Entering The Undercity... Again...

We roped in another friend to join us in the Undercity, so we decided to start over. This time we played one character each; I stuck with Pog & Doorstop, my friend from the previous game stuck with Canice, and our new challenger picked Gardek.

We soon realised that holding the spawn doors meant the enemies didn't get to boost.

The boss went straight for Canice, but she replied by taking two of his wounds, after which Gardek finished him off.

The game did feel more challenging with three heroes than four; we did not come out the end as unscathed as we did last time. However we also walked away with more experience each; enough to actually buy some upgrades this time.

Entering The Undercity

I've been curious about the Iron Kingdoms boardgames, wondering how close it played to Warmachine. I picked up The Undercity, figuring that if nothing else I was getting two Freebooters out of it - after all, I do love Freebooters.

Well, I finally had my first game. The rules were actually a lot simpler to understand than some boardgames I've played; I'm not sure how much of that is simply due to my familiarity with it's Warmachine DNA, how much is thanks to well written rules, and how much is down to it really not being all that complicated.

Anyway, there were two of us so I picked Milo, Pog and Doorstop, while my friend played Canice and Gardek.

Ch. 1 initial setup.

Doorstop went in aggressively right out of the gate, taking damage to confirm kills.

Gardek was not far behind though.

Building up some early momentum.

Canice quickly knocked the boss for two damage, and Doorstop finished the job.

All characters ended the chapter in the peak of health.

But with only five experience each we decided to hold off buying any upgrades.

Personally I thought the game was a bit simplistic; there was very little movement and the players don't seem to need to make that many decisions. However that might just be because it's only the first chapter; perhaps later chapters will require more involved decision making.

Nevertheless it was fun. The enemy spawning system is interesting because it means you never really run out of enemies, but the enemy activation system means even being outnumbered - while disadvantageous - is not overwhelming. The hero abilities and Feat cards system means the heroes feel powerful and there's always things you can do, options you can take, but the balanced stats mean that you don't feel too powerful - at least not from the start - because you do miss attacks and you do get hit and take damage. I also expect the game to get more exciting as the difficulty ramps up.

I'm a little concerned that there's only 7 chapters (iirc); it feels a bit of a waste to play though the campaign once then put the game away, and I don't feel that I would be tempted to replay the same campaign. I'm hoping I would be able to find some homebrew missions if I looked around online though, so the game might have more legs than it initially appears to.

Defender Z... I mean X

Holy crap, this guy was far more trouble than he should have been. Mostly my fault, you understand: the model itself is pretty nice and the cast was pretty good. But I do have a tendency to make things harder for myself than they need to be, for that and other reasons I ran into a LOT of trouble with this one.

First of all I decided that I really like the "rocket fist" from the official PP artwork:

While admittedly wildly impractical, it was a bit of a staple of the giant robot anime I grew up on, and I decided I wanted to try to convert the model to represent this aspect of the artwork better. Trying to modify the model itself would be tricky, so I figured I could try to put my new (at the time) Anycubic Photon to work.

So I took some photos of the arms from various angles (once PP sent them to me... they were not included in the box originally... like I said, lots of issues with this one) and spent a good chunk of time trying to duplicate them in Blender. Now I'm not much of a 3D artist, but I'm not a complete newbie either, so eventually I ended up with something passable that looked good enough when printed out:

My printed arm above, original below.

The actual flames were another issue. After some fiddling around with meshes I eventually ended up with something that I was reasonably happy with:

The next issue was the colour scheme. I definitely wanted to base the colours on one of the robot anime from my youth. I don't know if it's a coincidence, but the major parts of Defender X map surprisingly closely to one of the incarnations of Mazinger Z; based on the name I suspect perhaps not. Even small details on the head map quite well: just look at Mazinger's red pilot module in between the silver protective wings and compare it to the structure of Defender's head.

Initially I used a black gloss primer to help hide the print lines. I decided this was a good opportunity to try to zenithal highlighting for the first time with my new airbrush, so I layered on some lighter greys from progressively higher angles. Which amounted to nothing really as my basecoats were far too thick and solid for those gradients to have any effect.

