Painted Scourge army for Dropzone Commander!

Having spent some time magnetizing my little alien invader jellies I sat down with paint and brush to make them tabletop ready. You might have seen some teasers over on the Facebook page, but here is the complete army, as it stands right now, in all its glory! This is roughly 1100 points or so, but I have one more starter set to build and am planning on getting some Reaver gunships and Slayer heavy gravtanks to boost it. Probably some Vampires and maybe a Screamer to. Hmm...

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier I pretty much copied the studio scheme as it simply fits the Scourge so well. It is not actually the best looking colour scheme (for example these and these are actually better looking, I think) but with the strong and detailed setting information in the rulebook I wanted to paint them the way I kind of envisaged they would look if they were real and the purplish metal simply seemed more... right. At first I thought they'd end up looking boring but by the end I was very happy with how sinister they're looking.

Besides looking neat painting them like this is very, very quick which is always a plus in my book!

Of course all the relevant bits are magnetized so they can mount up, like so:

Being able to do this is an important bit of DZC for me. It just looks awesome! 

Destroyers! Big buggers...

The Destroyers were fun to paint as they are large enough to give them decent detail. Great sculpt and very characterfull. Might have to get some Eviscerators soon.

Warriors in Invaders.

Compared to the excellent metal Destroyers the plastic Warriors was quite a letdown. In fact I'd say the plastic infantry is the only lowpoint of the two player starter. They're perfectly adequate when you're some distance away but the are not very good sculpts close up. Still, some added scenery to the bases (made from cut up bits of sprue!) they certainly look the part when on the battlefield.

Prowlers, baby!

My favourite Scourge unit - the Prowlers! These were the first I assembled and the first I started painting. Love these guys! Eight is a decent number, but I think 16 sounds more Scourge like so expect to see more in the future.

A Marauder and the Harbinger that is transporting the Oppressor. Both nice looking models (although my
Harby did have some bumps in the resin that I couldn't be bothered to fix). Two Intruder Alphas can be seen in the foreground.

Dropships, the lifeline of the entire army. I'll probably get another Harbinger soon as I'd really like to try some Stalkers in the future.

Hunters and Reapers.

The main gravtanks of the Scourge. On the Reapers I deviated slightly to paint the inner parts of the Arc Caster, giving it a blue/white hue to signify the electric discharge of the AA weapon. Also, I forgot to drill out the barrels on the Hunters! Need to correct this soon.

Oppressor and one of its many, many children...

Finally we have the giant doomcrab itself - the Oppressor! Although I really like the look of the Desolator (hello Reapers!) I knew I had to get the Oppressor as my first commander when I saw it released. Love how big and stompy and... weird it is! Looking forward to letting it loose on the front lines.

By the way, all the terrain in the pics here are from the two player starter set and I love that you can get an awesome looking table setup in a matter of minutes (or an hour or so if you want to glue the buildings like me). While proper modell terrain that is well painted does look better this paper stuff still looks very very good, as far as I'm concerned. I don't get why not more games do this - at the moment the ones that spring to mind is this and Infinity: Operation Icestorm. Also, I'm still waiting for my plastic modular DzC board that I kickstarted almost two years ago now. They're saying it should be here in September. Yeah.

Anyway, let's round off with some mood shots featuring that great scenery!

Some Reapers and Prowlers deploy to secure the street for the Invaders.

An Intruder Alpha pulls away just as it has deposited a squad of angry Destroyers into a building.

Scourge warriors look down at the majestic view of their commander advancing towards the enemy.

A Harbinger dropship approaching to pick up an Oppressor.

Next up I'll probably tackle the UCM in the starter so I can actually start doing some demo games.

Read More

2 comments

Magnetizing my Scourge for Dropzone Commander

Finally getting to grips with putting together and painting an army (or two) for Dropzone Commander by Hawk Wargames. First out is the Scourge which will be my main army and where I'll put most of my resources. However, I will also paint the UCM from the core box and probably add a few extra units to make it into a solid demo army.

Anyway, I haven't actually got the core box quite yet but I really wanted to get stuck in so decided to start off with some Intruder Alphas and Betas together with a bunch of Prowlers and Destroyers. Since the prowlers are probably my favourite unit in the entire game (who wouldn't love a Mini Cooper sized crab mech with five eyes and a plasma proboscis?!) I started with those.

When DzC was first released in 2012 I really didn't like the look of the Scourge as models and wasn't particularly impressed by the metallic studio paintjob either. Luckily I've grown older and wiser and the little jellies have really grown on me! The Marauder and Despoiler dropships still look a little odd to me, but I love the rest of the range! After thinking of different paint schemes and looking at what other people's armies I've come around on the purple metallics to. The thought of making them more organic looking seems common when looking at other armies, but I actually think that's the wrong way of going about it. To me they look like metal constructs that have grown in an organic way, not the other way around and for some reason painting them to look more "fleshy" actually make them seem less alien, as far as I'm concerned. That they look organic but are actually metal just feels... stranger. So yeah, that was a long-winded way of telling you that I'll be sticking pretty close to the studio scheme when painting these babies!

What's that about magnets you say? Oh, I almost forgot. Being able to easily and effectively magnetize (or simply slot in) the entire army in their respective dropships was also an attractive reason for choosing Scourge - it simply looks cool to have everything hanging underneath, like it should! So for these little guys I simply dug out my trusty old 1.5mm x 0.75mm magnets that I've been using for Heavy Gear and Infinity as well. One in each pad on the Intruder and one at the top of head of the Prowlers and off we go!

I would have made some correct sci-fi sounds but the proto-gamer was asleep in the other room. Just imagine some pew-pews, lots of scuttling sounds and the screaming howl of the Intruder as it dives in. ;)

So yeah... just wanted to let you guys know that I'm actually doing stuff even if it seems a bit quiet around these parts. Talk to you again soon!

Read More

No comments