Bot War – C.O.I.L.S Vengeance

Sooo many turrets.

3 turrets is the normal amount that you get in the faction box for Bot War, but when you’re a crazy collector like me you end up with 11 of them.

I tried to be a bit ambitious today and get them all painted up but it wasn’t to be. They’re the last of the small units so I don’t mind spreading this batch over 2 days as long as I can get another model completed tomorrow.

To help get these turrets painted up I decided against hand painting the brown bases (needing 3 coats per base I didn’t fancy painting 33 layers of brown), so instead I made up a new batch of my Scale75 Gobi Brown + Citadel Baneblade Brown, loaded up and my Bartsharp airbrush and hit all 11 at once!

After each pass I hit the minis with a blast from my little hobby hairdryer before applying the next coat, and after about 10 minutes the brown was down!

With the bases basecoated I then set about drybrusbing then with citadel longbeard, and then blocked in all of the other base colours in the main turret assembly. Anthracite for the armour, Ironhull Grey for the joints, and Gunmetal for the vents and turrets.

Everything was then given a heavy P3 Armour Wash shade, including the bases and then hit with the hairdryer again.

The base rims were blocked in with brown to tidy them up, and armour panels were touched up with Anthracite were there had been some pooling/coffee staining of the shade.

2 hours in and the turrets are in a really good place to stop for tonight. The armour highlights will take some time tomorrow, but I will hopefully knock out Forktongue as well as finishing these defenses.

I sat down earlier and looked at everything I have left to paint, my calendar, and the deadline for this challenge…. And had a slight panic. I’d thought I’d gotten ahead to give myself some time, and if I was to use 2 passes I’m still having to complete at least one model a night to give me 5 days for Conspiracy. This is a lot of pressure so I’m hoping I don’t crack.

….anyway, with the new schedule firmly in my mind I had to group up the 3 Crawler bots and Mole together and smash them out tonight. It’s been a pretty full on week and my eyes are feeling it, so I rushed these a bit more than I’d have liked. But they’re still looking OK for the tabletop, and they are small. Plus with these I had the benefit of already painting the ROTD scale Crawler when I was working out my scheme color the COILS Vengeance force.

Short update as I’m off to Beachhead convention in Bournemouth in the morning, maybe one day there will be enough interest in Bot War for there to be a tournament there, or I get a chance to go back and demo it…. But sadly not this year.

Ghost is a relatively small Bot, based upon the AA Drone Choppers she has a very agile form with a sense of motion about her.

Her rotor blade is being used like a weapon so I used the Scale75 Cancer Turquoise ink from their Zodiac range to glaze over a light grey into white to give a “powered” up look to it.

8 days into my February painting challenge and I have 16 minis painted so far. 28 still to go in 21 days. I’m not quite sure if I’m on target yet as Conspiracy looms over my painting desk asking for probably 4-5 days I reckon.

Anyway, I thought I’d grab a group shot as just over a quarter of the way through.

Finished up the AA Drones tonight. They weren’t too difficult but being smaller models I may have been a bit too keen with my basecoats and wash yesterday as some of the detail was a bit soft so I had to guess in places where the panels separated. Still happy with the result and these are flying into the done pile.

I did break out my Black3.0 for the brass rod flying stands to keep them from catching any light and try and give that look of them flying above the ground. I prefer using brass rod instead of the clear plastic flying stems as I can cut that to varying lengths to have flying units at different heights, something that will be more obvious with the planes and Choppers.

Continuing with my alternating batch paint of vehicles and then bots, I decided to grab the 6 AA Drone Choppers and make a start on them.

They were each given 3-4 coats of brown on the bases depending if the stones came loose, if they did they were superglued back down and given another brown coat over the top before getting their drybrush layer of longbeard.

The main hulls were basecoated as well, and then the whole thing was shaded.

Rinse and repeat 6 times, and fix some of the rotor blades which snapped off whilst I was handling them. The blades come in a straight line from front to back which I really didn’t like so when cleaning I twisted them and glued into different positions to show variety, but this bond may not have been strong enough. I’ll let the new dab of superglue cure overnight and tomorrow start to paint the blades.

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Day 5 and continuing with the theme of ABTs I decided to paint up Deepstate who is the Bot form of the ABT Drone. This allowed me to easily repeat the steps I had taken on the ABTs as most of the shapes were the same and easily identifiable.

I stated off painting a basecoat on the Bot in the Ak Anthracite, P3 iron hull grey, and the track units in Darkstar Gun Metal. The base was also painted with 3 coats of brown to get everything to the same place.

