Infinitely Casual

well…. Blue Team never quite made it, or rather never got its blue. As it happened at the time I was putting together a Talons of the Emperor Kill Team using a B/W-grey scale scheme. Partly for speed painting reasons and partly for the visual effect. The technique I use turns out not to be that quick, but it is effective so I applied it as the base for the Pano troops.

When I came to applying the blue – GW contrast Talassar Blue is makes for pretty good Pano blue – I thought this looks good so left it. Added a few red ink highlights for effect. The Knight’s helmet isn’t quite right yet. For the red I use MiG Ammo Crystal Red which is great for lenses. But the viscous nature of the paint makes it hard to get into the very very narrow slits here.

The bases aren’t done as I didn’t know what I wanted to do at the time or if this would work. Sometime in the future these will be stripped and redone, quite likely the the same scheme. It’s all part of the experiment to see how much wear and tear the miniatures will suffer. Many many layers of thin varnish were applied.

Note: I run Bolts as Fusiliers just because I prefer the models.

The thing about Infinity is despite the spectacular miniatures I am more interested in actually playing the game than getting the whole setup right, which is different to the way I approach 40k. We got through the Kaldstrom missions using Icestorm model because it was still challenging to put together the new models.

Playing with painted armies is always better though. I did experiment with using contrast paint and it kind of works. It still though is very time consuming and all to easy to make mistakes.

Solution was to follow the new CGI batreps CB put out back then, paint up black and white models and use contrast paint which I was not using for anything else to make Blue Team and Orange Team.

For now I am quite happy with it. Will let me see how much wear and tear happens – that was the other issue with painting up to a good standard only to see it chip off within weeks. Sometime in the future they will end up being stripped and painted properly.

Since getting back into miniature gaming nearly 10 years ago Infinity has occupied a strange place in my gaming setup. The rich story, great artwork and different gameplay from the moment I first came across Infinity was always a major pull. On the other hand the insanely complex rules, as seen from the outside, coupled with metal models and paint jobs I could never compete with were a major obstacle. Took me years to understand the face-to-face roll.

There was no way I would make this my only game and no way I would persuade my wife to play. Doing completely with out it was appealing either so once when an Operation Icestorm ready built set was available on ebay I picked it up. And every year or so we would play through the basic missions and that satisfied curiosity.

Infinity models aren’t that difficult to paint, at least to a basic level. Funnily enough though despite the amazing artwork we were quite content to play with largely unpainted models and proxy anything we needed. Rather refreshing really.

The arrival of Codeone changed things. The rules are streamlined enough and basic army selection limited not to have to worry about the endless permutations and combinations. Codeone doubled the amount we play and I am perfectly happy with it with no aspirations to graduate to N4 proper.

Being immersed in 40k I was also not going to invest in more scifi terrain and always was happy with the cardboard CB offered. The upgraded terrain since Operation Wildfire I find great.

Cardboard is still cardboard. So my intention was to always give it a bit more protection and just get rid of the cardboard look as far as possible. The most unspectacular picture you are seeing above is the first lot of treated terrain – superglued the edges, painted them in more neutral colours and added a slight bit of weathering. Most important step is numerous coats of matt varnish. Takes off the shine, gives it protection and doesn’t look any different to pdf equivalents. Still takes a while to do, but not nearly as much as building from scratch.