done is done!
Looking forward to the new build Gits, I like the gradient idea.

Made a small bit of progress over night (well, really early this morning). Started blacking out the metal bits. With luck, I'll have the metal done by tonight. Internet went down last night so pics might be slow in coming.

Pictures!!!!

Just kidding...

So Gits, I'm about to start a P&M Blog, and I was like "I saw a thread on Dakka about 'what makes a good P&M blog.'" So, I was curious about the advice I saw there, in comparison to what you and a few other threads I subscribe to have." According to some of the advice I saw, they were talking about the OP containing lots of painted images (no one is going to want to read about the painting you plan on doing blah blah blah)... So I noticed you didn't have any painted minis on the first post (updates to that post obviously have since fixed that), but you didn't have anything painted on the first page either... So I did some digging, and found you didn't have any painting until page 4 of your blog. Then it got me thinking about the longevity of this blog, and the community aspect centered around it. Obviously this is just more than your Mantis Warriors, but their development as a community influenced project.

So all of this above tangent lead me to three things 1)This post serves as a bump while we eagerly await the next picture update, 2) I was treated to the best quote from you ever in this thread:

Gitsplitta wrote:As I said before, I'm not a very good marine painter so I'll be going through the "how to's" to try and do a decent job.

and 3) This blog turns 2 years old on April 16th, 2012 (we may even hit 300 pages by that point )

Gitsplitta's blog is a perfect example of a good P&M blog - 76 of those 271 pages you see are just his own posts! 2 pages of those were in the first 2 weeks - ie an average of two posts per day!

And he wasn't the awesome modeller and painter he is today back then either!

Not to mention contributing to many other blogs and community projects. Anyone would do very well to follow his example...

(edit because I realised I tallied up those posts over 2 weeks, not 4 - even more impressive!)

I agree Arakasi, I feel that Gits blog is like the multi cultural lunchroom of Dakka! where friends are made and problems solved!

..And where rivets are riveted.