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Dakka,

I am currently painting my hive fleet behemoth army and was wondering what i could do for bases. I was thinking using old Ultramarine bodies since they fought on their home world. How would i acquire pieces to do that? Just cut up old SM's and tanks or is there a decent technique i could try? Thanks

that might work on bigger bases... but for the gaunts i would keep your bases simple... then there is the question of what kind of base are you doing? just sand, urban rubble or tyranid infested grounds? i personally really like the tyranid infested theme. glue some cork to a base and run some white glue over and inbetween them. then add a few drops of superglue for awesome effects!

If I played Nids I would definitely buy a few sets of theses bases :

http://eurobitz.com/en/warforge/2127-socles-alien-pack.html

They look gorgeous !

I disagree about simple bases, bases are the primary driving force of some figures, especially basic troops, and can turn an otherwise drab figure into something awesome and help tell a story.

You could grab a jar of the Citadel Sand and some rocks/shrubs and have ultramarine bodies/parts literally the sand beneath them.

If you want to eat Ultramarines, I might suggest snow basing. The buffet was set at the polar fortresses after all.

As for getting parts, you might want to work out a bits-box exchange. Find some marine player who wants to base his army with dead nids, and give him your spare arms, heads, etc. He should be able to pony up a large number of arms, pistols, helmets, and the like.

For extra fun, base your army painted as the shattered remnants of your best friends forces.

"Forging a narrative" nomnomnom

Great idea on the snow basing. I'll throw in a couple helmets and guns on my lowbies like ters and horms. But dreadnots and tanks for tyrants and trygons.

Is there a tactic to applying the random bits to bases so that the nids aren't "more exposed" than they should be? I would think it really dosent matter since i play at a local gamestore.

Don't mount the nids _on_ the bits - that would indeed make them higher and 'more exposed' than normal. Instead, mount the nids directly on the bases, add some half-buried marine bits (i.e. actually cut/saw them in half) around the feet, then add snow to any remaining base area.

I don't play Nids but I like some of the ideas here... in fact, I'm going to use heads, other body parts and whatnot of other SM chapters... That way I can use up my unused bitz...

Where the others have failed..... hmmm.....

I've done alot of work on basing my own Tyranids. I find that going for the infested look is good. I use things like the catachan jungle plant parts or the parts from the deathworld basing kit. Also you can use things like the gun-barrels from Tyranid weapons to show Tyranid-life infesting the planet and starting to grow. The idea being it will all end up being spore chimneys or other forms of Tyranid life. The weird plant-things from the Genestealer sprues are also very good at it. Here are some pics of what I did to show you what I mean.

The base of my Pyrovore. The bones are covered with water effects I mixed with yellow and green ink to make it look like the flesh has been disolved by the Pyrovore's acid drool.







This stuff is from the base of my barbed Hierodule. I dug out trenches and again used water effects and added bits to get the look of a Tyranid infested swamp.























Here is some more Tyranid infestation, this time on the base of a Lictor with a cute, little baby Genestealer.



Here is a Malanthrope's base. I've used parts from the Zombie sprue to show the dead the Malanthrope preys upon. I also included some spare Tyranid parts to show the growth of Tyranid life and painted some ball-joints up as eyeballs.



Hope this helps you out.

I love those eyeballs, they look fantastic.