Space 2021 – A Star Saga

Lock?  What lock?

Kur Keela is Teraton, who are sort of teenage mutant ninja terapins.  He’s a criminal and an outcast among his own kind and is being blackmailed by Blaine into working as a Mercenary.  In the game he’s a sort of combat engineer armed with a rather meaty pistol and a data pad for hacking.  If he needs to get in somewhere, he gets in either by hacking the security system or by, ahem, “brute forcing” it.

Unfortunately, this model was a “salvage job” following another Army Painter Colour Primer incident.  I have pretty much switched to Army Painter paints now, for the most part but I have 100% dropped their primers.  I have had so many issues with them, including but not limited to the nozzle snapping off or just blocking up, losing pressure completely and not spraying (despite the can being almost full) and most commonly generally low flow rate which leaves a grainy, textured finish.  They are absolutely awful which is a real shame because I like the fact that they are well matched to the corresponding warpaint.  I’m now using colour forge primers which are, IMO, the best on the market.  Their quality and finish is comparable to the citadel primers, which are generally quite good, but the tin is 25% bigger.  The range is also almost as big as the Army Painter range (compared to GW who only seem to maintain a small selection of their colour range as primer sprays).

In this instance, the spray had basically gone on and left an absolutely awful finish, very corase and gritty.  This also happened with Ector Zanchez but at that time I wasn’t really sure what I could do about it so I just soldiered on.  However I decided to see whether Dettol could solve the problem and the answer was “sort of”.  It was bathed in neat dettol for 12 hours and then I tried to clean it up with a toothbrush.  The paint itself wasn’t exactly peeling off as I would have expected however it had softened up enough for the toothbrush to start lifting some of it off.  Ultimately I couldn’t strip the primer off the model (which could be the chemical composition of the primer or it could be the PVC plastic it was sprayed on, I don’t really know), however it was soft enough that the brushing acually removed the gritty texture and smoothed out the finish.  It wasn’t perfect, some detail was lost but it was miles better than it was.

The model itself was really good fun to paint.  I loved the blocky details on the gun and the datapad (it’s not a gun in his right hand) and the texture on the skin was also really easy to paint.  I am also starting to get to grips with the different tones and shades available in the army painter range, which while extensive I don’t think it’s quite as well organised as the citadel range which generally has natural paint groups (base tone and two different layer tones).  The jumpsuit was made using a beige mixed with a little bit of turqoise, the same tone I used for the knee pads.

Please, go for your gun, we will pit the speed of your hand against the speed of my mind

Kizai Uru is another one of the more esoteric species that we see in the Warpath universe.  As a rule, things like this don’t really seem to appear in Deadzone or Firefight which is a shame because this, for me, is what makes it stand apart from the 40k universe (for which it originally started out producing cheap alternative models for).  You do see a few aliens in the Rebs lists for deadzone but at the moment they’re prety much defunct and aren’t currently available on the Mantic webstore (fingers crossed that means they’re getting new kits real soon!).  Dreadball is the place to look for all the myriad alien species that share the galaxy and it’s amazing to see some of these make their way into the Star Saga game.

Kizai Uru is a Tsudochan Monk, his weapon is his mind through which he wields telekenetic powers.  I love how they chose the Tsudochan for this, a sort of worm/centipedal type of creature with a somewhat slow, clumsy looking body.  It makes sense that they might not need the same speed and agility that a human does when they can just control things with their mind.  Another thing that I am enjoying about these miniatures is how easy they are to paint.  They don’t have all the detail of a citadel miniature (not necessarily a bad thing because they’re way less busy) but they also don’t have all the deadspace that I am starting to see in citadel miniatures;  space where you have to try and manoeuvre your brush around, behind and between various bits of model that just make painting them difficult. The simplicity of these models is far less stressful than the Blackstone Fortress models I have been painting for our kid.  Not once while painting any of these models have I been trying to paint part of the model only to find my brush has caught some other part of the model as I tried to squeeze it through a gap.

