2017 Year in Review

This was another good hobby-filled year. So here is a summary of 2016 for me.

T'au Empire (Warhammer 40,000)
I took my T'au to the Harvester this year. While my Index army didn't have too much success, it was fun. Let's hope they get a good codex in 2018. At least I have some newly painted battlesuits.

James' Necrons (Warhammer 40,000)
I guess you could call this a commission. Something I did for my brother so he could attend the Harvester of Souls with us. We will see what kind of codex will come out for it in 2018.

Censers & Tocsins (Nurgle Mortals - Warhammer: Age of Sigmar)
This is an army I have been trying to keep up on with painting. Compared to last year's summary, I only had some built, and none painted. My goal with this army is if I build something for it, I paint it, before building the next thing. There will definitely be more to come for this AoS force.

Forthammer Clan Throng (Dispossessed - Warhammer: Age of Sigmar)
I have had a ton of fun with this army. I took them to the Las Vegas Open, added some cool conversions, and am running them in a campaign, which is still ongoing. I have more on the painting table for these guys, so I am not done with them yet.

The Klad Barag (Dispossessed - Warhammer: Age of Sigmar)
This deserves its own entry here because I consider it quite the achievement. Still not 100% sure what I will use him as, but he will be a proxy for any big dude I want to run in friendly games. Perhaps not tournament legal due to being a proxy and all. I do plan on taking some better photos of this guy and sending them to White Dwarf. Let's hope something comes from that.

Forgesworn Eternals (Stormcast Eternals - Warhammer: Age of Sigmar)
I haven't really added anything to this army, just got completely caught up on painting. Lately nothing has really stood out for the line to get me to want to add here. At least with being completely painted, if I do add anything, I will be inclined to immediately paint it. Like my plans for my Nurgle dudes.

Tempest's Eye Rangers (Grand Alliance: Order - Warhammer: Age of Sigmar)
I only have a couple things here for the army, for now. They are only really ever intended to be for some Grand Alliance army, rather than a start of Freeguild. I would like to paint them this coming year.

Song of Blades and Heroes Stuff
For my favorite non-Warhammer fantasy skirmish game, I have added a lot of Reaper BONES minis to it here and there. And I made some nifty ruins for it as well. But most of all I am still slowly working on the Song of the Deep Empire campaign supplement for it. More on that in the coming year.

And that sums up the year. Lot's of fun projects, and of course, lot's of plans for 2018. Stay tuned.

T'au Display Board finished, and finished army

My army is complete and ready for the Harvester tournament.

And here it is next to my old board. I tried the best I could to match the colors, and I think I got it close enough.

And the list I will be presenting to my opponents.

T'au Display Board - Work in Progress

The Harvester of Souls looms closer. With my T'au army painted, I want to try a new display board. I already made one for my old tau force as seen here. I kept that board in mind when building this one. I wanted it to continue off of the old one. The idea is so when I have them both set-up at home, I could have a couple boards to display all the painted models in my army.

Initial foam layering. I worked with 1" pink foam on particle board, same dimensions and materials as the previous display board.

I wanted more Tau structural presence on this board. So I opted for sort of a garage that serves as the top entrance to a much deeper underground layer. So even the generator and pillbox on the other board are considered part of this installation. The door in the floor is where the battlesuits come up from. The roof and front wall meet in the middle to connect and close off.

Furnishing the indoor. Most of these bits are remains of Devilfish and Hammerhead kits.

This shows how the 2 boards will connect when finished. Again these 2 are meant to display together for my own home display, I will not be taking the old board to the Harvester, thankfully.

So far this is what I am deciding on the arrangement of my army. A very battlesuit heavy army.

Sand applied to everything. As with all other sanding, it's a layer of glue, then sand, then another layer of glue on top to really lock it in.

Some of the inside bay painted up. I have more detail work to do, especially decals. I plan on adding a lot of the Tau decals.

Now to get some paint on this thing and finish the detail work!

A Better Small Flying Base

This is a common sight for my Tau at least, and it pisses me off how much it happens. All it takes for one to drop a mere 3' from the table, and the shattering happens. Having clear acrylic bases to be invisible on the board is nice, but not worth all this trouble. So I have found a better solution.

