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Yep, blue glow. Just didn't have time to do it. I saw them on the paint desk and didn't like it so I tried some templar right quick.

The black carapace looks very nice.

I'll have to take a whole base to completion with it but I think it might be the way forward.

I've been making some forays into deciding what to do first with the death watch, although I keep getting stymied by certain options not working just quite the way I'd like them to for maximum enjoyment. I'll figure something out but I'm really looking at the phobos stuff pretty hard right now.

I have to say I really like the horde of silver with the blue glow. I was having trouble with mine when I had painted half of them with the beige wings and then started the next batch and had them all silvered. To me seeing the whole mass of them as almost a wave of liquid silver flowing towards the enemy is a real treat.

It feels lazy to me haha, I mean I want a simple army but that's soooo fast and easy it's almost too much haha.

Black legs on the silver guys?

I like the black bodies on the scarab.

It helps set them apart from the base a bit. The silver and the grey base tends to blend a little bit too much IMHO. Compare the pic of the immortal where he is laying down on the mat as opposed to standing. Set on the brown, he pops out a lot more.

I’m not sure what your end plan is for bases. I think of you put some drifts of sand over what you have now it would be easy and look good.

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I’ve not picked up the new DW codex supplement, so can’t speak for the rules. From the leaks when it was releasing I know they invalidated most of what I have, so stopped paying close attention. One of the issues with the army is that there are sooooooo many options it’s easy to fall into decision paralysis. Especially for the Vet squads. One question is how competitive do you plan on being with them? The little bit of everything squad is flexible, overpriced, inefficient, fluffy, and looks cool. If this is mostly going to be a hobby project, casual play, but spend most of its time warming the shelf, just go with the rule of cool. My thoughts for the guys in the SC box I picked up was to gear up on frag cannons to drop them close for needed AV firepower, with a VV to let them fall back and shoot, and only a little chop in the squad. But that was prior to the new book.

IIRC they got rid of most of the synergy of mixed primaris squads. So now it’s only really good for adding some meat shields to expensive bodies. Which isn’t nothing. Also, lets you make some pretty nice looking flexible squads.

I think the big thing was the primaris kill team variants is that you can get some of the more effective unit s in the game as troops. Objective secure eradicators eliminators and outriders are all scary in their own way, as is being able to concentrate them in squads of five as opposed to three in two cases, I guess eradicators could always go up to six but most armies don't have them with objective secure. And yes, you always have the option to keep them mixed and use relatively inexpensive intercessors as ablative wounds for the more expensive variants. The firstborn marine kill team has a ridiculous amount of variance, you can take four or five heavy weapons and then three terminators with heavy weapons and just double down on flamers or missiles or plasma, or you could take define regular veterans as either cheap or especially durable using storm shields, and then take four bikers and a vanguard vet who all have power weapons and veteran marine profiles and as long as the jetpack infantry is alive the bikes can navigate through train as if they were also infantry. any unit that takes a Terminator has access to the teleport Homer so you can move them around on the table in a pinch, and anyone that's got the jetpack can fall back and still do stuff or something like that.

I think the death watch for me will walk a line between being a fun hobby project where I get to do fun space marine modeling stuff, and something that I try and make playable. I'm probably not going to be able to get out for games very often so the necrons could probably really have me covered for anything I'll get out with and not get bored, but if I have the space Marines I'm going to want to play at least one game with them if not several. There are several interesting tactics to try with them between fiddling with all of the objective secured when they shouldn't be units and doing things like spamming drop pods and being all in my opponent's face very early on.

whether all of them are ultra competitive or not I think breaking the rules as far as other marine chapters are considered with kill team shenanigans is the most attractive thing. Finding a way to use the phobos captain and lieutenant to complement two squads of four eliminators babysat by one comms array infiltrator where all of them are now getting the cap/lt auras regardless of range sounds great! So does the fact that between those characters and four combat squads the opponent pretty much has a small corner of his own deployment zone to put his deep strikers into since Omni scramblers push deep strikers very far away indeed from them.

