Sunday, 23 February 2025

A Litany of Excuses

In my last post, I owned up to being behind with my efforts to paint all the models in the Combat Patrols magazine series as they arrive. Now, I'll belatedly make the case for my own defence.

Essentially, it's that I was painting other 40k stuff, in order to use it playing 5th Edition 40k Apocalypse, as we'd planned for our big Christmas game (which, it turned out, was festively delayed due to snow). 

So, to save some amount of face, here are some pictures of those things. It occurs to me that many of them have been sat around in pile of shame for close to two decades, so finally painting some of them is cause for celebration, even as it distracted me from painting new stuff. So that's something.


Inquisitor and retinue! Painting these was entirely critical, as it allowed me to include a land raider as a transport, and I definitely wanted that to happen.


Servitors! I think these are probably the oldest sculpts I've painted for a very long time - I'm reasonably sure they appear in the 2nd edition books somewhere, although I can't be bothered to check. In any case, they are still very nice models, and sit there shaming me for not having painted a tech priest to go with them. In the Apocalypse game they filled out the crew for an artillery platform.


A Valkyrie! When these first came out, I knew immediately had to have one, I think they're great models. I even went so far as to wire it up to have LEDs on the wings, but then, unaccountably, never finished painting it. 


Even more unaccountably, when I came back to it I decided I wanted to go for a dark "special forces helicopter" scheme rather than the light grey "fighter jet" version I'd previously started. I also ripped out the wiring and LEDs as on second look the wires were far, far too obvious. I suspect it won't be my last ever go with lighting though, because I'm a glutton for punishment.


Having used this in two games now, I can say that the model is much more imposing than its stats in the game would suggest, so there's a definite psychological advantage to having it too. 

Speaking of which...


Assassins! 


Since Apocalypse allows you to ignore army selection restrictions, you can also ignore the "0-1 Assassins" rule, and therefore field them from all four temples. 


Maths fans will have spotted only three in the photo, which is because I also had an Eversor Assassin painted, so he isn't new and doesn't qualify for a picture here. Also, he doesn't look great, so he might get a repaint at some point.


I've run out of things to say about these, but there was another photo, hence this sentence. 



Grenade launcher Arbitrator fella! This guy actually didn't make it into the Apocalypse game, but I painted him, so here you are.

And yet, here's something that did make it in. Apocalypse practically requires super-heavy tanks, so here's mine, the technically super-heavy Malcador!


Mostly, what this did was trundle about slowly and miss things, but it's a satisfying chunk of tank to plonk on the table, so that's nice.


In my head this is associated with my Praetorians. Does that matter? No. But I've told you anyway. Main paint colour for this was Vallejo Green Brown, a piece of information that I'll find useful should I add another at any point.


It's a big boy. Have a look at it next to some Leman Russ tanks for scale:


In fact, have a look at the Leman Russes on their own!


I'm not sure I'd say these are technically "done" but they're "done for now" so that'll do. They were both painted very poorly in the distant past, so I stripped them and gave them a very quick paint job. It doesn't match the Malcador because I want these to be associated with my Cadians... which also desperately need repainting but that hasn't happened yet.

But here's something that did happen! The Apocalypse game itself. I didn't take enough photos to talk through the game itself, but there were lots of models on the table, which is nice.

Statistically, if you're reading this,
you're probably in this photo.




And finally! To go with the Genesis marines I've been painting from the Combat Patrol magazines, I've painted a few more intercessors to edge them towards having enough troops choices to be legal in 5th edition. Not there yet, but it's getting closer...




Tuesday, 18 February 2025

40k Combat Patrol Delivery 3 - Invisible Touch

Ok, so things haven't stayed fully to the plan.

I was supposed to be painting each delivery from the Combat Patrol magazines, then getting in the games from the magazine, and posting here about it all before the next delivery arrived.

I realised that if I just use the Combat Patrol
logo every time, I can't tell the posts apart,
so now there's a photo of a model here first.

This has... not come to pass.

However, it's not all bad. Although posts here haven't been up to date, I have been painting things a little faster than that. I'm not quite up to where I should be, but I think it's possible to catch up, so I'll just keep at it, post here as fast as I can, and see whether I can manage it. 




So, here we go then. Issues 7, 8, 9 & 10.

I used this photo on the previous post
by mistake, and no one, including me,
noticed. This might suggest that
these photos are pointless,
but I've taken them, so meh.


This set includes the first "big" squad, in the form of 10 termagants, and the sprues there also make a ripper swarm base. I used the paint scheme I'd already started for these, which kept the painting time very short. 

Scuttle, scuttle

Nice as it is to have these, I already had a decent number of termagants anyway. So, this makes my Tyranid army a little bit bigger, and it's nice that other than the inevitable scale creep, these models don't look out of place among the older stuff I already own. 

More visually interesting was the terminator librarian. 

Yep, this photo again. I didn't think this through.

I quite enjoyed painting this guy. I was still trying to keep things quick so he's almost entirely done in contrast paints (his armour is Ultramarines Blue to keep him codex-compliant) with some blue ink over silver on his shoulders. The runes I picked out in white and then drybrushed on some sky blue - just enough to give them a bit of a glow. 



Wouldn't be 40k without an obviously
oversized close combat weapon

Models done, it was time to sort the games... but that didn't happen until embarrassingly recently.

Not so recently though that I can actually remember what happened (I was using the marines with Kieron again taking the Tyranids, I think I lost the final game), so here's a set of photos of... something happening.

Marines engaging in a confident fashion

Some sort of standoff

Ah.

Something of an issue for the librarian

Starting to look like an actual game of something


The takeaway from all of this is that even though I'm definitely still more onboard with using the models for older editions (2nd and 5th, until we decide randomly to do something else), I don't actually hate the 10th edition Combat Patrol rules. They are definitely more abstract, but it will let me use the new stuff without proxying as something else. Can't see me buying anything specifically for it, but since in Combat Patrol the forces are set anyway, that's not an issue. 

So, I'm now somewhat less behind than I was! More to come, as I catch up even further. Optimism!