GW's 32mm plastic bases are the same diameter as the small flying base! This is important because of the following steps:

Start by taking a large paper clip and straightening it out. Then using some pliers, form a little shape like this. Find a drill bit with about the same size as the paperclip, then drill a hole directly in the center of the 32mm base.

The shape you made in the paperclip is to provide strength for it to glue into the inside of the base. I used some superglue for quick place. Superglue is not strong enough in this case, but it works for holding it there.

Next I filled in the whole bottom of the base with hot glue. This did 2 things: hold the paperclip in place even better provided some really good weight to the base. Flying models can tend to be top heavy and prone to tipping over. This will counter some of that.

Once the hot glue cools and sets, you should have penty of wire for mounting. You merely need only to cut it short to the height you need, and drill into the bottom of the model and glue the wire in it with superglue.

I am eventually going to do this to all my drones. Even my planned Drukhari will have some Hellions in which I am basing them this same method. In case any of you are wondering about the strength of this, I have had models based this way fall from the table several times, and the bits of the model break before the basing does. I'll take it!

Harvester Preparation - Tau Painting

I haven't had much to show off the past couple weeks because I have been working entirely on getting the following painted:

I had built this back when the Ghostkeel model first came out. I liked the look of a larger stealth suit, so I wanted to give one a go. Again, not being satisfied with regular posing, I tried to build the kit in a very dynamic run-n-gun action pose. I also wanted to make sure the preserve the ability to open the cockpit. The head is actually the bare head from the Shadowsun kit. I wanted a female to be piloting this suit. It just seemed to fit. Haven't thought of a name or story for her yet.

My counts-as Technical Drones from Forgeworld are painted. Again with drones, using 32mm bases and wire rods is a significant improvement over the brittle clear plastic GW flying bases. The main drone bodies are from the Hammerhead SMS sponsons, and some other drone bits. I decided that little mechanical arms for repairs fit the technical drone better, so these are from some Adeptus Mechanicus bits I got from a bits site, I can't remember which kit they go to.

Ethereal Commander Aun'Mei is complete. I am proud of the way this one turned out. I hope it conveys the Ethereal inside (with the blue and tan and tall hat), as well as the Honor Blade. Of course the model itself is not considered to have an honor blade, it's mostly there for aesthetics. Here it is in the Coldstar Battlesuit configuration, which is likely what I am going to run at the Harvester. The Coldstar is a fun model. It has a 20" movement, with the ability to double that for an advance move. I played a game against my brother's Necrons, dropped her down on one far side of the table, then on the next turn, ended up completely on the other side to contest an objective. That's what the Coldstar is for, to get a model to where you need it FAST.

My tacticool fusion suits are completed as well, painted normally in the pattern of the rest of my battlesuits. The main difference is on all my other Crisis suits, they are completely magnetized, but here the guns are set, because of how they are held and converted. But I'm not worried. I have plenty of other magnetized crisis suits already, and the Sunforge configuration (2x fusion blasters) is a weapon set I don't see going out of style this edition, or even the next ones.

These combined with some of my existing painted Tau, I have the current iteration of the army I plan to bring to the Harvester, unless through playtesting I swap a few things out. We will see though. But with this done, all I need to do is create my display board, base these new minis, and finish painting my brother's Necrons.

Harvester Preparation - Necrons and Tau Commander

I've been working on 3 total models since my last post. Starting off with my brother's (James) Necrons.

I saw a really cool idea for a cryptek. You can imagine this guy's tendril getting him around the tombs. I think the final result turned out, and will really come together when painted.

The monolith I wanted to build to where it definitely looked like a monolith, but different enough to set it apart. So I made some extra plates with paneling (out of plasticard) for each of the corners and built the parts a little different. I think this thing will definitely sell the look when it's painted.

This is going to be one of the commanders for my Tau army. I have always toyed around with the idea of a battlesuit ethereal.. With my Sept, and teasers for the new T'au fluff in 8e, I wanted an Empire friendly sept that has to adapt to a unique circumstance. I will touch more on that later, the story of the Fi'rios sept since the fate of the 4th sphere expansion. For now, this may be Aun'mei. She suffered a fatal accident in a previous battle, and she needs to live on life support. Luckily she can do that while inside a battlesuit so she can continue to have a battlefield presence. Above is a configuration I am planning for the harvester (3 missile pods and a velocity tracker), but this thing is magnetized, so...

