I have not been posting any painted stuff of mine for some time. Not that I've been idle and haven't done anything, but it is a lot less than I would have liked, and I could certainly not find the time to also take pictures and post them. Having a baby around the house certainly sucks up a lot of time, especially when the wife injured her back and cannot do anything at the same time...
But, I've finally finished a small project after all. And it's in a scale that I have not done, which made for a nice change of pace. And I must admit that I actually like the 10mm of Dropzone Commander!
At Crisis last year, Voivod bought himself one of the starter boxes, and I agreed to do the same later on. We decided to split the armies, so we'd each have a sizeable force in the end, to which we could then add some of the more fancy stuff. And it being his box, Voivod had first choice and went with the human faction. Which left me with the Scourge.
Apparently, at least visually, the Scourge is the least popular of the current DZC factions. Just another Gigeresque biomechanical threat to the civilized people of the universe, blah blah. But they've sort of grown on me (having been a long time Necron player in 40K must have helped there), and they're pretty easy to paint up too.
And, as Voivod has realized by now, they're also rather effective on the battlefield...
In the starter box, you get three sprues, which each hold 2 infantry bases, a Main Battle Tank, an AAA vehicle, an APC and a Dropship. The force laid out in the rulebook has all of the above, minus one APC, which is sort of a bonus. With a second box and one extra Dropship plus some infantry, it will form yet another complete unit.
Now, I am not a great fan of the studio army's paintscheme. The purple stripes just didn't do it for me, but at the abovementioned Crisis 2013, in the Hawk Games booth, I saw an alternative paintscheme that I really liked; still silver metallic (no escaping that, I suppose), but with a blueish purple on top, with an olive green on the edges.
I've tried to emulate that, and I think I've succeeded too. But don't let the apparently simple paintscheme fool you though; even though the basecoat of silver spraypaint with a black wash was pretty quick, the detailing and subtle colouring still took a long time. Since the coloration of the metallics was done with straight paints, heavily diluted with water (as I could not find washes in the desired colours), most of the tinting took at least three thin layers to get to the right intensity. And then there were the details such as vents, exhausts and eyes/sensors, which still required traditional layering etc.
And since the Scourge vehicles are all supposed to be skimmers, I could not leave them lying on the table; that would just not look right. But since one of the neat things in DZC is that the Dropship models can actually hold all the units they're supposed to carry, and since permanent bases would look rather daft when the vehicles are loaded (not to mention that with the Scourge, that would be impossible to begin with), I made magnetized bases for the skimmers. All vehicles have magnets embedded, so now I can take them off the
CD-Racks Dropships and base them when they deploy. And of course take the bases off when they remount the Dropships. Neato.
The bases are Renedra 25mm square bases with a plastic rod glued in the center. The top of the rod has been drilled out carefully to mount the magnet with some superglue. Some basing material and presto...
In regard to basing; since we're talking 10mm instead of 28mm here, the standard basing sand and gravel is way too coarse and would look ridiculously out of scale. So I recovered a handfull of sand from a building site near my house, sifted it a bit and used that for the basing. It's really fine, so looks in scale with the tiny infantry figures. In the same vein, I used very fine foam flock (several colours mixed) instead of the usual static grass, as a strand of grass would be almost as tall as a human sized figure...
So, without further blabbering, here are the pictures of the start of my Scourge army. Apologies beforehand for the quality of the pictures, but my phone was the only thing handy at the time and especially the purplish blue is lacking in intensity:
First up is the infantry. They come 5 to a base and are vital when grabbing objectives. Also, the Scourge infantry is one of the hardest hitting in the game and they're in trenchcoats to boot
The colourscheme is made up of the same colours used on the vehicles, to make them fit in with the rest of the units.
Next are the Main Battle Tanks. The purple/green scheme is obvious here:
Next up are the AAA units. They're built on the same chassis as the MBT. Also, they're pretty vital in-game, with so many flying units zooming around the table all the time:
Then it's the APCs. People have commented on them having Rhino syndrome, with so many troops having to be crammed inside. But my take on the Scourge is that their mindcontrolled slaves (which the infantry are; captured and turned humans) are just cocooned in there. No need for legroom when they're kept in hybernation, shoulder to shoulder, right?
As I mentioned before, even though the initial force only has 2 APCs, there are 3 in the box, so I painted them all up. The third one will get used eventually:
Then the Dropships from the title of the game. They're pretty important; all units are initially transported in/on them; the force is basically dropping in on the battlefield at the beginning of the game. If it does not have a place on a Dropship, it's not allowed in the army list.
You can see why the Scourge Dropships have been dubbed CD-Racks. Bear in mind that there's also a version that can stack 9 hovertanks...
And finally a groupshot of the entire force, ready to drop in on a planet near you:
I've taken quite a liking to the scale to be honest, and I'm already planning a small 120x120cm table for it. DZC comes with an entire playing surface in the form of a paper map, with cardboard buildings, and whilst looking nice, I would like to eventually have something a bit less flat. So I'm looking at N-scale railroad buildings etc, to see what would work with the game. Since everything is so small, it's all pretty quick to build and paint, which certainly fits my current situation. So stay tuned for more 10mm stuffs in the future...
Welcome, Guest. Please 
April 25, 2024, 12:33:54 PM
November 23, 2012, 02:00:25 PM