Bot War – the war wages on (clearing the backlog)

It’s been a full-on couple of weeks since my last update, Trashers and Trashasaur are all finished and just need to be based.  As this faction is slightly more display worthy they are having my standard bot war desert bases which although they don’t necessarily look the part when fighting in a city, brings them in line with my other factions.

I have also managed to knock out a handful of objective markers, representing energy stockpiles that are used in a few of the game scenarios. These are just Bot War energy cubes, superglued to clear bases and then given a light wash of scale75 magenta ink to help enhance the colour.

I also managed to get another game in, this time I used my Atlantican force, and faced off against Valiants. The usual points limit for a game is 80, but we decided to up it to 90 to get some more variety into the lists, add some upgrades, and essentially try to test out as many special rules and abilities as we could to familiarise ourselves with them.

I also put together a close attack variant of General Duc for the Valiants called War Duc. He’s a bit of a badass and so I decided to alter his pose slightly so that instead of charging forward to attack, he is instead stood heroic and stoic, with a foot on a rock like any noble leader should these days. He will be painted up in traditional Duc colours (blue) and will go with my other General Duc that I’ve been working on to match the official Boxart colours (and not an homage to Optimus Prime)

The final part of this update signals the end of January and sets up February. This will be a very busy month and will see me demo Bot War at the Beachhead gaming show in Bournemouth in less than 2 weeks.  February is also the Bot War community painting challenge month for 2022, which means I need to paint for at least 30 minutes a day, everyday, for the whole month, and complete at least 10 models. There is also an exclusive miniature bonus up for grabs if you can complete twice that amount. I love this challenge and am in full stride already to hit this challenge hard. Sadly I won’t be making a separate project for it this year as I won’t have enough time to get all of the painting done and get prepared for Beachhead, however I will keep this project updates as I go.

It’s a lot of miniatures I’m planning on painting.

2 full factions to be exact:

The Infesters, corrupted deceivers with an insectoid theme led by The Queen and featuring a contingent of zombie Clones.

The heroic Democracy Eagle’s Veterans, an all action force fighting for freedom over land and air, supported by Max Starr’s Special Branch of Secret agents and masked crusaders who will save the day!

52 models in total!

It’s going to be a very busy month that’s for sure, and it all kicks off tomorrow.

Until next time friends……

With the first round of Bots complete I’ve decided it’s time to tackle the Trashers.

These are a very close attack faction with lots of aggressive bots that will really offer a different flavour when playing he game. The first few games I played it was mostly about guarding and controlling firing lanes, and only really pushing movement to capture objectives, so having a force that excels at closing the gap and getting in the opponents face will be fun to try out.

15x Trashers, 4x Generators, and also the Trashasaur combiner are hitting the paint queue. Stay tuned for the next exciting update….

….. Oh and this little lot is going to get cleaned up!

It’s been a few weeks, but 2022 has started off well as I’ve managed to make a decent start on the backlog.

The Turbo Edition COILS have all been painted up, with only a few touchups left to go.

These have all been finished to a tabletop level, some have had a bit more effort than the others, and to get them to the table quicker I have gone for clear bases. These are definitely gaming pieces and I have so many to get through, getting the backlog cleared as soon as possible is the priority.

I have also finished up the Valiants from both the Turbo Edition and 2nd Edition starter sets.  The only one missing so far is Ducal who is the leader of the Valiants, as such he will have a little bit more time spent on him. General Duc will lead this faction on the meantime and I have used the model to pay homage to a Valiant leader of a well known franchise close to my heart.  I have got another General Duc which I will paint in the Boxart scheme to match the rest of the Valiants. The reason I’m going for boxart is because there are so many of them (I have over 50) and each has their own colour (compared to a unified scheme as seen on the COILS), so matching the art will make it easier to find the gaming cards and remember who is who.

With this round of Bots completed I managed to rope a mate into having a couple of games. After collecting and being involved in this game from the hobby side for a few years, actually playing the game was really fun. I’m not a massive wargamer anymore, not since GW blew up the Old World and made all my old armies redundant (yes I did try Kings of war but it wasn’t the same), so getting Turbo Edition COILS vs Starter Edition Valiants in a 60 v 60 point game was great. Rules were easy to pick up, and it won’t be long before I’ve remembered all the special abilities, and then I can look into competitive list building.

Getting bored of sorting and updating spreadsheets, I’ve started to build and get some paint down on the remaining starter factions I had from the 2nd edition starter, and the recent Turbo Edition.