The whole model was then treated with shade of P3 Armour Wash, and then the main panels were picked back out again in Anthracite.

Edges were highlighted the same as the ABTs and the base was drybrushed with citadel longbeard.

I think I had some blue or turquoise ink in my brush or water when I was glazing as the main colour is a bit too far into the blue zone for my liking, so I may fix it later. I’d also like to go back and fix up the magenta and turquoise spot colours at a later date if I have the time as they’re not great, but I must press on for now.

Anyway, Deepstate “done”

Continuing on from yesterday’s batch paint session I wanted to get these ABTs finished off. Having already gotten the Anthracite base colours down the first thing I did was to apply a straightforward coat of Darkstate Molten Metals Gun Metal to the gun barrel and track units. With this dry I then gave the whole tank (not the base) a thinned shade of P3 Armour Wash to give some contrasting tones in the recesses.

With the shade applied and dry (handy hobby hairdryer lives on a hook under my hobby desk) I went back and layered over some more Anthracite green mix to reestablish the main colour on the hull leaving enough of the shaded parts to still give the contrast.

Then I went in with my first highlights along panel edges with very tiny jagged brushstrokes so that there wasn’t a defined edge. With the highlight mix being thinned to have transparency this chaotic edge helped to give some nice definition without looking “Tron-like”. With the “edges” brightened I then glazed the main colour back over to help bring the highlights into harmony.

Once glazed back I was able to see where I wanted the brightest highlights to be, so using some P3 underbelly blue and a bit of Anthracite I added small highlights to panel corners and defined lines to give the tanks some pop. This was exaggerated by using Citadel Contrast Black legion to blackline and push contrast through panel separation.

The tracks were given a drybrush of Darkstar Silver before another shade of P3 Armour Wash with a touch of Citadel Agrax Earthshade for warmth.

“Driver” windows (or the main sensor under the gun barrel) and the other sensor array on top of the turret were painted in Pro Acryl White before being tinted with scale75 Magenta and Turquoise inks respectively.

And that was it. 6 Drone tanks done, bringing my total mini count up to 8 in 4 days, but I still have 36 more to do over the next 27 days, and quite a few of them are A LOT bigger than these. But thats all part of the challenge!

The ABT (Anti-Bot Tank) Drones are unmanned fighting vehicles which are designed to take down Bot Units with their special rules giving the 4 Attack dice against “Bots”. This is a brutal amount of ranged attack but they will crumble in combat.

Anyway, I have 6 to paint so I set about splitting then over 2 days with the 1st day of the batch paint being dedicated to getting their bases and main basecoat down. I started off with the bases which follows my standard Bot War workup… 3 layers of a Scale75 Gobi Brown and Citadel Baneblade Brown mix, followed by a dry rush of citadel longbeard, and then a thin wash of a dark shade, which on this occasion was P3 Armour Wash.

The 3 coats of brown mix are needed to give a solid colour over the black primer when not using the airbrush (as I didnt want to paint the main tank brown as well), so 18 coats of brown later the bases were done. You can see how the layers build up in the following gallery

With the bases done I gave each of the 6 hulls and inner track armour plate a coat of AK-Interactive Anthracite and called it for the day. Tomorrow I will go in with some shades highlights and glazes and paint up the metal tracks and gun barrels. This hopefully won’t take long so if I get an opportunity to wrap them up and start on another unit i will.

Seeing as I started with the Vyper I figured it would make sense to paint up Darkstate next as Darkstate is capable of changing its Bot state into the Vyper Assault Vehicle.

I thought it would be a relatively straightforward piece but boy was I wrong. There are so many little panels, joints, details and fiddly bits to get your brush into. It certainly took me a bit longer than I’d planned but I’m glad it’s done now.

2 days in and 2 down….. I need to give myself plenty of time to tackle Conspiracy so this weekend I’m going to start tackling some of the ABTs and Drones in batch painting fashion.

And we’re off.

Day 1 of the challenge and I wanted to go for the Vyper Assault Vehicle. This armoured SUV is very similar to the Rezvani Vengeance which was the inspiration for this paint job so thought it was apt to start with it and see if I could get something similar to the Stealth Grey Satin of the real world vehicle. I decide to mix a little Reaper woodland Green into my AK Anthracite to give a bit more depth and saturation to the colour. This moved it more into a turquoise colour space but I was happy with how it looked, and as the paint thinned out the green colour became more impactful on the blues of the Anthracite.