This also gave me an opportunity to play around with some of the army painter metalics, which I haven’t done in any great detail yet.  I think Nightscales – although the dark, blue tinted colour in no way matches the dark, borwn tinted colour on the label – is my new favourite base colour for silver.  It really allows you to create a steely blue finish rather than the traditional silver grey that you would get with tones like Leadbelcher and the final effect is a very clean, bright looking silver.  Also the Army Painter copper colours are vastly superior to the citadel ones, which I always found to be very weak and for some reason, more than any other metallic colour, would separate and the pigment solidify

You can either walk outta here or be carried.  I get paid the same either way.

The miniatures from the Star Saga character creator were sat on my desk, staring at me, for pretty much all of 2022.  With all of the basic sets and expansions painted I had moved on to other things.  But I couldn’t stop looking at them and playing a game of Star Saga last weekend, which I am fairly sure is the Start of a campaign, well it inspired me to pick them up again.  The character creation pack is where I think Star Saga really starts to come into its own because it has six new playable characters, none of which are human.  In fact most of them are barely humanoid.  There’s a turtle, a worm, two robots and an Orc in a stealth suit.  And then there’s Hund, the Bounty Hunter.

Hund is a Rin, a six limbed alien with a reptilian appearance.  There are some Rin in the Devil’s Betrayal expansion and this model is a resculpt of an old Deadzone Miniature.  Incidentally there is a different character card for the Deadzone version of Hund.  I quite like the art for this, it has some vaguely star wars-esque vibes, like he could be a denizen of somewhere like Mos Eisely.  I am also reasonably certain that the name is not entirely accidental.

As always I just copied the artwork as far as possible.  I think the only noticeable exception was that the artwork didn’t have those rather fetching Vin Diesel Pitch Black style shades.

I got a present for ya

This model represents a bit of a land mark in this project, it means that my Star Saga project is of equivalent maturity to the Death Star Mk II – it’s not finished but it’s fully armed and operational!  What does that mean?  Well, Erriq Umunsar is the last miniature from the last expansion, all that I have left to paint is a few scenic elements and some add-ons/stretch goal characters.  At this point it is now possible to play a game with fully painted miniatures and all of this has been achieved in 2021!

And what a model to finish on!  I really enjoyed this, painting with bright colours is generally my preference and he definitely ticks that box.  On top of that, what’s not to like about muscle bound soldiers carrying gatling guns with shoulder mounted micro-rocket launchers?  Oh, and that gatling gun also has an underslung flame thrower.  Yeah, I haven’t read his stat card but you know this guy is going to be a tough nut to crack!

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

I decided to give the Alpha Simians an update all of their own for no reason other than in contrast to the human sized miniatures, these were actually really well cast.  The details were clear and crisp and honestly the only difficulty I had painting them was that they were pre-assembled, attached to their bases and their pose made it very hard to paint parts of the legs.  I ended up painting them in two halves, top and bottom.  I cut them off their bases while I painted the bottom half but then reattached them for the top half before finally removing them a second time to remount them on their clear bases.

They have the same uniform as the other other rebs;  grey clothing, black/red armour plates with blue spot colours.  I also like the fact that they share the same red piping as the Shayo Silverback, like they’re his body guards.  To try and keep a theme going, I gave the the silver sections of the armour a wash using Space Wolves Grey contrast paint which has given them a slightly blue sheen.

Weirdly, despite not being a particularly big fan of The Planet of the Apes, I love these models

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

Rather than do separate entries for all of the Rebs, I am just going to stick them all in a single update, there’s a couple of reasons for this.  Primarily it saves time;  doing lots of project updates does tend to take quite a long time so combining things where possible makes sense.  Also, these are also the test pieces for a larger Rebs force for Deadzone so there’s a certain uniformity that I want to try and achieve, which is interesting given the sheer diversity of the Rebs faction.  They’re a real motley crew of weird and wonderful aliens with some humans thrown in for good measure.  They’re the riff raff of the Warpath universe, the great unwashed, the dissatisfied masses which makes them perfect to be painted as…

