Desert dwellers

Idrian Skirmishers -  Source

This entry is focussing on Idrian Skirmishers; perhaps one of the less favourite units available to the Protectorate.  They are a mercenary ally unit, but considered faction when building a Menoth army.  When you first look at their abilities you will quickly notice that they have an abundance of skills and an average stat line.  The UA further adds to this and presents even more options and expertise.  As a result this unit is quite expensive; 6-10 for the unit and 3 points for the UA, so 13 points for a full unit with officer attachment.

I won’t make this article a full tactica article, but rather a taster of the Idrian unit.  As noted above they have a swathe of skills and abilities, I’ll include the UA’s in this section too as generally speaking it is worth the three points if you’re investing in a unit of Idrians.  They’ve got Advance Deployment and Pathfinder as well as CRA as standard, so pretty useful from the off.  They all come armed with a Kopis melee weapon and a military rifle for ranged.  They’re mediocre stats (MAT6 and RAT5) make the P&S10 Kopis and POW11 military rifle fairly unremarkable, however given that they have CRA a pair combining will make an effective RAT7 POW13 RNG 10” gun, this is quite tasty.  Obviously they can combine further for greater accuracy and hitting power depending on the target.  I do feel that you pay a premium for these abilities and at one point per model are probably about right – I think they get compared to Errants (quite often) which are cheaper and better, but I’ll just discuss the merits of just the Idrians in this article.

Defensively the Idrians are again mediocre, DEF13 and ARM12 means that they will likely die to a half decent attempt, they do however come with Camouflage as standard adding a further +2 to any defensive terrain bonuses, therefore behind a wall they are DEF19 from shooting.  Clearly that is pretty darn good, but most enemy armies will have a method of dealing with this, i.e. sprays, AoE’s or possibly units which ignore these benefits – Hunter for example.

Idrian Skirmisher Chieftain & Guide - Source

The UA, Chieftain and Guide, come in at a whopping three points, but you do get quite a bit for that investment, CMA as a tactic meaning that the Idrians can now mix it up in melee as well as shooting (mitigating the mediocre MAT6/P&S10 against High DEF/ARM targets).  The Chieftain also adds the Assault & Battery order, which will get you quite a lot of attacks, or could be used as a pseudo Bushwack, so you shoot and then must run or charge – disadvantage here is that you can’t CRA or CMA (though I’m not 100% certain as I type this – it could be a real ball-buster if you can)!  The Guide is perhaps the real icing on the cake as he provides Prey and Go to Ground as a mini-feat.  Prey is fantastic as it raises the Idrians mediocre offensive stats to elite trooper/solo standard and allows the Idrians to kick some ass; as they can Advance Deploy it allows you to place your Idrians right opposite your intended prey-nice!  The mini-feat is useful as a first turn run and go up to DEF19 from shooting (it grants cover), it also defends against AoE’s as it makes the Idrians immune to blast damage for a round – again less effective if the enemy can by-pass this defence.

At present I’ve been running them with Feora1, though a Defender’s Ward ‘caster would get much more mileage out of them.  Feora1 does nothing much for the Idrian’s, but I picked them because they’re fairly self-sufficient and capable of dealing with almost any threat.  They haven’t done anything particularly impressive, but have been fairly solid never-the-less.  One thing I have found is that I’ve expected more of them on occasion and they haven’t delivered, it might be just some bad dice rolling on my part, but I felt they let me down on a few occasions.  I think that most serious players won’t take them as they cost a lot of points and don’t tend to give that much back, as I touched on above other units are far cheaper and arguably more effective so I doubt they will see much competitive play.  On the flip side not many people know what they do and therefore have that ‘Dark Horse’ aspect to them!

Idrian painting

I painted my Idrians as a block of twelve models, which took ages, hence the gap in between blog entries.  As a mercenary ally unit they do not conform to standard Protectorate models.  They are almost polar opposites with flesh aplenty, leather armour and lots of pouches/bling.  They have a Red Indian look to them in the artwork and skin tone would be important when painting these.

Completed Idrian unit

Metals:

As the Idrians don’t wear plate or mail armour like the abundant Exemplar or Flameguard units and are desert dwellers I tried to make them stand apart, but still have some ties to the main army.  I decided after spending a long time studying the models that the metal would be mainly silver with very little gold and the metal would be quite rustic, not polished steel blades that you’d expect in the main Protectorate army.  I used lots of washes to achieve this effect, the old Citadel Flesh Wash as well as the OOP Citadel Washes such as Grippone Sepia.  Metals were drybrushed first from Tin Bitz through to Chainmail, I opted not to layer paint the blades to maintain the rustic look I sought.

Clothing:

The Idrian clothing had a lot of leather armour which were various tan and brown shades washed with various old Citadel inks washes, some had metal plates which were again weathered like the swords.  The cloaks were painted to reflect the camouflage aspect of the Idrian unit and had an earthy tone, these were layer painted (adding Menoth White Highlight to the mix to tie the Idrians to the existing Protectorate units).  I further tied the Idrians to my paint scheme by adding in purple sashes on models which had them – this colour being unique to my personal Protectorate force – alternatively I could have painted pure Menoth White.

Skin:

This was perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the paint job, as noted above they’re like Native American Red Indians and had a different tone to anything I’ve ever painted before.  I did quite a bit of research on the internet and didn’t really find anything I found useful.  I ended up basing the flesh with P3 Midlund Flesh as I have done for many other miniatures, including the existing Protectorate units.  I differed my technique at this point and mixed the old Citadel Flesh Ink with the old Citadel Ogryn Flesh wash, keeping the ink quite strong.  I added a tiny amount of medium and washed the entire flesh tone.  As I predicted the increased ink content made a dark wash and strongly tinted the Midlund Flesh.  After this I re-washed the skin with pure Ogryn Flesh, I did this to make the skin tone matte – inks tend to leave a shiny finish and this dulled it back down.  With the dark tone complete I re-highlighted the flesh with the basecoat leaving the muscle definition created by the wash.  For the highlighting proper I mixed increasing amounts of the old Citadel Bronzed Flesh colour along with medium to the Midlund Flesh basecoat.  I think this gave me a different skin tone to the other Protectorate units, although it doesn’t really look how I envisaged the end result.  I contemplated making a glaze to tint the finished flesh to a more Red Indian skin, maybe using Baal Red or possibly making my own glaze with P3 Sanguine Base.  I didn’t do the latter because the Idrians looked suitably different and the flesh had come out quite nicely – glazing it might have ended up being counter productive.

Below are a series of glamour shots of the completed unit:

Chieftain & Guide

Chieftain & Guide

Idrian troopers - front

Idrian troopers - rear

Idrian troopers - close-up

 Thanks for reading :-)