I started painting the model using normal paints, but after applying several of the basecoats I decided to switch to the new coloured metallic paints I had recently received from Green Stuff World. These paints were lighter and had less saturated colour than I would have liked however, so I ran some tests on some test models and decided that I could add saturation using my Badger Minitaire Ghost Paints.

Unfortunately things didn't work as smoothly as I had hoped: the Badger Minitaire tints did not sit evenly across the surfaces and created some very ugly effects. Eventually I resigned myself to reapplying the metal basecoats, and living with the fact that the colours weren't quite what I wanted.

The next issue was the flames. After a test run on a spare printed arm, I settled on my colours. I was trying to get a smooth blend, and ended up using a LOT of shades: I think I spent around seven or eight hours painting the flames and glowing areas of the model. Even with all that, the flames aren't as good as I had hoped. I think this is because I didn't have the courage to try to paint cast glows onto the surrounding metals, and also because the model as a whole is quite bright (unavoidably so as mentioned above).

Once that was done it was time for shading and highlighting. Which took absolutely AGES. Seriously, look at those legs: look how many recesses and edges there are. I'm pretty sure I spent at least four hours highlighting just the blue parts of the legs.

Seriously, this model was EXHAUSTING. Thankfully it looks pretty decent now that it's done. Still, seeing as my plan is to get two minimum armies painted before I actually start playing the game, I really need to try to work faster.


Colours:
Primer: Vallejo 73.660 Surface Primer Gloss Black

Blue:
Basecoat: Green Stuff World 1872 Metal Color Neptunus Blue
Shade: Citadel Glaze Guilliman Blue
Highlight: Neptunus Blue + Scalecolor SC-66 Speedd Metal

Red:
Basecoat: Green Stuff World 1874 Metal Color Caesar Red
Shade: The Army Painter Quickshade Washes Strong Tone
Highlight: Caesar Red + Scalecolor SC-66 Speedd Metal

Brass:
Basecoat: Citadel Layer Doombull Brown
Shade: The Army Painter Quickshade Washes Strong Tone
Highlight: Citadel Layer Gehenna's Gold

Steel:
Basecoat: The Army Painter Warpaints Gun Metal
Shade: The Army Painter Quickshade Washes Dark Tone
Highlight: Vallejo 72.052 Game Color Silver

Black:
Basecoat: Vallejo 71.073 Model Air Metallic Black
Shade: Vallejo 70.950 Model Color Black
Highlight: The Army Painter Warpaints Gun Metal

Flames & glows:
Vallejo 70.960 Model Color Violet
1:1 Model Color Violet : Game Air Gory Red
Vallejo 72.711 Game Air Gory Red
Vallejo 72.710 Game Air Bloody Red
Vallejo 72.709 Game Air Hot Orange
Vallejo 72.708 Game Air Orange Fire
Vallejo 72.706 Game Air Sun Yellow
Vallejo 72.707 Game Air Gold Yellow
Vallejo 72.705 Game Air Moon Yellow
Formula P3 Morrow White glazed with Badger Minitaire D6-170 Ghost Tint Yellow

A Magic Box

This is a box that I CNC-ed earlier this year. It was intended to hold my red/blue starter Magic The Gathering deck. Which I used once before deciding I couldn't be bothered to get into Magic.

So it sat for a while, assembled but unused. Eventually I decided to use it to test some ideas, so I painted in the logos (Citadel Glaze Guilliman Blue and Bloodletter), then airbrushed on a wood staing/varnish, lightly sanding once dry. Which worked surprisingly well, so that was nice.

I had issues with the mill bit being slightly out of spec leading to loose fitting parts, and I screwed up the positioning of the logos just a little bit . Still, I'm quite happy with the result, although the woodstain turned out more yellow that I expected - I would have preferred a more reddish-brown. Ah well.

Tiny Tanks

I've slowly been hacking away at some Monsterpocalypse models. The scale on the units is a little bit new to me; the only time I've painted something this small before was when I did up my mini Juggernaut. I actually put a lot more care into him than into these guys, but that's not to say I didn't face some challenges with this lot.