Yes, as my GCPS were painted as the troops of the GDI from the fantastic Command and Conquer video games, so too will the Rebs become their erstwhile enemies, the Brotherhood of Nod.  The main colour scheme for Nod in the video game was essentially just grey, light grey with dark grey trims however as colour schemes go that’s a bit boring.  This is sci-fi so I want a little bit of colour in there too.  So given that their badge is red I opted for red , but I muted it down massively using Black Templar contract paint to create a black armour with red edge highlighting (sort of).  This prevents the miniatures from being overly bright.  I then used bright blue for a spot colour.

Overall, despite the models themselves being of questionable quality – a side effect of the soft PVC they are cast in rather than any particular sculpting issue – I am please with the effect.  I think, despite them all being so very different, their is a sense of uniformity about them without deviating too far from the artwork.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

You created us, but now we will bring an end to your kind

This is the Shayo Silverback and this was an exceedingly fun miniature to paint. I love the model, I love the story he has.  Shayo is a super intelligent ape, and a ruthless rebel cell leader with a reputation for just knowing stuff.  He has cells everywhere and those cells have spies everywhere, even in other cells.  To top it off, you definitely wouldn’t mess with him.  The details were nice and sharp, well defined and really lent themselves well to washes and layer highlights

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

I haven’t had chance to start on the final two boss characters yet and that’s because I have been doing a bit of planning and I thought I would share a bit of insight instead.

Whilst it is true that my brother has been the chief batch painter and has mostly been batch painting all of the minions, in most cases I have provided an example painted miniature that he could copy (and I have done a little touching up at the end).  So I spent the last couple of evenings working on some test paints for the Rebs in The Devil’s betrayal.

In this case I am deviating away from the stock colour schemes in the artwork slightly because of what they are.  I already have a decent sized Rebs force for Deadzone, likely enough to play firefight with (should Mantic choose to provide an army list for them) and I would like the Star Saga miniatures to stand beside them to expand the army further.  Although my Deadzone Rebs aren’t currently painted, I do know what they will need to look like and the reason for that goes back to my Deadzone GCPS models.  I will explain shortly.  However first, here is the test paints for each of the minion types.  I have tried to maintain a consistent theme across the 4 different types – mostly black and dark grey with black/red armour and spot colours in blue.  These were all finished off using a black glaze, rather than the more common aggrax earth glaze, to maintain the cool look but also to cover up any gaps that always seem to occur with contrast paints.

The reason behind this colour scheme is because last year I took part in a  Deadzone painting challenge – paint a Deadzone strike team in a month.  Rather than going the normal route and picking 6-10 miniatures and painting them to a high standard, I went the opposite way and challenged myself to paint ALL my GCPS – the faction starter and the faction booster.  To do that I decided to use contrast paints and brown wash which can get you a decent tabletop ready result very quickly.  To elevate that basic paint job to the next level I decided I would put a bit of extra effort in with the bases, but what to do?  Well the answer came from Steam and the release of the remastered Westwood Studios classic – Command & Conquer.  I loved that game back in the 1990s, I loved it just as much when they re-released it last year and I knew there and then, my GCPS were to become the GDI and the bases?  Well, Tiberium crystals of course!

Needless to say I was successful in my attempt to paint them up.  They’re not stunning, they won’t be winning any competitions any time soon but for anyone who was there in 1995 when C&C revolutionised the real time strategy genre with its FMV cut scenes and it’s rock music sound track, these are great fun.  I had so much fun with them that rather than do loads of gallery photos and all that stuff, I made a video instead

So what the hell has all this got to do with the price of Tiberium I hear you ask?  Well, the GCPS colour scheme has had a direct influence on my choice of colour scheme for the Rebs.  What would the GDI be without their erstwhile adversary, the Brotherhood of Nod!  The primary colours for most of the brotherhood of Nod is grey and black.  However I found that too boring so I used red to try and break up the otherwise monochrome look, which kind of works seeing as the badge of the brotherhood of Nod is a black scorpion on a red background

Oh, no, this ship isn’t sinking and we’re not leaving.  In fact, I think we shall stay.  The future belongs to the rat.