I'm using yet less useful would be spending a relic in a warlord trait to get the phobos captain's gun up to damage 5, capable of one-shotting most other space marine characters other than captains...Other not super likely to do it on a single shot with strength for and not preventing invulnerable saves lol. I kind of want to give the Purgatus pistol to the lieutenant because neither phobos nor reiver LT really offer as much in terms of damage beyond their aura, but three strength five ap3 damage 2 pistol shots what you could also potentially use in combat and give a little flexibility.

I love how I can take like five relics in a 2000 point list because of a warlord trait and a stratagem beyond what normal space Marines could do. One of them is going on a squad surgeons and is from a kind of short list along with the one from the Warlord trait, but it just really pushes that whole band of elite heroes thing, kind of like how high heels used to be able to give their regiment leaders cheap magic items, and I don't know maybe eldar can do that too.

I think my first foray into Deathwatch will be the phobos Captain and a spectrus killteam. In order to use up all nine guns from the eliminators box, I'll have to be careful what I build so I want to get these guys put together ahead of time, plus the tacticool Marines are singing to me at the moment... Painting them might be a different story but we shall see.


Speaking of painting I shall include a photo of the base for that model now that it is more or less done. I like to keep my bases drab and gray to match more scenery as possible. I actually had a small crisis of faith where I was considering going back to clear acrylics... But I think having a magnet on the bottom of the base is going to keep me course corrected and moving forward without doing so. Anyway in the picture you can see dark gray panels with a couple dry brushes to give them visual interest, I imagine they are on some kind of industrial world where they are stepping over either metal panels or concrete, rivets are prevalent as are sections of mesh and various industrial looking bits. The shiny metallic necrons are standing out pretty well so far, although there is a lot of silver on these bases and I will probably have to rust it heavily to make it work for them, and but a lot of orange isn't that far from a lot of sand like you are suggesting.

I think the death watch will go on very similar bases but I might tweak the color mix to help contrast the black Marines if need to be either with heavier dry brushes to lighten them up a bit or more spot color if that's what it needs.

I'm pretty sure it's stupid to do so but I'm also pretty sure I want all the models and really would like to play kill team eventually... So I think I'm going to pick up Pariah Nexus later today. I had about talked myself out of it until I switched it to death watch and knew that the heavy intercessors would enable me to take those eradicators into a indominor kill team. I don't have a lot of needs for the captain but I guess he would look good on a shelf next to the phobos and Indomitus ones... but I definitely want the Chronomancer and his spare bits enabling me to make a second one, And I hear five flayed ones are a decently cheap units to throw into the opponent's backfield with their sneaky deployment, defensive stratagem, and otherwise efficient ability to do an action or line break.

look Chris I won't be able to play kill team without the book The main book I mean, but we'll get there eventually.


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I apologize for a fair number of mixed up words and other grammatical quirks, I have come to rely heavily on speech-to-text and while I normally vet it thoroughly before posting, sometimes life gets in the way lol.

Final round on the scarabs I painted two bases to completion with the two schemes, what does everyone think?

I like both and I'm having trouble deciding, the drag silver ones don't look as bad now that the base is painted, but the black one still has a lot to offer.

Also do you like the darker blue or the lighter color? I like how deep and rich the tassalar blue is but the plasma fluid (lighter color) has more of a glow to it.


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Consider also that the full silver ones were the original prototype and are a slightly darker driver silver than the scarabs will be in the end. I did the airbrush work on them out of sequence because I had the opportunity to test it and couldn't dry brush them as heavily.

So consider that the silver will be 10 to 20% brighter moving forward and that their faces will be the same shade of gold that the black ones have, it's only darker because I was heavier handed with the AG contrast and was going over a darker base.

The two differences between them are the black shells and the blue glow and I could do either glow with either shell if it would look better.

Looking at them from 3 ft I got to say the black ones pop a little more but the silver ones have more of that implacable tide of metal monsters so idk

Both look good, but I think the lighter blue is the best glow and I prefer the black body. It gets all of the colours from the big lads in to it then too

I think, maybe, you need a shinier gold. Maybe try a gloss coat on those parts?

Hmm maybe? Although I'm almost certain to matte spray everything when done.

Yep, it's here.