I can do the coldstar commander configuration if I wanted to. Some of my fingers got in this shot because I didn't have her based yet and my hand had to hold the stand up while I took the shots.

Some eary concept art my brother, Jarom, did for a battlesuit Ethereal. This helped inspire the project above.

Coming plans and getting ready for the Harvester

The date for the Harvester of Souls 40k GT has been officially announced, and it's coming a little early this year. Meaning I don't have as much time as I originally thought to get an army ready for it. Thus I have to put any AoS painting on the back-burner for now.

That also means my original plans for a 40k army may change. I was going to expand my Haemonculus Covens army with some space pirates themed Drukhari. But with as much buying, building and painting I need for that plan, I may not have enough time. So I am going to default to my Tau, of which I have most of it painted already.

The other thing I need to take into consideration is one of my other brothers, James, is likely going to join us. This will be his first 40k tournament attended, and the Harvester is great for that. Unfortunately most of his army, Necrons, is unbuilt and unpainted. He joined us a couple years ago for a kill-team campaign, but not much playing beyond that. 8th edition is great for beginners and people getting back into the hobby from a long hiatus. So I will be helping him assemble and paint some of his army.

I've already gotten started by making his monolith. I am not done, but this shows off the symbol he designed of his dynasty on the front. I made it out of plasticard. So it will look like an engraving, rather than painted on.

Some pictures I took of his painted models. He designed the color scheme himself, so when I paint his other things, I will try to match it.

James' Dynasty symbol, lead by Lord Ter

'omenti.

Tau Plans and New Stuff

Of course with a new year, I am already thinking about what I plan to bring to the next Harvester of Souls in October. I need time to prep for these things. And I feel the pull of the Tau again, after taking a break from them for so long.

Now I will be using the latest Codex edition, which will be allowing me to run a type of list I have dreamed about for a very long time. A list consisting entirely of battlesuits and drones, thanks to using 3 formations. It consists of a Commander, 9 Crisis Suits, 3 Broadsides, Riptide, Ghostkeel, 6 Stealthsuits, and a whole bunch of drones.

As I always want to feature my conversions whenever I can, I will be building some new suits and well as using some old favorites. I will be using my XV86 conversions for 3 of the crisis suits, and my XV9's for 3 more. In that case I will be magnetizing their twin-linked burst cannons and replace them with missile pods. I will also need to re-base them onto 50mm bases to make them legal as XV8's, as the new XV8 kit (which is one of my favorite model kits now, btw) comes with 50mm bases.

On top of this, with my lovely wife gifting me the new Crisis kit for Christmas, I made 3 more suits. This is a conversion I have been wanting to do for a long time now. The idea is give them a more tacti-cool 2-handed rifle hold pose. Each fusion blaster is long-barreled which will count as a twin-linked fusion blaster, to account for accuracy and precision. I also went for a different head style, using a support system bit (commonly represents Target Lock) with some other bits.

Also with some of my winnings from the last Harvester, I bought the Commander kit. I have some semi-radical plans with it. I have thought about what if an Ethereal piloted a battlesuit, and that will be the focus of the conversion. More on it in a later post.

My brother, Jarom, got me a small gift for Christmas, which I appreciate. He has been working on a Gue'vesa themed Tau force lately, and gave me the DS8 Tactical Support Turrets from his Fire Team kits he had. I built one normally (right), and a one to represent how I believe it would look like while hovering (left). The story with these turrets is they follow the strike team around in hovering, and the team can plant theirs to deploy the weapon. Only when it is planted the weapon can be used. In this case I prefer the Smart Missile System.

And finally, this may have nothing to do with my Harvester list, but I have always wanted to add Tetras to my army. I faced them in one of my games at this last Harvester, and they were effective and looked like a lot of fun. My opponent also used the official models for them, where I commonly saw people use stripped down Piranhas as proxies, which are generally much bigger. The Tetra is deceptively small, more close to the size of jetbike models. So that gave me an idea. How would I go about making a Tau Jetbike? So with a bits order I got the core parts of the Reaver Jetbikes, and tried on the drone and Coldstar Commander thrusters (which I will not be using on my Ethereal Commander). This is just a preliminary stick-together concept of course, so things will likely change, but I think with these core components I can make a decent Tau jetbike Tetra counts-as.