As part of the Star Saga kickstarter, I opted to buy the Deadzone character packs, which basically gave you the metal mercenary models for Deadzone and accompanying Star Saga character cards.  This was a good move for someone who also has more than a passing interest in Deadzone (we will come onto that in the next project entry).  As I had just painted all of the Veermyn for Star Saga I decided to fish this character out and paint him somewhat out of sequence – the original plan was to paint the metal Deadzone mercs after the expansions were all complete.

This is a fairly old model I think and it kind of shows.  From the angle you’re looking at in the photo, and indeed from the reverse angle it all looks fine.  However the details on the areas that are cleverly hidden by the angle are somewhat lacking – areas like the chest and stomach.  Honestly that’s not really such a big deal and for gaming miniatues I generally hold to the ideal that if you can’t see it, it doesn’t matter.

Overall I actually had quite a lot of fun painting this, even to a basic standard, as it’s a colour palette I don’t normally use.  I also really like the deployable ratswarms that he comes with as well.  Much like Ogan Helkkare comes with deployable gun turrets and shield generators, the piper can summon rat swarms.

You run a flip six, three hole and you score…

Conceptually this is one of my favourite characters. Ector Zanchez is a former Dreadball Xtreme player who, following a serious injury was saved by Blaine (the mysterious “fixer” behind all the missions in Star Saga) and now has to work for him as a merc to pay off the debt. Given that he has a robotic arm and his face is scarred on the same side as the arm, it would seem as the injury, and subsequent repairs were extensive.  As a merc, as well as carrying a fairly heavy duty gun, he is also a grenadier.

However, background aside, the miniature; I am not overly keen on the pose but the details were at least good.  Or at least that was until my primer decided to burp and laid down an awful, grainy textured undercoat.  Suffice it to say I was absolutely fuming.  During lockdown over the last year, primers have been in and out of stock and at the moment citadel primers are hard to come by.  So I was using an army painter primer and this is far from the first issue I have had with Army Painter primers nor is it the only issue I have experienced with them.  My honest opinion is that they are a vastly inferior product to the Citadel primers.  I don’t really have the time or inclination to strip the model down so I just had to go with it, how it had clogged some of the details and left flat surfaces with a very grainy, bobbly texture.  I took the photo on a lower resolution to try and disguise that

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

In the right place at the right time, a single bullet can change the galaxy

The project has been quiet for a while, for a number of reasons.  A big reason is that we have been unable to obtain the Wraithbone primer we use under the contrast paints for many of the minion models.  Because the minions weren’t progressing I put everything else on hold.  However I did find a solution to that problem by getting a bit more creative with what primers we had.  Specifically looking to prime in greyseer for miniatures that have less skin on show and then picking out certain areas, like flesh, in Wraithbone from a pot.

So having solved that I pressed on with the heroes and we are now into The Devil’s Betrayal, a campaign that sees the mercs raiding a Rebel stronghold to “confiscate” a sample of the Plague.  Like the other expansions it has two heroes, the first of which is Nastanza, an Asterian sniper.

I love the dark red armour on this and I ventured into Vallejo paints to lay down the base colours using black red.  I highlighted it up using a mixture of Vallejo and GW paints and then at the end gave it a glaze using thinned Nuln Oil to darken it down.

Now, while I really like the concept the model was, well, poor.  The details were incredibly soft and I found myself having to freehand highlights on where there should have been a definite edge.  It was a real challenge to paint.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

Only when the last ocean has been turned to polluted sludge and last planet has been poisoned to a toxic wasteland will humans realise that they cannot eat money.

So Hin is an Asterian, essentially a Space Elf. Although the Asterians tend not to engage in warfare themselves, preferring to operate remotely through highly advanced drones, there are some among them, the Kalyshi, who prefer to take part personally. So Hin is one such person who operates as a Mercenary and reports back to his clan all that he sees of the GCPS.