Didn't exactly have to fight off crowds to snag one, but I did go ahead and pick it up. I was on the fence the whole time, but IDK I like it so far. The heavy intercessors are CHONKY BOIS. Oh man I love them. You also get 8 heavy bolt rifles and a heavy bolter. The bolter has 3 halves you can pop on to denote which type of heavy bolter it is, and the regular heavy rifles are just like the intercessor bolt rifles, you pick which kind by popping in the appropriate magazine. These are so chonky I think I should have no problem working in a magnet, and they should store really securely to some magnetic surface. I think these guys may keep their arms in place and only have magazine magnets. The captain has no options, the flayed ones... maybe have options on a couple sets of claws?? But maybe not at all. It's hard to tell until I assemble those guys. The chronomancer gets two staves, two necron techno-cube things, and three heads. Should be almost zero effort to convert my spare plasmancer into another chrono.

The heavy intercessors are the stars... but I'm sat over here racking my brain to see if there's some way I could possibly use all those spare bolters to make another squad or do...something? Some how? Honestly not sure, they clearly aren't heavy bolters but they're like 90% as big. Give em to scouts or vehicles as heavies with a magazine modification? IDK. Its not like there's a lot of gravis armor marines floating around anywhere extra just needing arm swaps perhaps my reaper bones power armor guys could use them as neater guns.... Not that that helps my space Marines at all.

Anyway, if anyone has any specific questions I will try to get back to you on those but yeah I don't know I guess I have the and it's box pretty interesting. The game board seems nice, it just barely fits into my laptop backpack so would be pretty travel friendly although it might not fit into a smaller backpack.

For $160+tax, I don't feel like I got an amazing deal, and I'll still have to obtain the KT rules elsewhere if I want to use the contents for the actual game of killteam, but this *is* an expansion. Arena didn't come with the main rules either. Though, being fair, the whole killteam/killzones release had some borderline predatory marketing/bait and switch stuff going on so that's certainly a thing. I bought the box because I fully intend to play necrons AND space marines and I have at least a passing interest in kill team. Had any of those things not been the case, it would have been a harder pill to swallow and I may well have skipped. But that's all I got to say about that

I'm starting to lean back towards the silver scarabs now that they don't blend in as much with their bases. I think I'm gonna push phobos for my marines going forward... but it may be hard to resist building these absolute chonkers. The chronomancer should make his way into most of my lists if I feel like being competitive, and the flayed ones could easily be worked in given their 65pt profile. Flayed ones are also pretty dope in KT... though so far heavy ints, probably too much so lol.


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Also, it is definitely dakka flipping these images 90 degrees. They're proper on my phone. Bizarre.


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I don't know looking at these scarabs again I think I'm really leaning towards the silver tide now, but I think that combination of black and darker blue needs to exist somewhere I'll find somewhere to put it perhaps a fantasy model or something else down the road.

Nice work on the scratch built terrain. Tanks with ladders and platforms are a solid staple for any good wargaming collection - you just gotta have some!

Thanks! It's kind of a scratch building right of passage, and one that I had skipped out on until now mostly.

I am tore over which scarabs I prefer. Both look really good. I'd nearly be tempted to include both, one unit silver and one unit with black... sitting on a fence is one of my great skills

Both definitely work. I really like the tassalar and black together. I think I'm leaning towards the silver tide, but I wanna use those colors at some point.

May switch gears and paint the PN necron scenery next. It has minimal cleanup and the color scheme will be so simple. Think I'll go with classic Necron greens rather than marching, the PN game board kind of expects green scatter.

Going to keep these green themed to match the board, but I'm thinking metallic green. I have some of the citadel contrast and technical paints for green, no I have access to my airbrush too so I'm not sure quite which approach I'm going to take yet.

I still like the silver tide , plus it’s so low in points that you need something you can chew through painting, even if it doesn’t match color wise to the rest of the army.

I think that's the way I'm leaning too. I can't skimp on all my little silver babies though each one is precious and it might be the one that chews through a marine skull ensuring my victory. Or the one that refuses to die because there's so damn many of them That brings me objective points.

The silver one should match though, the black one was the one that was pushing it honestly I think with the base painted though the silver ones look okay and that's probably what I'll do.

