Now back to Warhammer. The big news recently was the SoB pseudo-codex. While I'm not actually a player (I just paint really), I'm still opinionated, and in my opinion: it sucks. My biggest complaint would have to be the fact that they lost Martyrdom and resistance to psychic powers, which were two of the most characterful rules of the army. The new way that you roll for Acts of Faith isn't bad (to be honest I prefer it to the old way of rolling against the number in the squad and needing less or more depending on the act), but the acts themselves suck and are rarely all that useful, plus one specific act per squad makes it feel less like a miracle and more like just a trick they've been taught (but aren't very good at yet). Or a psychic power, but more random and less useful. Nevermind the random amount of faith per turn which just takes all the strategy out of it (and out of list building, which I think is a shame), and which does not scale with the game or army.
But one thing that gets to me is the fact that you have to roll two dice now for faith: once for the amount and once (per unit) to see if it goes off. And either roll will ruin your carefully laid plans to... I don't know, land a couple of extra wounds, for all the good that will do. The point is, if I'm rolling to see if the power goes off every time anyway, why did I have to roll to see if I would have enough faith before? It may not sound like a big deal, but having to roll well twice for the marginal benefit of, say, re-rolling to hit with a squad that isn't particularly good at CC to begin with just doesn't seem fair to me.
I'll not discuss all the nonsense that plagues individual units (that would just take too long), but suffice to say that, while it seems the army will be playable (albeit with less variety in competitive builds), it's lost much of it's character, it's flavour.
I've been doing a bit of painting lately, and have finished my power-fist seargent. He's an early conversion from the Assault on Black Reach box. I replaced his pointing left arm with a power fist from the Black Templars box, I think the chains don't look too far out of place since he has chains on his torso as well. Originally I had replaces his right arm, which held a chainsword, with an arm holding a bolter that I built from several leftover pieces. The bolter hand later broke off by accident, and rather than glue it back on I decided to replace it with a bolt pistol (also from the Black Templars box), which makes more sense rules-wise even if it is more generic.
Initially he was going to be part of my squad of Crimson Fists. Then that nonsense with the varnish clouding over happened, and I decided not to waste any more time on them and to focus on my chapter, so I added the Sentinels Eternal icon to his right shoulder (I was considering switching to the right shoulder so terminators would match regular marines - I mean, seriously, why do they swap sides anyway?), and ended up forgetting to paint anything at all on his left shoulder. It doesn't matter, he was an experiment anyway.
After the cloudy varnish debacle I ran into last time (which has since come to plague my Chaplain, though luckily the effect there is less pronounced so far), I picked up some Galeria Matt varnish. As mentioned previously it didn't cloud up after a month on my window sill, so I decided to try it on a model. I was also trying a method of painting skin that I hoped would produce smooth gradients and a smooth surface, as well giving quick-shade a try. Plus I wanted to see if red worked well with the black-and-blue colour scheme I want for my army. Oh, and I didn't give him a backpack since, to be honest, I don't like them and I've decided my Sentinels will not wear them. I did add a magnet on his back so I can add a backpack later if I really need to.
No varnish or shading.
Quickshade.
Matt varnish.I was surprised by how well the quickshade worked, not only did it fit into crevasses in the armor, it also worked surprisingly well to shade the face. However, despite following the directions on the tin to 'shake 5 or 6 times' (actually I shook it far more times than that, but perhaps not as vigorously as necessary for fear of the model flying off), the varnish pooled in several areas. Next time I'll try attaching the model to the end of a drill, as I have read about somewhere on the internet.
The matt varnish did not work as well as I had hoped, creating the same satin-like sheen I have seen before. I'm not sure if that's because I applied it too thickly despite my efforts not to, I tried to add a bit more on his back afterwards where the effects would not be very noticeable, it didn't seem to help. I had to apply the varnish directly rather than watered down since in my experiments it didn't seem to work properly when mixed with water. There's also a strange effect on the surface when you look real close, although this might have been caused by my trying to brush it on as thinly as possible. Overall I'm not sure about it, I might try another varnish or go back to Purity Seal. Purity Seal has worked well for me in the past despite the stories I've heard, but using spray cans just takes a lot of effort because I don't have a good place to do it.
The red looks OK to me, I think I'll be using it for cloth, though probably not for armor (one of my ideas was to give models different coloured shoulders depending on rank, and I painted him with red shoulders to see how it looks, though I don't plan to actually go ahead with it). The chapter symbol doesn't look very good in bronze and black, I don't think pure bronze really works either, at least not on the rank-and-file. I'll try white and black next time. I might try giving the shoulder plates a white trim, or I might try smoothing the trim off entirely. I did consider a blue trim on a black base, I'm not sure how it would look but I feel a solid blue would work better.
I've been trying something fancy with a Cairn Wraith (love that model), hopefully I'll get back to that later, right now I'm trying to get a few models out quickly using simple colour schemes and quickshade. Hopefully, when things calm down here, I'll get back into programming too.
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