Judgement Day

It has been a few weeks since my last blog post, but the fires of industry have been burning and Konquest has a new playmate – Judge Judy!

Judicator source - www.Privateer Press.com

Assembly

I eagerly awaited the release of the Protectorate Colossal and set to work building it as soon as it arrived, similarly to Konquest she was built and painted in several sections:

· Base
· Legs and lower torso (rear skirt detached for painting)
· Upper torso (head and shields detached for painting)
· Left arm (hand detached for painting)
· Right arm (hand detached for painting)
· Missile pods

Building and painting in sections is something I find easier, especially with large scale models such as Colossals, simply holding such a heavy and large base for several hours can be difficult as well as getting a good paint job in all the nooks and crannies should it be assembled as one.  Conversely holding a section, an arm for example, to paint can be awkward too as laying it down can ruin paint work, or you might accidentally get finger prints embedded into soft, drying paint so choosing the best method is quite tricky!

Conversions

Perhaps the first thing you’ll notice about my Judy is that I converted the flame thrower weapons.  I really disliked the ‘machine-gun jubblies’ look, as well as the impracticality aspect of the weapons themselves; i.e. they wouldn’t be able to be effective weapons where they were positioned.  Therefore I decided to re-position the flamethrowers on the arms, behind the hand, allowing them to stand proud of the vambrace armour and be seen.  The flame throwers sit quite easily here and I just added greenstuff to extend the inner armour and make the join as seamless as possible.  I contemplated filing down the ball part of the flamethrower and adding some tubing, but this would all be hidden by the hands once they were glued in place.  To hide the two concave socket joints where the flame throwers should sit in the Judicators upper torso I used two spare plastic Errant shields that I didn’t use and had kept in my bitz box.  I angled the concave sockets slightly to accommodate the two shields and filled the void with greenstuff.  Below are a couple of photos of those conversions for your reference:

Gap filling, pinning and filing

The Judicator had a lot of flash as well as gaps which needed filling.  Reading various internet forum posts this had been an issue for some people, however it was pretty much what I was expecting so I wasn’t overly bothered myself.  If you are following this article prior to building your own Judy, it is best to leave the gap at the top of the upper torso assembly and greenstuff it later.  It is hard to explain but if you dryfit the metal and plastic pieces it is apparent that they don’t fit as they should and a 3-4mm gap is inevitable!  Also the siting of the missile pods is awkward and this will inhibit how dynamically you can pose the arms, the shoulder pads will interfere if they are rotated too much.  It is also definitely worth taking the time to pin the big joints and those that are weak, such as the arms to body as well as the upper and lower torsos.  As I painted the rear ‘skirt’ separately it had to be pinned also, if glued in the initial assembly I suspect it would be ok without a pin, just that gluing painted parts to painted parts yields a weaker bond.  Also another good tip is to pin the missile pod doors, the contact here is tiny so lots of patience is recommended, oh and a small drill bit!  A few of the WIP shots below show the positions of the main pins as well as up close details of the paint job in sections:

Base WIP, showing pins for feet

Legs and base complete

Upper torso complete 1

Upper torso complete 2

Painting

As indicated above I found it easier to paint the Judicator in several discreet sections and worked from the base upwards.  The colours for the Judicator were exactly the same as previous articles, the gold being the first stage, given the messy nature of drybrushing and washing.  One small change was my daylight lamp decided to go kaput and I ended up purchasing a new lamp, the new lamp has a ‘white light’ and has a tube rather than a bulb.  The light I bought is designed to aid partially sighted people and it has the effect of showing imperfections in painting up.  Basically it has improved my layering because it shows up the different shades more harshly, therefore you end up making closer, less harsh shades and under normal light the layering looks more seamless.  It is kind of like when you take a flash photo of a model and it makes it look a bit naff!  I did quite a lot of highlighting of the gold plate with P3 Solid gold on most of the protruding gold leaf and embellishments as well as the gold rivets, this was augmented by a lot of black ink lining, the latter is absolutely painstaking, it takes ages and needs a really steady hand, but the delineation between two surfaces looks so much neater and makes the model stand out - definitely worth the time IMO.

