From JamieM - Conquest Spires Force Grown Drones (245 points)

I didn’t own these figures when the challenge began. I’m not sure I’d heard of the game “Conquest: The Last Argument of Kings” before the challenge began. But here they are to once again prove that the painting gods laugh at painting plans for the Challenge - some Force Grown Drones for the Spires faction for the game.

I blame my mate. He’s a master at finding bargains on eBay and some of these started as this; just another bargain 2-player starter set that he found. He then gave me the Spires half and kept the human faction half and said “put them on a shelf, we’ll probably never play the game”. And so I did... but… because I had them, I started looking into the game. The rules were free online. There’s a free army builder online. The models are really nice… So I started stalking eBay and found another bargain starter set. One cheeky bid later and I passed the humans from it to him and we now both had big enough forces to get going.

The Spires appear to be an alien race who came to the world of Ea to colonise it. Some vaguely defined catastrophe later and only a few more of the race made it and, as there were so few of them, they started making clones and drones. These ones are apparently “force grown”, which sounds pretty horrible and are the lowest of the low, with terrible stats in game.

Their massive shields will hopefully keep them alive for a little bit whilst their masters do nasty things to their enemies, like release plagues, or have these fellas explode when they die which damages their opponents.

All contrast paints for these androgynous individuals and I didn’t want any of them to stand out, so I gave them the same colour chitinous armour and used slightly different browns for their wraps.

The shields I tried to make look slightly like meat with dry brushes and washes. I used a splash of colour on the loincloths and shields as the colour represents the colour of their owner, but as they’re the lowest of drones, only a little colour would be spent on them.

35 of them done so far. The maker of the game (para bellum) have done that annoying thing of creating their own scale (35mm) and so they’re chunky fellas, but I’ll score them as 28mm for 175 points in total.

It’s not a hugely popular game in the community, but I’m rather enjoying painting (and buying) figures for it, so hopefully we’ll find time for a game at some point. And I’ll be able to get some more figures painted for the Challenge too.

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"...the Painting Gods laugh at painting plans for the Challenge ..." oh my goodness, do they ever! I had a whole "plan" for some figures that I won't even name again out of shame, and I still hear the mocking laughter of the Painting Gods in my head...

A great submission all around Jamie! While the painting is nice, the best part is the whole "well, hey, I'll just dip my toe into this, what might happen?" approach to this project. I think many of us - and by "many" I mean "99%" - can relate to such projects. But the seeming randomness of the hobby animal spirits are a critical part of what make this a "hobby" in the first place. No need to worry about the stuff you had "planned" for this round...there is always the next...one evening in August, you will turn to them, wonder why you had not painted them, maybe check some painted examples online and suddenly it all begins again!

As to scoring, I too despise the boutique scale creep moving through the hobby (I'm looking at you, Warlord Games, although there are many other offenders - Fantasy Flight Games among others...) but we have some precedent for these larger chaps generating larger scores. On that basis - the "Star Wars Legion Precedent", you shall be awarded 245 points. Well done! 

 GregB