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You're just giving me a chance to keep up with your Dark Eldar...

Yep. Is it working?

Having just caught up with your other thread… not yet?

 endtransmission wrote:

I think the Alpha Legion looks like the better of the two

Of course it does!

Though they're both quite nice...

Thanks! I think Alpha Legion is the way to go (IF I go Heresy...) as I can paint up any other units I want, in whatever colours I want... and claim that they are agents that have infiltrated the other legions

Ugh... sorry for the radio silence, things just got hectic at work this year and hobby time went out the window.

The last few weeks I've managed to get some bits done on the vampire bits though. This was mainly inspired by the Exiled Dead set for Underworlds and discovering that some of the new contrast and washes make zombies much easier; Mortarion Grime makes for an ideal zombie flesh over the wraitbone undercoat



I had some Highlands Miniatures zombies printed and undercoated, so I tried the same on them and it worked nicely so far (still working on them)



Here's a close up of one of the armoured zombies and the contrast nmm


I am also updating the skin on Gorslav as the original blue skin that I did originally didn't sit well with me any more. Just noticed that I've missed his shin on the left leg

That is a great zombie skin, I'll have to remember that for my zombies!

Just glad to see you back. And with brilliant work as well.

They look great!

I really love the contrast zombies. They look horrid!

 Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll wrote:
That is a great zombie skin, I'll have to remember that for my zombies!

It is a couple of washes of Mortarion Grime and then a little bit of Agrax in the darkest shadows. For some of them I've also added a little bit of Plaguebearer flesh as splodges to give that slightly mouldy flesh look. The plan is to also add some purple washes to parts on some

The first batch of zombies are now complete. There's quite a way to go before this becomes a usable unit in *anything* other than a small skirmish system. Heck... even 7TV needs more zombies than this as a horde



They are all 3d prints from Highlands Miniatures. I have about 30 of the new GW zombies in the painting pile on my desk... and another 12 zombies from various other Patreons due to print** tonight; so it's zombies for quite a while yet! Doing them in small blocks of 5 or 6 seems to be the way to go. While on the subject of zombies and growing a horde, has anyone seen a scale comparison of the Fireforge zombies against the quite dainty gravewalker kit?

Oh. Speaking of Highlands Minis... this month they have released a load more vampire/undead goodness for spooky season, including a corpse cart and some updated standard skeletons. The corpse cart is way nicer than the ancient GW version and comes with a skeleton on the back that is loading up a fresh cadaver



I also spent this afternoon carving up sheets of plasticard to make cobbles for some bases



** After months of not using the printer, due to repeated issues, I gave it one last top to bottom clean and used a new levelling trick I found for resin printers... and it's now done 3 prints without any failures at all! :O

The levelling trick went against the instructions to level with a piece of paper... level it with the tank and some resin in place as that then gives you exactly the right distance needed for whatever thickness film you have; plus a little bit of the resin that needs to be under the bed.

Love the Zombies!

That's really interesting
I'm about to break out my printer again. Good to know.

I know she's not seen as the greatest character ever, but I really like the model. Also, I don't really play so who cares




I still need to sort the base, but I had to take a break from basing as I cut my fingers while carving lots of cobblestones from thick plasticard. Whose dumb idea was it to do cobbles on all the bases?!

Well. I love it. Very pretty, really creepy.

Thanks! I really like her as a model. she should stand out nicely amongst the dark/red of the vampire army. She will blend into the beige of the Flesheaters if they ever end up on a table together though

Yeah... perfect for the season.

With her hair like that and the bicolour dress, she has a very "Pennywise" feel to her that gives her an air of menace

Wow, now you point it out, it really does doesn't it! :O

Maybe I just need to start referring to her as Penny instead

After much debate, and construction, of Cursed City appropriate bases for zombies and skeletons, I'm looping back around to actually looking at multibasing them for easier storage and a nicer display.

This is the current painted collection for Aos (not including a reasonable Flesheater army), which is pretty impressive given that I tend to get bored very easily



It looks nice, but could be better. I've been looking at Kings of War again as R&F games are slightly more my speed. Given that I have a terrible memory, the number of reactions/skills/special rules and combos that need to go into AoS are, quite frankly, beyond my poor brain at the moment. The simplicity of KoW seems more at my level. 40k is the same, so the Eldar seem to have stalled a bit and become more of a slow burn painting project. There are some updates to it that I need to post about sometime... anyway.

Given that I've been enjoying doing the cobbled bases, I'm wondering if creating all of the Troop and Regiment bases will be a fun distraction and lead to a nicer looking display if they are all designed to interlock into a scene or two for the Kallax shelves. The benefit of KoW is that some of the larger models from AoS, like the Coven throne, don't have an equivalent... so that can drop in the painting queue as it doesn't fit in the cabinets anyway! The downside is that some of the models don't have a KoW base size equivalent, so some of the characters won't fit :(

While I wait for a load of MDF to turn up... what are people's dos and don'ts for multibasing for KoW or historical games?

And yes, I know skeletons are apparently sub-par in KoW... I just really like painting skeletons for some reason. There are about 50+ of them so far and a bunch more lined up for the printer. I do need to focus on zombies for a bit though as that seems to be the core choice and fits with what I always loved about undead... a necromancer leading masses of the shambling, endless tide of death and destruction. AoS doesn't really give that feeling

Yessssss come to the multi-based side KOW is wonderful, I've been playing for some years now and I'm always blown away by how enjoyable it is to play, which is telling because I feel the opposite when I play GW's big games But it's also really liberating to hobby for KOW, as you can do what you want and multi-basing frees you from even the tyranny of individual bases.