Below are a series of photos of the finished Judge Judy:

Judge Judy in action

So with Judy getting her paint job I had a couple of opportunities to playtest her.  I chose to field her with Feora2, the pair seemed destined to fit together, heck I think Feora features quite strongly in the Colossals book fiction!  My thoughts on Judge Judy is that she is a great piece for the Protectorate and enjoyable to play.  The Judicator has great infantry clearing skills as well as being able to kill any heavy target in the game.  Feora2 augments the Protectorates already great ‘jack buffing abilities by giving Judge Judy 2” of much needed extra speed, whilst buffing Feora’s armour with the Escort spell.  The bond adds that extra melee attack or boost, but more importantly grants Judge Judy continuous fire on all of its weapon systems allowing the missile pods to cause more havoc than you would believe against infantry.  Feora2 also has the Ignite spell which grants Judge Judy +2 STR to her melee weapons giving a frightening number of very accurate high P&S attacks.

I’ve run the Judicator at 50 points and 35, it seems like a squeeze at 35 but quite do-able: 50 points however gets you all of the toys…  I found that a Reckoner is a welcome addition to the Battlegroup as its Flare helps to counter the Judicator’s Inaccurate rule when shooting high ARM, low DEF targets, clearly the Hymn of Battle, aiming and boosting to hit all aid accuracy further.

A couple of examples of where Judy has passed judgement were as follows:

Infantry:  Carpet bombing high DEF Satyxis Raiders who were immune to blast damage, basically they ignore the AOE blast, but are susceptible to the continuous fire.  Similarly any unit of high DEF or stealthed infantry can be targeted by Judy from a considerable distance and the inaccurate rule really doesn’t make any difference so she can be quite focus efficient.  The free focus can be used when fishing for solos or UA’s to boost the damage and hopefully kill outright or maim sufficiently for the continuous fire to finish off in the opponents next Maintenance Phase.

Hard target (from range):  My Judy combined its firepower with a Reckoner and Battle Engine to judge Mulg, the two fully boosted rocket pods were shooting at an effective RAT7 plus 3D6 and damaging at POW16 plus 3D6, with all the buffs.  With the new SR2013 destroying enemy objectives from afar will be another strong use.

Hard target (melee):  My Judy had the opportunity to judge a Kraken, the Cryx Colossal, receiving four focus, the Hymn of Battle and under the Ignite spell it just didn’t seem fair.  In the last example I had received a charge from Kraken and lived, though had dice gone my opponents way then Judy would likely have been destroyed.  In another game I had the opportunity to judge a Conquest, but had to trample over half a dozen infantry to get there.  I did have the ‘alpha strike’, but even with Battle and Ignite three bought attacks simply wasn’t enough and it was Judy who was judged!!!

YOU will be judged!!!

Grand Slam 2

Another tournament has cropped up, Grand Slam 2, to be held this Sunday (3^rd December 2012) at Maelstrom (Eye of the Storm) and run by my good friends over at York.  Details can be found here.

In all honesty I should take Menoth as I know what I’m doing with them, but I decided to take Khador, basically because I wanted to field the big lad!!  I’ve got major surgery the following day so to be honest I really need to have a good fun time and not be bothered about how well I do so I think this choice is just the ticket!

As I’ve posted the pictures of the big lad, a.k.a. Konquest recently I needed a warcaster to run him, I used a cheeky Sorscha2 list a few times with a Winter Guard ‘Deathstar’ and Black Dragon Iron Fangs (poached from Dave).  That list was pretty brutal and good fun too, I also had Sorscha2 painted and most of the Iron Fangs… so I decided to take Irusk1!!!  I quite like the idea of ‘Fully Painted 2013’, an idea banded around by Muse On Minis, something I try and adhere to anyway.  This meant I had to paint up Irusk1 and a full unit of Kayazy Assassins plus Underboss.

