Infinity: Defiance & Beyond

I started the project with the Nox troopers. These are the basic footsoldier of the Shasvastii and I have 9 in total – 3 from Operation Wildfire and 6 from the core game. I only included 6 in the photo because in the Defiance game you get 3 different poses and two of each pose. It was far easier to fit 6 models into the frame than 9.

I haven’t ever painted any Combined Army before, and the thought of all that black armour really didn’t fill me confidence – it’s my least favourite colour to paint, especially hard armour surfaces. I know that I could in theory paint them any colour I like but with boardgames I like to match the artwork on the cards. I think this makes things easier for players who aren’t otherwise aware of the Infinity setting. In this case, I think the black not only makes them look more menacing but also I think it provides a nice contrast to the hero miniatures, which are all bright, poppy colours.

These were very much a sort of “trail blazing” exercise to see whether I could create a quick colour scheme that didn’t look too bad at general viewing distance but also didn’t look terrible up close. That’s why I started with the basic footsoldiers, I would lose less sleep over them if they didn’t turn out quite how I wanted them to. In order to try and speed up the armour areas, I primed them black and then gave them two drybrush coats of different shades of grey followed by a heavy black wash. I then painted all of the other areas of colour normally, using brighter colours to make them stand out kind of turns the black armour into a sort of “background” colour, your eyes are drawn away from it. It kind of worked although as you will see, it will take me a number of attempts to get the wash strength right.

Finally, as with all my Infinity miniatures, I am using colour coded, transparent acrylic bases. The colour I selected for the combined army is a rather fetching pink.

Overall, I have decided that, apart from the black armour, I really like the Shasvastii models. They remind me very much of some of the aliens from Mass Effect whilst facially having undertones of Predator.