The advice I can give in that regards:
- Do use the correct size bases (i.e. I don't recommend up-basing despite being allowed by the rules).
- Do mark the center point of your front edge (I met a dude recently who marked the center point of all edges, which is neat but does seem like overkill).
- Don't worry about FMC (full model count), aim for 60-75% (so 12-15 of a '20' model regiment), maybe even less if you're using modern GW. Volume is more important than model count.
- Try to avoid overhanging your base if you can, especially the front edge. It's not the end of the world if you do, but you'll want to have a blank proxy on hand for actually making contact with other units.
- If you're magnetizing your bases to use a steel sheet transport, it's generally easier to magnetize them before adding all the stuff - like models! - to the other side. This especially if you're drilling holes into the base material for the magnets.

Dash28 did a couple articles on basing: here and here.

 endtransmission wrote:
The benefit of KoW is that some of the larger models from AoS, like the Coven throne, don't have an equivalent... so that can drop in the painting queue as it doesn't fit in the cabinets anyway!

While I've never seen a Coven Throne on a KOW table, you could easily balance that thing on a 75x75 and run it as any of the Undead titans and nobody would bat an eye. It's an extremely tall model but titans are Height 6 which is as tall as units (currently) come. Alternatively, with the ponies and the vampires it would be at home making up the bulk of a Soul Reaver Cavalry regiment, you'd just need to add 3-4 more Undead knights to either side to fill the base out. (That would be a 125x100 base.) The unit's height will be deceptive but everybody knows cav are Height 3 so are unlikely to have an issue.

Ah yeah, I'd not thought of that! Excellent suggestion sir! Thankfully I just created some print plates with [rul=https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-vampire-knights-highlands-miniatures-patreon-144130]Highlands Minis Vampire knights[/url] to use as Soul Reaver cavalry on, so I can just keep printing more to bulk out a larger base for the regiment!

I'm interested to see how full bases start to look, without hitting max capacity... just waiting for Warbases to send out a large order of mdf

This evening's project is to kitbash a couple of STLs to make a vampire knight on undead pegasus... because why not?

I'll probably start with basing up enough to try Ambush (even with skelebobs) and see if anyone at the local gaming club will teach me how to play. Might get me out of the house for a bit!

 endtransmission wrote:
Thankfully I just created some print plates with Highlands Minis Vampire knights to use as Soul Reaver cavalry on, so I can just keep printing more to bulk out a larger base for the regiment!

These are great sculpts! I'm not familiar with Highlands Minis, some really great wargame Undead.

Also vamps on pegs are super good in KOW, I rate them over vamps on dragons (tho dragons are more or less not good in KOW this edition).

Highlands have some amazing sculpts and the supports are fantastic. Very fine, but strong enough. Very tempted to also do a not-empire army at some point too as their models are fantastic for that too

After a few days of holiday in London (Go see Totoro at the Barbican if you get the chance!!!) I started to carve cobbles for the first batch of multibases.

These will be for 3 Regiments of skeletons, 2 Troops of Revenants, a Troop of Soul Reaver infantry, 2 Troops of Soul Reaver cavalry and 2 Troops of Soul Reaver cavalry.



These ones are all going to be Cursed City looking, so I need to print off some gubbins to add to the bases like lanterns, bottles etc. to make it feel a bit more street like. I've yet to decide what the Ghouls and Zombies will be like. I may take the corn fields that are down the right side of the top cavalry base and put the zombies coming through a corn field and then blend that over to a graveyard for the ghouls.

In order to use the corpse cart I need to make a zombie Legion to get enough depth to the base... unfortunately I didn't order any bases that big and that's not going to work for Ambush if I want to try and start small... so that model can go into the backlog for now. I'll just have to print a metric butt load more zombies at a later date.

Wow, that's a lot of impressive work. Also much jealousy re: Totoro. Hate living at the other end of the country sometimes.

*phew!*
That's a lot of work for not a lot of points... Over the weekend I finished painting up 30 more zombies, bringing the total to 40. According to the bases I've made, I still need another 20-ish to build the really big base as well as the two Regiments... I suspect there will be a break to paint other things for a while as I'm not sure I can face more of them just yet. Given that I'm waiting for the Fireforge zombies to turn up, that's no bad thing anyway as I want to mix them all together so there's no "oh that's the GW set" going on. I do have two surprises to go on the Zombie regiment bases, but I'll reveal those in due time

The GW ones with the graves attached to their backs are going to be used as standard bearers in each unit as, in general, I think that's a dumb design and they are not the most pleasant to paint. The rest of the grave-carrying ones will be left for use in Cursed city, so I'm not so bothered about painting those up just now










I can't remember all of the sculptors for those. Most are the new GW plastics, but there are definitely Highlands miniatures zombies in there as well as two other designers for a bit of variety. The 3d printed ones are a bit bigger when you put them size by side, but it'll give the horde some variety if they are all mixed together.

Speaking of bases, the skeleton and cavalry bases are coming together nicely! Hopefully I can start rebasing something this week



Also, stoopid brain has started printing an Empire army as well :/

That... is a great looking batch of undead!

Way to plow through those zombies (and I agree on the dumb GW zeds carrying stuff around??), and the bases are looking quite nice