As a model, I was really looking forward to this one, with its nice, bright colours. However the reality was somewhat different. It was an incredibly hard model to paint with lots of soft and poorly defined details, in many cases details had to be freehanded on (the leather cords and bands around the legs, shoulders and chest), it wasn’t possible to do good edge highlights; all sorts of problems. Overall I am pleased with the results and completion of him means that the Terror In The Deep expansion is now also finished.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

A true warrior is always prepared for death. Their own or someone else’s. 

Whilst I may not be the biggest fan of the Nameless, I can certainly say that the two heroes that come with Terror in the Deep are probably my favorite two characters from the whole Star Saga game. This one is Ota Sora, a Matsudan, a species tricked into virtual servitude by the Greedy Corporations of the GCPS. Ota Sora seeks to regain his family’s lost honour by proving himself a capable warrior and leader.

I love the design of the Matsudan and I was very pleased see them released as a faction in Deadzone. Whilst a little cartoony, which is typical of the Mantic style especially in Star Saga, the armour has some very strong Samurai overtones; the large bulky shoulder pads reminiscent of Japanese armour and the two bits that stick up at the top look a little like Sashimono. And of course the helmet with the Oni mask design.

This took me around 10 enjoyable hoursto paint and I am sad to say that the camera doesn’t do it justice. The brightest highlights on the red seem to have been mostly lost.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

Just shoot damn it! Shoot it until you run out of ammo, then reload and shoot it some more!

This bad boy is the Goliath, I can safely say that I am not really looking forward to fighting against it! This beast came with a mission book all of its own.

For painting, the sams contrast paint techniques and colour palette were used as all of the other Nameless minions, the texture on this model was no less Pronounced and so it has been painted using the same contrast paint with a purple wash and finished with a Gloss Varnish to give it a wat look.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

The last of the lower forms of the Nameless, the Assassins. I will say that the Nameless models were absolutely perfect for contrast paint.  Ian now has one more Nameless project to do – something a bit bigger.  I will be painting the two Mercs that came with the expansion.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

I have no idea what that was but it was one tough son of a bitch.

This is the final boss for Terror In The Deep. Known as “The Blight” he’s a particularly vicious example of what is known as a Calamiton. In terms of painting I think he was probably slightly more interesting than the previous characters because he brings together all of Nameless colour palette together, whereas the others tend to 3 out of the 4. I really like the splashes of red and purple on the dark blue background.

Now I get to paint the two Mercs that came with this expansion and I am really looking forward to them, two of my favorite miniatures of the whole kickstarter.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

Would you look at that, it’s Cthulu’s little brother

Well this is a weird beast, isn’t it? As before, the colour scheme for this isn’t new, there’s a certain uniformity to the Nameless and this is the same colour scheme I used on Project Oberon. To save time on these I actually bought a dark blue acrylic spray from Humbrol.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

These guys really like tentacles don’t they? 

The Riflemen are the second variant of the rank and file minions they have exactly the same colour scheme as the gunslingers, they’re just more tentacly.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

Huh, Tentacles in suits.

After not doing very much for a week a bit, Ian finally got round to painting the gunslingers, which are just basic line troops for Nameless (one of three variants).  I kind of like how the Nameless have tried to force there tantacular (is that a word?  It is now) forms into protective suits but their limbs are still essentially tentacles.

As with all minion level models these are done entirely with contrast paint finished with a purple wash and then a gloss varnish at the end

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo

These things just keep on gettin’ uglier

This is the first of the character for Terror in the deep, the eponymous Terror. The colours are broadly similar to those used on the minions only they have not been done using contrast paints. Well, technically they have but I used the contrast paints as a base coat and then gave a heavy purple wash to the whole model over which I then painted layers as normal, I am actually quite pleased with the results.

Art Credits Rob Jenkins and Roberto Cirillo