Wednesday 30 December 2015

From AaronH - 28mm Imperial Guardsmen from GW (105 points)

My next entry in the Challenge is 21 Imperial Guardsmen from GW. These are 28mm models, mostly plastic. I can't stand the 40k rules. I bought an army of these guys before I realized that though. They've sat, assembled and undercoated for years.

A friend and I are planning a campaign for 2016. We'll see if it gets off the ground, but if it does, these will be the core of my ground forces. We'll be using the Chain of Command rules for the ground combat. To start we'll play them out of the box. Once we have a handle on them we'll mod them for Sci-Fi, things like hacking, ECM, teleportation. They are candidates.

The full group
This batch is one squad of ten men and eleven odds and ends.

Rear shot
The rifle squad is a Sgt, a Vox-Caster and eight riflemen. I haven't added any support weapons into a squad yet, but I have the options and will sub them in as appropriate.

The rifle squad
These men are veterans of the Malvee militia, returning home after several years fighting off-world. They have arrived just in time to defend their home from invasion.

A hard bitten Sgt.
The odds and ends are a dismounted armor officer, Vox-caster, missile team, melta gunner, plasma gunner, two grenadiers, two flamers and a Corpsman. The bases are done in my standard desert pattern.

Odds and sods
The officer can be identified as an armor officer by his lack of armor. His sword is a chain sword that I filed down to be a power sword. Several of these models are metal.

No armor, not infantry
The metals are very sharp, very nice poses. They are less bulky than the plastics which are, frankly, not GW's best work. The plastic Cadians are all badly proportioned and some of the sculpts are very soft in places. The metals suffer from none of these problems.

Plasma gunner. I elected to go with the traditional blue plasma chamber.
You can see the difference between the gunner above and the grenadier below.

Grenadier. Not as well proportioned. The faces have great character though.
These men are from the 1st Battalion, 5th Malvee Infantry. The V is for the 5th. The single dot represents the 1st Bn. This is horrible OPSEC but it's fiction and I wanted to give these guys a little bit of color.

Armored officer attached the 1/5 MMI Regt
These models are solid and unremarkable; which is appropriate I guess. I now have two squads, since I finished up another nine models while I worked on these. They don't count as I started them years ago. I'll be finishing up enough models to start playing during the Challenge. These are a nice filler unit. Easy to paint a bunch of them and a change of pace from the more complex historical models that will be most of my Challenge fare.

Great work Aaron! I quite like the desert colour scheme you've chosen for their uniforms, especially the judicious highlight of their green shoulder armour. Nice.
I agree with your assessment of many GW plastics. They were often over-scaled and soft in detail, while the quality of the metals you could usually bank on. That being said, you've done a wonderful job on both here. Bravo!

19 comments:

  1. I really like the dusty look that ties in with the basing.

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  2. The figures do look nice and very fitting for a desert world.

    Using Chain of command might save the day for these troops as the rules are so much better than 40K (in my opinion)

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  3. They look lovely, the colours on the uniform tie in nicely. I hope the campaign is a success!

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  4. For the Emperor! Nice work on the squaddies, Aaron!

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  5. Great idea taking 40K figures and using them in a nohter system. Love the look of these guys thouhg the presense of swords in 40K has always puzzled me. Good luck with the campaing.

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  6. Excellent work with these figures Aaron. And you are spot-on re: GW's Imperial Guard plastic figures - they were disappointing models. These fellow look sharp, and I like the back story too.

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  7. Great job on these. I like your organization markings on the shoulder pads.

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  8. Shame your not a fan of the rules as you have made these look great

    Ian

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  9. The Guards!!! I like a lot their painting scheme.

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  10. Despite the fact they are a bit wooden they are still amongst the better IG plastics. They're loads better than the Catachans for example which are simply awful and astounding when you consider ho sculpted them.

    You've done great job on them. I really like the colour choices and the squad markings really set them off.

    BTW, why not give Gruntz a go? They're a great set of rules and you can use them for any scale. There's quite a community of people using them for 40K...

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    1. Thanks Millsy. I do play Gruntz in 15mm. It's very nice and quick, works well with lots of vehicles and I love that I can design my own vics and units. I don't find that it rewards realistic tactics the way that I hear that CoC does. The other guy I'm looking at playing with was a Marine grunt and wants to see some rules that make sense to him.

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    2. CoC would be a good choice as well. I know Greg and I have been thinking of using it for 30K games as I just can't stomach playing the 40K 'rules'.

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  11. Great stuff, I sold all my Cadians but these make me a bit nostalgic to say the least...

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  12. Well done Aaron! While these plastics may fall a little behind compared with newer offerings you've actualy done a great job bringing them to life.

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  13. Very nice! I really like your color palette on these guys. They remind me a bit of Mobile Infantry from the Starship Troopers movies.

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  14. Very nice work, I like the color choice and spot color. I'm still working on my Cadians, but the 7th has a lot of color. ;)

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  15. Really like the colours on these. really good job. The baseing is perfect for them. cheers

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