2016 Year Goals

Now to discuss my plans for the new year. These are not new years resolutions, but goals. We know nobody keeps their resolutions.

HARD GOALS
These are goals that I must get done this year.

The Coven of Verminlord Skrax (Warhammer 40,000 - Dark Eldar, Haemonculus Covens)
I put up a little teaser image of the logo I designed for this new army project. It is a skaven/ratmen themed Haemonculus Covens army. All I have built so far is pictured above. I played a small points game with a couple proxies and I did lose because I am becoming familiar with it still, but I love it because it is different than any army I have ever played and a challenge. The reason this is a hard goal is because I want to get it done by the Harvester of Souls in October. Luckily for me the model count in this army is relatively low.

SOFT GOALS
Things I would like to get done before year's end, but only to break up the monotony of the Hard Goal.

• Paint all my Dwarfs
• Paint all my Forgesworn Eternals
• Collect and build my Nurgle/Pestilens warband for Age of Sigmar. This is also a new army project I want to do, but no set goal for its completion. I still have some stuff to collect and there will be a lot of conversions planned for it
• Finish building all the Zone Mortalis tiles

LOFTY GOALS
Things that will most likely not get done before the year's end, but maybe depending on how the moods strike me.

• Finish building and painting my Grand Inquisitorial Retinue
• Build that new Devilfish kit into something
• Paint the rest of my Tau 
• Completely paint the Zone Mortalis Tiles
• Paint my Nurgle/Pestilens warband

2015 Year In Review

Not as much happened this year as I would have liked. My family had a move so that cut into a lot of hobby time, but I was still able to work on many projects that I am proud of. So here is a wrap up for the year on the status of my many projects.

Grand Inquisitorial Retinue (Warhammer 40,000 - Inquisition)
I had originally planned for this project to get done in time for the Harvester of Souls Grand Tournament, but the move especially cut into this. I have about 95% of the army assembled, and about 15% painted. This project is officially on back burner status. I think I got burned out on such an ambitious project and bitten off more than I can chew with it. I would like to get back to it at some point because I am especially proud of some of the conversions, like my Lord Inquisitor in terminator armour and the Acolytes with boltguns.

Commander Truestrike's Fi'rios Expedition Cadre (Warhammer 40,000 - Tau Empire)
My original Tau army has expanded some. The new codex brought in some fun additions that I got. I made a set of Breachers and an XV95 Ghostkeel, the latter I really enjoyed on the tabletop. I may even like it better than the Riptide. Plus a few more minor editions. My brother Jarom got me another Devilfish for Christmas. I have some ideas for a different conversion for them, so you may see a few posts on that next year.

Forgesworn Eternals (Warhammer: Age of Sigmar - Stormcast Eternals)
Games Workshop really shook it up with the release of Age of Sigmar. Regardless of all the fuss I love the game and excited to see where it's going from here. The Stormcast Eternals are unique and fun to build and paint, and I got a lot of positive internet feedback on my Lord-Celestant on Dracoth conversion when it was featured on Faeit 212. I don't really plan on adding any more to this army. I have enough for a decent force in a game that plays well with small warbands (one of the many reasons I love AoS) and they are generally meant to ally with my Dwarfs anyway.

Forthammer Clan Throng (Warhammer: Age of Sigmar - Dwarfs)
My original Dwarf army has taken a turn for AoS, with my round basing project pretty much done. I still have a little bit to add to it, but I am going to start fresh with a new paint scheme, and some new fluff, depending on the rumored Duardin Battletome. So we will see where that goes.

Extreme Scythean (Warmachine/Hordes - Legion of Everblight)
This was not my army, but I guess this could be considered my first commission. I had fun doing the project and I enjoyed seeing it received.

Zone Mortalis Project (Warhammer 40,000 - Terrain Project)
This one had to take a break as Christmas came in and took up the bits casting zone. But that will resume soon. I am hoping I can at least have this one built up to 16 tiles before the end of next year.

That sums up the year. Next update will be my goals for 2016.