Irusk1

Below are a few snaps of the painted Irusk1, I followed the procedure for painting Khador red as previously discussed in the Konquest article, the remainder of the model was done with standard techniques previously discussed for the metals, clothing, flesh etc:

Irusk1 - front

Irusk1 - side

Irusk1 - rear

Irusk1 - side

Kayazy Assassins

The Kayazy are a Khador Ally unit, which means that they are ‘faction’, but aren’t quite regular army and therefore required a different painting style.  I felt that they needed to be quite dark, given their back-alley, cutthroat, shadowy fiction and playstyle, but still retain some of the Khadoran colours for visual recognition.  I chose several dark-greys to base the main colours on, each of which was shaded with Badab Black, then re-highlighted back up to the original base coat, then further highlighting by mixing a cream into the base (not necessary on all colours given the dark pallet – just extreme edges).  I used P3 Greatcoat Grey as the base colour for the Kayazy clothing as this colour is present in the main army and would creat visual continuity.  I used very little red as it was just too bright for the Kayazy, though a couple of assassins did get Khador red hats!

Below are a few photos of the finished Kayazy unit and Underboss:

Kayazy Underboss

Kayazy Assassins - front

Kayazy Assassins - side

Kayazy Assassins - rear

Kayazy Assassins - side

The Irusk1 list is based around two units and Konquest, Irusk1 can run Konquest easily and support the infantry with his defensive/offensive spells.  His Superiority spell really takes care of a few of Konquests weaknesses, as it adds +2 SPD, +2MAT and +2DEF, the latter not really making any difference to a DEF7 model to be honest, but the first two are really important.  Irusk1 can use Battle Lust to basically give out ‘weapon master’ and fearless at will, making units such as Kayazy very dangerous to higher armoured and multiple wound targets.  Iron Flesh is a very good defensive buff, adding +3DEF, but reducing SPD by 1, this obviously synergises well with high DEF units such as Winter Guard Infantry and Kayazy and of course himself (given the Shrinking Kill Box Artifice unique to Grand Slam events).

Irusk also has Inhospitable Ground, a spell that makes his control area (14”) difficult terrain for enemy models, situationally very powerful, allowing the Irusk1 army the opportunity to ‘alpha strike’ the slower enemy.  If the enemy has little or no access to ‘pathfinder’ this is very strong, clearly the inverse is true against those armies with a lot of access such as Circle and Legion.

Irusk1’s feat is a double barrelled feat, where it grants friendly faction warrior models +2 to hit on ranged and melee attack rolls, but perhaps is more defensive in that it grants 4+ tough (super-tough!), fearless and immunity to knock-down for a round.  I found that hard to hit units such as WGI and the Kayazy, who benefit from this feat become very difficult to shift and can jam up enemy lines with less reprisal than without the feat.  Also the buff side of the feat stacks nicely with other buffs the two units inherently possess, such as gang, CRA/CMA and Kovnik Joe’s boosted to hit speech – meaning they are reliably accurate.

The list below is what I have been practicing:

Irusk1

*Konquest

Battle Mechanics (min)

Kayazy Assassins (full) + UA

Winter Guard Infantry (full) + UA

Kovnik Jozeph Grigorovich

Below is a photo of the Irusk1 list:

Karchev

The Karchev list is a bit bonkers to be perfectly honest; it is the exact list that I used to use when I first started playing and is as follows:

Karchev

*Beast 09

*Behemoth

*Kodiak

*War dog

Battle Mechanics (min)

Koldun Lord

Ogrun Bokur

As you can see it’s a bit different, having loads of ‘jacks and virtually no infantry – it is not very subtle and is fairly easy to predict.  It does pose certain problems for opponents and if you can’t deal with that many warjacks then it will probably hit like a sledgehammer.  With the currant meta shift towards Colossals and ‘anti-colossal lists’ this list will likely fall prey to such lists, still it is incredibly good fun to play and that is my primary objective for this event!  As it has a low model count then activation time for the 7 minute turns will be favourable (I hope).

The basic idea of the list is for Karchev to Tow the three heavies into position and let them wreak havoc under Unearthly Rage smashing the snot out of anything nearby!  The Bokur is there to take a shield guard hit for Karchev, though any concerted shooting effort will probably kill him as easy as any other heavy ‘jack TBH.  The dog will help Karchev with a bit of defence in melee as well as getting away without taking free-strikes.  The Koldun Lord can play sweeper with a decent magic shotgun spray as well as powerboost/un-disrupt a ‘jack.  As Karchev will have virtually nothing to hand out to his ‘jacks this extra point of focus could mean an extra fully boosted attack.  The Mechanics are in for obvious reasons!

