Sunday, December 13, 2015

On the Table: Skitarii Vanguard / Rangers

So On the Table will focus on my recent army I played at the Standish Standoff. Today will be the Ranger and Vanguard units. For the event we had list restriction cutting us down to two sources. This really limited some armies and others (*cough* Eldar *cough*) had very few restrictions. I opted to continue with the force I had brought to the Fratris event in the Spring and bump it up to the 1850 point range. Having played some more I realized a few things. A.) Infiltrators are awesome. The speed and versatile threat they represent really helps to keep the pressure on and lets you get around the board. B.) Vanguard and Rangers are really not great. The lack of transports or real mobility prevents them from contributing much across the board. Although the Plasma Fusillade looks great, without a drop pod you just can't get them in range very effectively with a 6" move on an 18" gun. I opted instead to go with three smaller units (5 man) and the Arc Rifle for the support weapons. with a 24" range and rapid fire they can reach out fairly well with an effective threat of 30". 

Haywire means that they can threaten large and small vehicles with equal ease allowing them to help soften or finish off targets above their weight class. The rest of the army being so fast and wanting to get into it means these guys tend to hold the back to mid field. I didn't have the models or the points to equip all three units with Arc rifles so the third unit is a counter charge unit with a beefed up Sargent. Hiding most the game then jumping on an aggressive assault unit to lower its toughness allowing the Infiltrators to be able to double out Marines or anything else toughness 4. 


As for painting these guys I opted to go with the Mars scheme, but a little modified. I already have Blood Angels and the GW Mars scheme is basically the same paint method I use for them. I have always felt the Mars red should be a deeper darker red, akin to my Techmarine. SO I started with a very deep red Minitaire paints Red Clay for the base. A mid tone of Regal Red and highlighting with Angel Red. This helped to give the cloaks a dark red hue but the highlights although not as stark as an extreme highlight gave them a depth of color. I used the classic gunmetal for the base to most the metallic with some brass/copper coloring for details. The gun stalks I used a burnt umber over the metallic base, the metallic showed thru a little giving the dark brown a kind of sheen that I really liked. Almost a brass effect but more brown. I used Vellejo's Game Air Electric Blue for the base on all my blue work. Highlighting up with a sky blue mixed in then straight and white highlights.

Yay hazard striping painted by hand
For the Arc Rifles I came back to the model and Airbrushed on the glow to get a nice OSL effect from these heavy weapons. The Radium carbines I simply painted by hand as they are much smaller in effect. The only other thing I used the airbrush for was to apply the base coat of red on the cloak outside and khaki on the inside of the cloak. I did the standard three layers of color, base and two highlights. The mid tone I applied through out the cloak on raised areas. The brightest highlight I simply edge highlighted with. I washed the whole model with Null Oil once I had the base colors on before highlighting to shade. All the copper/gold was done with my classic mid tone yellow brown base then the metallic over top to get a nice smooth copper/gold coloring.


The decals really brought the units together. I opted to only do the gear pattern trim along the Sargent cloaks due to the lack of gear decals I had plus the amount of work required to do so. The squad numbering really just put a crisp detail to these guys though the stark white on the red robes really makes the red pop even more. Liberal application of Micro Sol and Micro set (think 5-6 coats) helped to completely dissolve the decal carrier and make them look painted on in the end. I was very happy with how these models came out for line troops. I cut a couple detail corners on them as eventually I will be doing 40+ of these guys. Yay future projects abound.

Next time we will go over the Infiltrators and Rustalkers. Also my two award winning entries in to the painting competition for the Standish Standoff this year.





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