I gotta say, if I don't play much 40k, I'm definitely looking into this:

GRIMDARK FUTURE
https://youtu.be/zBnnX_1j3AQ?list=PLOt6UN-cmqk0KJ7kvRI375hIg8HDTKlZU

The rules remind me of an older edition of 40k but heavily stripped back and simplified. And I like fast simple rules. I think it'll miss out on a lot of the nuance for 40k, and who knows how good the quality control on the army lists is, but it looks like an excellent way to get some minis on the table! Maybe especially kid friendly too for the lesser nuance.

Little progress here, been doing some other stuff not hobby related. Busy week as well so I'll do what I can and show off anything worth seeing

No progress yet. Working on a list. Got a 500pts deathwatch I think. Either have to run 501 pts or 496 swapping comms for helix adept (I think).

Reiver LT Purgatus pistol and rites of war trait
Spectrus kill team (combat squaded)
4 infiltrators (incl Sgt) 1 incursor
1 infiltrator (comms/helix) 4 eliminators
Invictor tactical warsuit (flamer variant)

Not a lot of anti armor, invictor can fist stuff to death though. Snipers with reroll 1s to wound try to deal with characters and other important hard-to-reach individuals. The infiltrators are going to have to get a forward objective probably alongside the lieutenant although he may chill with the warsuit. He can have obsec himself via his traits and can turn off enemy obsec as a stratagem.

12 models, basically a kill team with an attached leader and support vehicle, nice compact force to paint. Maintains a theme.

I gave the pistol to the lieutenant because there is literally no other way to make him killier, there's no melee options in death watch to replace his knife with only salamanders Raven garden ultramarines have relic knives. This gives him 18" with three decent shots and you can use pistols when you're in melee so it's kind of a buffer that too. One thing I don't love about this is that the war suit is not core or a character so I can't give it objective secured which is kind of what taking that warlord trait is for. he'll be able to give it to Blade Guard in a bigger list or something similar, although having it himself is enough to steal an objective if I use his stratagem to turn the enemies objective secured trait off.

Probably ultimately not the best list but it's a nice little goal to paint for and I would use most of it in a bigger list.

Definitely looking at other death watch units I want to build and convert. I think I'm going to steal a spare plasmancer staff and cut a bolter to fit into the top to make a custom first digital/master crafted vigil spear and build a watchmaster at some point. I also need a jump pack captain with a sweet ass power sword that may or may not be ganked from necrons, to convert a bike chaplain, a phobos librarian, this reiver LT, a chapter champion with an epic shield...oh an apothecary...extra snipers from reivers... So much.

of course I'm also going to make my spare plasmancer who I'm stealing the staff from into a chronomancer with his spare staff magic space wizard box and angry Egyptian wizard head.

I wish I had a way to get ahold of five aggressors, I think they make an awesome linebacker team to go with the heavy intercessors, I can also pair my eradicators with them but those need to be shooting high value targets more so than just running up the board and being obnoxious on a point.


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I mean, I could just buy the aggressors lol, I just retroactively lament skipping dark imperium back when.

All right coming to you on this lazy Sunday is some stuff from the painting desk.

I finally got all the airbrushing done on everything so I was able to go back in and do the brush work. Well, I still got to do the spiders, but the stuff that's in a place that I can work on is being worked on.

The immortals still need their blue the scarabs need their eyes colored in, most of the bases need finished, but I did get the cryptek really close to being done and I think he works pretty well. I'm not sure if I'm in love with how his weapon is glowing and if that's how I want to go forward with other weapons but for now I think it's good enough that I can move forward.

Good enough is going to be a running theme with this project because I have acquired far too many models to let perfection stand in the way of acceptable.

You can also see a sample of my pariah Nexus scenery, the first coat of metallic silver spray paint had some really bad properties for adding more paint to it so I went back over everything with a dark camo green color and then highlighted up to what you see now. I could wash them but on flats when the services like this that tends to get kind of uneven and I think for scenery they look okay at this point. I've got to get a little better with the tesseract glue because the large crystal especially looks pretty rough. I think if I go in with the airbrush to put the white down instead of trying to brush it on that will help a little bit but the tesseract glows still seems a little unwieldy at best.

next up, I will continue to finish this until I have a sweet little core of my army and I'll try and work in getting the scarabs done.

During and after that I will focus on getting the first 500 points of death watch which will include 10 sneakybois, the scary skull face lieutenant and the inconceivably stealthy alien style armed to the teeth power loader marine.