When I first played this list my local gaming group was much smaller and had less variety of factions and models within them so it was quite a potent list, however in the last two years we’ve all broadened our gaming horizons and I feel that it is no longer a particularly strong list.  I’m using it because it is fully painted, meets the character restrictions, actually poses a good diversity to the Irusk list and is a damned good laugh to play!

Below are some photos of the Karchev list ready to smash face!!

A firm foundation

As noted in my last article I offered to build and paint Dave Forster's Konquest base in a similar way to my own and I thought I'd write an article on how I build mine and paint stages should any reader be interested!

Slate glued down

Materials:

Simple really, ordinary garden slate which is generally a blue/purpleish colour.  Very cheap and abundant; I smash the larger bits up with a hammer to get more manageable pieces.  For the earth I use medium grade model railway ballast; something I've recently started using, but find that it 'clumps' nicely and has a nice texture for drybrushing.

Assembly:

Ballast & PVA mix

Once the slate has been bashed up into manageable chunks I tend to dry-fit pieces with the legs looking for an interesting fit, for example the Conquest has a bent right foot which will fit with some angled slate, whereas the flat left foot would need to be modelled on some flat slate otherwise the model would end up off balance and look wrong.  In Dave's base the right foot would be mounted on some angled slate, which was actually quite thick, so therefore the left foot would need to be raised with the thickness of the earth, around 5mm.

Ballast mix applied to base

Once the foot positions were figured out I glued the slate in position with thick superglue, thick adds a greater contact and acts as a filler too.  The next step is worth taking time over to save problems later.  I use a pencil to mark the final foot positions and make ready to site the pins, with the Colossals this is quite important as they have pre-determined LOS markings on the base itself.

Close up once dried (note pins for feet)

To get accurate pin positions I first drilled the Colossal's feet in places suitable for the pins, i.e. where sufficient depth could be achieved as well as hidden when complete.  The next step was to cut pins that are deliberately too short, just enough to poke out of the holes; these were left in the feet and the model sited on to the pencil positions drawn earlier.  Next the feet were pushed firmly allowing the too short pin to make an indent on the plastic or slate where the other hole needed to be drilled.  This should make an almost exact fit for the pin to line up...

Drilling through slate is possible and certainly worth it, it just takes time and patience!  Once the holes were drilled I inserted much longer pins than the previous ones and bent the ends into an L shape in order to secure them on the base, for the feet to slip into later.  After a quick dry-fit the pins should be correctly aligned, possibly a slight tweak with some pliers to bend them, but hopefully a good fit has been achieved.

Once the slate has been glued into position with superglue the next step is to fill the gaps with earth, basically mix the ballast with PVA glue and some water into a very thick paste.  I used a sculpting tool to lay the mixture down and sculpt it into an undulating earth that would look good when painted.  One final thing was that I fitted the legs into position as the earth mixture was drying in order to make the left foot fit snugly; the earth was pushed slightly to leave a footprint and the legs then removed and cleaned up after any excess got stuck.  All done and just ready to dry now!

Painting:

The paint scheme for the base is quite simple, basically drybrushing the following colours in order:

1.Chaos Black primer undercoat

2.  Scorched Brown drybrush

3. Bestiel Brown drybrush

4.  Snakebite Leather drybrush

5. Menoth White Base drybrush (initially don't clean the brush, but  leave some of the previous colour (Snakebite Leather) to get a halfway tone.  Then do a pure Menoth White Base drybrush

6. Skull White drybrush (very light)

7. The slate rocks were basecoated in Bastion Grey

8. Slate washed with Badab Black

9. Slate re-highlighted with a drybrushing of Trollblood Highlight and very light Skull White

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 In this example there is no static grass or tufts, which I think is the finishing touch that makes all the difference and lifts the whole thing.  This is because Dave will be adding his own to match existing miniatures in his army, but below is the Konquest on his base, hope you like it Dave :-)