Adding in some glazes and highlights for the vehicle I wanted to see how it would fit in with my standard bot war rough terrain paintd bases, so set about blocking in the browns. This warming base would have an impact on the cold Anthracite, so I was happy to get stuck into painting a base so early on in this project as it’s usually the last thing I paint.

With the base blocked in inset about adding other details, such as the metals which were a mixture of Darkstar Molten Metals Gun Metal and Silver for the hubcaps, reinforced bumper, and guns. The headlights were painted white, as were the slots on the windows to provide a base for some inks to be applied over; Scale 75 Astral Magenta for the windows and Aquarius Turquoise for the headlights. I also gave the whole vehicle a very watered down shade of P3 Armour wash to add some contrast to the recesses.

The wheels were painted up with Secret Weapon Tyre Black and Rubber Highlight, before having an edge highlight added with P3 underbelly, and then glazed over with Tyre Black again.

Overall I’m happy with the th the result, this was a quick 2 hour paint, and for Day 1 I refined some of the paint scheme and managed to get my first mini completed. One down 43 to go!

As with every Bot War (Well Traders Galaxy painting challenge these days due to the increased number games and miniature lines available) the idea is to hit the ground running on the 1st of February by having all of the miniatures built and primed so that day 1 is the start of applying colours.

I’ve volunteered to admin the challenge this year so have the extra task of tracking every participants progress each day. It’s fairly straightforward and out of the 29 days this leap year people are allowed 2 free pass days (because life gets in the way some times).

So what am I going to paint?

Looking at the vast amount of models I have available to me (see previous post) I have decided to build all of the resins and a few of the metal promo pieces, extra turrets and if I get to it later in the challenge the Infantry as well.  This gives me 44 models ranging from tiny 20mm based turrets to the 100mm based titan “Conspiracy” (still only counts as 1).

With this plan in mind I set about cleaning, washing, gluing, basing, and for good measure magnetising all of the models. The magnets will come in very handy later for storage and transportation, but during the painting they also nicely hold the mini on my trusty painting handle (a curtain rail finial). I like to give my resin pieces a quick soak and scrub to make sure there’s no grease or release agent in them from production and my handling of them whilst cleaning. This helps to reduce the risk of the primer not adhering properly.

Once the models were built I also made up their bases with AK-Interactive texture pastes, sand, bits of Cork, and various pieces of slate. I usually leave this until the end but because I knew I was going to magnetise the bases for painting it made sense to just get the complete model assembled and primed and not have to worry about basing after they’d been painted… Saves me 2 days based on experience and I’m going to need those days for Conspiracy.

For the primer i went with Vallejo Mecha Black as this is a pretty solid satin coat that works well to protect the metals from a few bumps and gives the fragile resins a bit of armour. This was airbrushed over the whole model and left to dry ready for my challenge to begin.

The last thing I wanted to do before the challenge begins was to review my original paint choices made back in July. Whilst I think most will be fine I recently picked up an AK Interactive 3rd Gen Acrylic Anthracite which looks like it will be the perfect base colour for this project. I really like the AK 3rd Gen paints, they’re nice and opaque and flow really well. Great for base colours and layering, and will be a solid foundation.

I decided to put my paints to the test with a little speed paint of a 30mm scale Rise of The Democracy COILS Crawler bot I had laying around. Although this was primed black with a heavy white zenithal it shouldn’t have too much of a difference to solid black given how dark the anthracite is. I threw in some Darkstar Molten Metals for the metallic parts and went with Vallejo Model Colour Dark Sea Grey for theunder armour  inner frame parts. I then used the vallejo mecha blue to glaze in some contrast over the anthracite and, and then again with a bit of Reaper Foggy Mist. This was a very quick paint so quite rough but it helped me map out a plan of attack to get going with. During the challenge my methods always get more refined so this is just a way to get off the starting block!

And with that, I’m all set for Day 1.

Where did the last 6 months go?

Its now nearly February and that means the annual Bot War painting challenge is about to kick off.

What better way to get stuck in than by getting my VENGEANCE force painted up, and hopefully manage to get some games in this year!

With that in mind, I’ve had to do a quick check of what I’ve got and what I may actually be able to complete as part of the challenge….

