A Trip to the Big City!

I am cooking with gas when it comes to 40k right now.

Inspired by my recent game with my wife the other day, I decided to build a whole bunch of new buildings for my war board.

I've had quite a lot of 40k buildings for years but not enough to cover my eight foot board and have had to make do with a bunch of homemade medieval buildings that didn't allow models inside them. As this was bugging me I decided to push it a little further:

Now I can get a little single minded so one building wasn't enough for me.

I decided to do TWELVE new buildings. 

Here's the first one.

It's a temple using the old GW ruins that came with 3rd edition 40k. Now I count this as four of my twelve because although it makes a nice big building it can also be split  up into four smaller ones.

I added cake pillars to the base to make it look more like a ruined church and painted the rocks on the base to match in. The trick with the The statue and aquilla from the Honoured Imperium set add a little something but they can be removed if they bug me. 

Now this building is good but its weakness is that it's a little too striking. I wonder if it'll bug me long term having it in every game. I like my buildings to be slightly more generic where possible.

My next big four part building was this one:

Again, I built it to be split-downable, using Ork obstacles to suggest walls, especially for when they're split up into separate buildings. You'll notice the aim of the game here was to maximise the surface area of the buildings to fill the war board, rather than building tall, but smaller buildings. I'll be focusing on that next.

The main lesson I've learned with my buildings is to build them all on the same sized footprint, each one having a little edge round it to suggest a pavement. This way, the buildings fit together to form roads VERY easily in any direction but also look good standing alone.

The next part of my project was to get my bastions to look good in a town setting. They already look good in a countryside game but without a base they look wrong in a town. So I built flat foamboard bases for each one that I could add a bastion and obstacles to to make it look like it's a proper building - maybe a little guardhouse or something...?

I'm not entirely happy with how they've come together but I'm planning to add a streetlight or two which should make a big difference. I tell you what would add something, thinking now: how about a vehicle parked off-road? That would be cool.

Man, this is a long blog.

(Deep breath).

Next I produced the Shrine of the Aquila. This is a lovely big building that adds some much needed height. Height is something my town doesn't have enough of yet. To make it look interesting it has to go in all three dimensions. I'm planning to rectify that soon but in the meantime this helps.

Now I was originally planning to include this kit in the temple above but I realised it was going to get too big. Wanting to keep my buildings on the same size footprint I was forced to build it in this conventional way. I'm still pretty happy though. It is cool.

And here, finally is my third "building" that I wanted to transplant into the town: a homemade bunker that I constructed from foamboard and balsa wood. Again, it's a nice piece but looked odd in my town. Now though it fits in a lot better and can still be removed for a more rustic setting. I'll add a streetlight to this as well when I get round to it to make it look more real.

The gun on the top, by the way, is the Forge World gun emplacement thingy that no longer seems to be available.

Annoyingly, the practically free quad gun in Planetstrike is ironically better than this expensive model because it's twin-linked. This one looks a lot better though. 



Spotlight On... The Forge World Necron Tomb Stalker

And now a word from a friend of mine…

I’ve been playing against Rob for a couple of years now and not only is he a nice guy he has an annoying habit of beating me.

Rob is an independent stockiest (which was how we met originally) and sells very reasonably miniatures from his site Warscape Forty K.

The first time I heard that Forge World were bringing out a Necron tomb stalker I had to have one, if you know Necrons you know why a close combat unit like the stalker is a must. Last year’s Games Day (2010) at the NEC was the first time i saw the Necron tomb stalker and boy did it look good. The guys at Forge World had painted it so it looked like chrome and they put the stalker on a Tau piranha so it look as if the stalker was running over the downed piranha, at that point i had to have one.  

I asked for the Necron tomb stalker as a birthday present and was over the moon to get one. as I started to unpacking the stalker i realized that it was going to take all my modelling knowhow to make it. I’ve always  been told that Forge Word models can be tricky to make because of the resin and the washing needed before painting. None of that was a problem. It was the stalker’s multi parts that had to be glued together and held in position which was the problem. 

This was the first model that I’ve build from the base up. I wanted the Necron tomb stalker to look like it was coming over a mound of earth and attacking its enemy. I had to build the base then build the stalker over the contours of the mound of earth and at this point it got very interesting. As you can imagine trying to get the correct pose and making sure all the body parts and legs stayed in the correct place was a nightmare. But after a lot of blood sweat and tears I eventually finished it. I’ve now had a few games with the Necron tomb stalker and it’s a good unit to have and at 195 points isn’t too expensive.

 Thanks Rob!

Spotlight On... Before the Push

The manager of my local Games Workshop store told me they were running a unit painting competition. I was never one for competitions really but I thought, what the heck! I had just bought the new Tyranid Trygon and thought I'd do that for the competition. But bad luck, the entry had to be a unit of infantry!

Deciding to do something special - the best I possibly could do - I ordered a unit of Forge World Death Korps of Krieg models standing at ease and Before the Push was born!

The idea here (hopefully obviously) is that the infantrymen are getting a last minute pep talk from their commissar before climbing out of their trench going over the top.

The punch line to the story is that they cancelled the infantry painting competition and replaced it with a Trygon painting competition.

I had to wait for the better part of a year before they ran another infantry competition and handed it in to win first prize!

Ah the glory! Would that there had been more than one entry in my category!

The diorama has been on display in the local GW since April and now, finally, I’ve got it home to where it belongs.

The bulk of the diorama is made out of insulation foam covered in multi-purpose filler. I used GW razorwire, a GW ladder and barrels & petrol cans from a military model shop. The metal braces holding back the trench wall are actually fabric that I got from The Range.