This will give me a decent selection of Valiants from the 2 sets and a starter force of COILS from the Turbo Edition. I already painted the Atlanticans from the starter set so it’s getting the rest of the starter box finished up at the same time I paint the Turbo Edition Valiants seemed logical to me

After some cleanup and a quick soapy rinse the resins came out lovely and were easily assembled.

They were all given a quick blast of Badger Stynelrez grey primer (to give a neutral starting position) which I then went over with Liquitex white ink that had a little MIG Ammo Ultra Matte varnish in to give it a bit more body and reduce the shine of the ink. This was then sprayed laterally and from a zenith all in varying amounts to give a stating highlight point. The COILS had a very light coat, as they will ultimately be dark grey/black, and the Valiants had more coverage as they will be more vibrant colours.

I’m not looking to achieve anything groundbreaking here, just a solid foundation that I can through colours over.

I have started the process of cataloguing all of my bots. Using a very sophisticated system of a spreadsheet, a heavy duty supermarket bag, and 2 cardboard boxes.  The bag has all of the individual bot packs in, I take one out, log it on the spreadsheet, and then if it is metal it goes in one box, resin the other.

The spreadsheet is used to define the following attributes of a bot:

• Name
• Faction
• Material (Metal/Resin)
• Traders Galaxy state (Current/Legacy/Promo)
• Subfaction/Notes

After doing this for a while the data starts to look something like this…

One problem I have found is that I can’t remember all of the bots names, and as I have a large number of legacy miniatures which have either been fully discontinued or updated with newer versions.  Quite a few were purchased from the Traders Galaxy site directly so don’t have any merchandising stickers on with the contents, or they simply have “Promo” on the label so I’m having to dig through old Facebook posts and my archive of stat cards to try and determine who the Bot may be.

The other problem I have is the sorting I have done. Whilst I split them into 2 boxes to have metal in one and resin in the other for protection, I should have actually split between Current/Legacy status.  I’d rather paint all current models first and get them to the table, then work through the legacy pile in slow time.  So I need to go back and resort the pikes I’ve done so far. Any I can’t identify will then also go into the Legacy box. Promos will go into the Current box.

I may also add a column to the spreadsheet to identify how keen I am to paint it, because there are definitely some bots I want to get done first. So I may look to add a priority to the entries to help sort this.

** Data Update…. January 17th 2022

Welcome to my 4th Bot War project.

You can check out my previous Bot War OnTableTop project blogs:

Cult of the Destroyer

Atlanticans Rising

Beastlords

Painting Challenge 2020

This one though is the biggie, the one to rule them all, the final push, it’s time to clear the backlog!

I became interested in Bot War around April/May 2019 after seeing a Twitch hobby streamer talking about them in one of the streams I frequent. As a huge fan of 80s kids cartoons and toy lines I knew this was going to be something I wanted to get in on. I finally pulled the trigger on my first purchases in August 2019 and since then I’ve loved collecting and supporting the game, knocking out painting projects every now and then, but as I’m a painter first and game second I jump around all manner of hobby projects. Like many other hobbyists who’ve been involved for multiple decades, our backlogs are huge and our list of potential projects is stupidly long. My Bot War collection is no different. Its time to change that. Its time to get this lot painted…..

Usually I would fire up my PC and go searching for references, start mocking up colour schemes and figuring out paint palette options, but this is not like those other projects. What I will do is start planning what I want to paint, and I’ll be honest, I can’t remember everything I have in my backlog.

I’ll fire up a spreadsheet and start to catalogue everything during the week, this will help me with balancing the different factions. I know I have the majority of the Infesters, Trashers, Beastlords, Democracy, Valiants, and Deceivers factions. I have a decent amount of COILS, some Overlords, but at present, I don’t have any Red Star Nation (which I find strange as I loved both Centurions and DinoRiders growing up).

I have recently received the new Turbo Edition Starter set and so will be starting with these as the new COILS look fantastic, and as a mini-challenge for this project I have signed up to run a demo table of Bot War at Bournemouth’s Beachhead 2022 event in February. For that I will be looking to have a few factions that I can have playable on the day, but to also have a few on display.  Given I already have Atlanticans and Deceivers painted up, I figure having Valiants, COILS, Infesters, and Democracy forces available for play would be a good goal… I think I have 10 weeks to do this. Whilst I won’t have everything painted, 2.5 weeks should be sufficient to get a decent force ready, and I won’t be looking at going past a high tabletop level for the painting and will mostly be following the boxart. As there are now unit stat cards this will help for any demo purposes as well as saving my brain trying to come up with original schemes.

So, let the war rage on, and let’s battle this bot backlog!