I decided to try to paint the G.U.A.R.D. models in relatively realistic colour schemes; in your average Kaiju movie you tend to have pretty traditional military vehicles after all. Even though it's technically a military vehicle, I wanted to paint the repair truck in the colours of familiar civilian construction vehicles. That basically meant yellow and black, with some basic metal colours. I probably should have added a touch of red for the brake lights, but couldn't be bothered. I tried to distribute the colours in a balanced way, but at the end of the day it's a pretty simple yellow truck. That's fine I guess.

I considered black and dark green as the primary colour for the tanks, but settled on a desert tan as it's a common colour for modern military vehicles and would help the tiny models stand out. Plus I haven't really used this colour before, at least not as a primary colour, so that was a little interesting.

Traditionally one tank gets a base with a star and a slightly different paintjob to mark it as the "elite" unit, but it went against my nature to "hard-code" things this way so instead I decided to try to find an alternative. I settled on a magnetised rocket pod to mark the elite models:

I designed the rocket pod from scratch in Blender and 3D printed it on my Anycubic Photon. It took a couple of iterations to get the details at the right scale, but overall it wasn't too bad.

I installed small 2mm round magnets in the bases of the pods and on the tops of the tanks. I magnetised all four tanks; why the hell not right?

While at first glance I thought they were not very different from normal tanks, as I painted them I realised that there were some details that weren't exactly "realistic" and I wasn't sure how to paint them. The turret armour and cannon especially; I felt that they should serve as the focal point of the miniature. I tried painting the cannon in the same tan, but it was a bit too subtle. Painting it in steel just led to too much steel colour. In the end I settled on painting the cannon in brass; it has a bit of a sci-fi look to it after all, so I though painting it in a less "realistic military" colour was excusable, and overall I decided it was just the best looking option.

I'm not sure why I tried to paint the headlamps in a bright blue, but after doing so on a one model I realised that the barrel would also need a glowing blue energy effect or else the headlamps would be the focal points of the model. I wasn't able to make the effect look good however (plus it took things too far away from the semi-realistic look I had settled on), so I abandoned that idea and painted the rest of the headlamps yellow.

For these tiny models that I was trying to knock out in a hurry I decided I couldn't be bothered with highlighting. So pretty much everything was just basecoated and washed. I think it worked well enough; I really want to get enough models painted up to play Monsterpocalypse fully painted from the start, and I don't care very much about the units to be honest, so... good enough.

While varnishing I ran into another case of Sugar Coated Frosting Of Doom! I had started with the "blue energy effect" tank as a test; I was unable to fully remove the frosting with olive oil so I gave up and stripped the paint from the model, painting it over to match it's brothers. I'm almost glad to be honest as I much prefer it this way.

After some research and trial and error, I eventually settled on applying Vallejo 26.517 Gloss Acrylic Varnish and Vallejo 26.518 Matt Acrylic Varnish straight from an airbrush. Now that was a whole story involving much time, effort, frustration, and money, but I don't want to go into it right now as the story is not quite over yet.


It took me FAR longer than I had hoped, but at last I have five pretty good looking models. Unfortunately in Monsterpocalypse the minimum recommended game size is fifteen units and a monster. Sigh. This is going to take a while.

Repair Truck:
The truck was first basecoated with Vallejo 72.705 GameAir Moon Yellow, Vallejo 70.992 Model Color Neutral Grey (I think, might have been Black Grey), and The Army Painter Warpaints Gun Metal. Then the yellow parts were washed with The Army Painter Quickshade Light Tone Wash, and the black and steel areas were washed with The Army Painter Quickshade Dark Tone wash (basically a black wash). The headlights were then painted with Vallejo 72.005 Game Color Moon Yellow, then a touch of P3 Morrow White was added.

GTanks:
The tanks were basecoated with Vallejo 72.763 Game Air Desert Yellow and The Army Painter Warpaints Gun Metal. Then Citadel Layer Gehenna's Gold was painted onto the Desert Yellow for the brass areas. The whole thing was then washed with The Army Painter Quickshade Soft Tone Wash. After this the headlamps were painted Vallejo 72.005 Game Color Moon Yellow with a dot of P3 Morrow White. The rocket heads were then basecoated in Vallejo 72.106 Game Color Scarlett Blood (their typo, not mine), and a dot of Citadel Wild Rider Red was added to the tips to help them really stand out.