I've been thinking of how the two forces would match up and it's kind of interesting. The immortals are pretty tough and actually decently fighty so I think the lieutenant and the forward five man would have to gang up on them to have a reasonable chance of shifting them without heavy losses. I'm not sure if anything can shift the scarabs so the Marines would probably have to focus on killing the immortals the character which should go down quickly to the snipers, and kill the spiders or die. I think the necron game plan would be to take the two mini blobs of scarabs and contest objectives while the immortals hold one down and the technomancer helps the spiders win the fight. I think only the tactical war suit has a chance of killing the spiders and I think that would also be a pretty interesting matchup both of them chipping away wounds before colliding in combat where he's going to be punching them quite to death but those things are no slouches either.

The next 500 points of neck rounds is going to be 20 warriors a custom command barge and the two crypto thralls. I'll probably work the Chronomancer and flayed ones into the lineup. By the same token I think the space Marines will expand into the first half of an indomitor KT as I paint the heavy intercessors and their captain. I wasn't planning on taking the captain, but it would complete the pariah Nexus set if I finished the terrain and the walls I want to build... So finishing a small project like that would be a nice morale boost and I'm considering it. Finishing the phobos Captain instead would adhere to my current list on progressing to but we'll see.

I've been playing with stats and strats for the captain, he comes with five toughness seven wounds and a three plus save with a four plus invulnerable. Between two warlord traits and two relics all of which are enabled by death watch being elite as hell, I think I can get him up to nine wounds a two plus save, and a once a game round long three plus invulnerable save, and a 5+ feel no pain. I can save myself a relic slot by making due with a 6 plus feel no pain. I could give him a little bit more punch or save the CP. Not sure he would be super useful overall but I just thought taking the durability up to 11 would be amusing, especially in a small game.

Just a quick snap before I drop another piece off. Finally made something tall/obscuring. There's rust on the floors, think the second photo was a late WIP.


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Alright... Dakka is screwing with me now, those were for sure straight up and down =\

The planet has fallen into the warp....Or the 5th Chaos god A'ple was held sideways when taking the picture and it's settings don't mesh with Dakkas, so it auto-rotates.

Either way it looks good

No it's an Android, and it's always done fine. I'm not sure what dakkas problem has been the last couple of times.

I like the ruins, despite the crick in my neck now! Looks are really good size and the rust will look great. Good work.

Thanks I'm gonna have to see why dakka keeps flipping them.

Progress has been slow but extant. I got a moment to fire up the airbrush and now the three spyders are all ready to be tackled with the regular brushes which will hopefully let me chip away at them a little more steadily.

I dropped the ruin off at the game store, and I have started some more scatter, some quick junk piles. I'll get a photo of them when they're done.

I also managed to finally finish my squad of five immortals, it's just down to the sealer. I think I'm going to try airbrushing Vallejo matte sealer and see how that goes. Maybe I'll try it on my two little bits of pariah Nexus scenery and then a scarab base before attacking the fancier ones.

I'm going to wait until I have a good 500 points, so basically do the spiders, And then I'll do a photo shoot with them.

I think after that, I'm going to try and get some space Marines put together. I think I'm going to stick with my original plan and push forward with a spectrus killteam, reiver Lt, and invictor.

I want to take my time with the Invictor though, And take a stab at making it look a little more like a Titan from Titanfall. My head cannon for the Invictor suits is that the lone Marine pilot, almost a lieutenant in and of himself, sneaks into a forward position and then calls for his suit to be dropped before springing out and ambushing the enemy. I'm sure something in the codex calls out oiled specialized servo motors or some nonsense that make this big a clunky war machine quiet enough to sneak up the field... But I love Titanfall and the thing air dropping just makes me happy so that's how it works and I'm not accepting any other points of view!

I haven't seen anyone else trying to play 40k at the game store. I think a lot of them are mustering forces like I am. Local covid cases are trending down and I think I'm going to be able to get my shot pretty soon so I'll soon have nothing but stepping outside of my own comfort zone to keep me from trying to get a game.

D'oh, I forgot the dang attachment!

The immortals look really cool, I like the dismembered body in the base . Good luck stepping out of that comfort zone and finding a game