Fortress of Pain defences:

• Fortress (Metal)
• Fortress (Resin)
• Turrets (Metal) x5
• Turrets (Resin) x6
• AA Drones (Resin) x6

C.O.I.LS Military:

• Vyper Jeep (Metal)
• Vyper Jeep (Resin)
• ABM (Metal)
• ABM (Resin)
• ABT (Metal)
• ABT (Resin) x6
• Python Jet (Metal)
• Attack Jet (Resin)
• Nightbird (Metal)
• Nightbird (Resin)
• Attack Chopper (Metal)
• Attack Chopper (Resin)
• Heavy Chopper (Resin)
• C.O.I.LS Infantry (Metal)

C.O.I.LS Bots

• Reptile (Metal)
• Crawlers (Metal) x8
• Mole (Promo) (Metal)
• Crawler (Promo) (Metal)
• Crawler (Resin) x2
• Shogun (Resin)
• Deepstate (Resin)
• Darkstate (Resin)
• Messenger (Resin)
• Blades (Resin)
• Raven (Resin)
• Slaughter (Resin)
• Forktongue (Resin)
• Ghost (Resin)
• Conspiracy (Resin)

• Inspiration & reference
• Colour scheme
• Background fluff
• The models

So then, what is this project actually about?

Well, simply put, its this lot………

Vengeance

Noun

1. punishment inflicted or retribution exacted for an injury or wrong.

   “the corporation was ready to wreak vengeance on the world”

With the theme and scheme settled on I wanted to add some flavour in the form of a background for the use of “Vengeance”.  Summer 2022 saw a Bot War global campaign run on the Facebook group which had a number of battlegrounds that could be fought over using specific scenarios, and at the conclusion of the campaign the results of the community games updated the lore for these locations and re-drew the battle lines.

One such location was Eastcoast City

Before the campaign……

“Rumours have surfaced that an enemy force has built a Doomsday Device in Eastcoast City.  If the forces of death are not stopped this could affect the entire eastern seaboard of the Democracy”

and after the campaign…..

“After COILS took the city, Swordana rallied her White Knights and attacked COILS before they could dig in.  With the Deceivers in the north and the White Knights attacking the south, COILS retreated and met up with their garrisons from the Space Portal.  The force then moved to occupy Southern City”.

So the COILS got kicked out of the city, and the city was left in ruins, a Doomsday Device still lurking somewhere waiting to be claimed.

The COILS corporation offices were now rubble, a dent in their pride, and a powerful weapon that could be used to inflict considerable revenge on those that interfered in their plans.  Reinforced by the Space Portal defenders, and with a new stronghold in Southern City, it was time for the Eastcoast City COILS to return to their former dominion to seek out the Doomsday Device and inflict some vengeance!!

With a reference photo of the Vengeance in tow, I fired up Photoshop and used some colour droppers to create colour swatches that I could use to plan my palette…..

Using some images of the COILS logo and a couple of Bots from the Bot War Facebook group I used the wonderful “Color Replacement Tool” to begin recolouring the original red & black scheme into a Rezvani Vengeance adjacent scheme.  Desaturating and lightening along the way to get a sort of metallic effect I was able to confirm that I liked where the scheme was heading and it would work well on them.

The following are some of my examples showing the original scheme and the Vengeance’d one…….

Using the Paintrack app and its glorious colour picker feature I was able to colour match the swatches with the catalogue of paints I have recorded in the app to find out the best matches for how I can actually paint this scheme…..

#1A272F = P3 Thamar Black

#F9306C = Pro Acryl Magenta

#00D3FF = Pro Acryl Sky Blue

#384F57 = P3 Gravedigger Denim

#658E9C = Vallejo Mecha Blue Gray

#A5A1A0 = P3 Iron Hull Gray

#0E0F0F = Citadel Corvus Black

#D4D2C9 = P3 Underbelly Blue

Back in December 2021 I set about painting my Bot War 2 Turbo Edition starter set from Traders Galaxy

To make the right impression both factions in the box (Valiants & COILS) were painted in the box art colour scheme as I had intentions to take the game to shows and stores to run demos.  This worked really well and I was able to knock the minis out rather quick as they were just going to be tabletop gaming pieces that “other people” would be handling – they were even based on clear acrylic discs to make things even easier to show off.

Jump forward to Summer 2023 and I have a rather substantial collection of COILS in my backlog that I’ve been struggling to work out how I want to paint them, I didn’t want to do black & red, I wanted something different that would fit in with my other alternative scheme Bot War factions.

I wanted something Unique!

….and as if by chance, the bloody Facebook algorithm of bullshit sponsored suggestiveness delivered.

Behold, the Rezvani Vengeance

https://www.rezvanimotors.com/rezvani-vengeance

The matte metals, with hints of blue grey and an orange-red spot colour just lept right into my inspiration sponge of a brain.  This was it, this was the colour I want my evil terrorist capitalist corporate army to be dressed in.