Assembly completed! Now onto painting...

I finished up the assembling the rest of the crisis suits for the Farsight Ally force this past week.  I started by tweaking the weapon loadout of the last model I built.  In my older Tau force, all the crisis suits are modeled with plasma rifles and missile launchers.  The combo was an effective take all comers loadout with the previous codex's rules and visually evoked the Heavy Gear robot style as well that I'm a fan of.  With the current rules (both codex and game rules), it's much better to specialize against a particular target.  I do like the double gun(slinger) look as well so visually I'm ok with the change and if I ever do field the squad then they'll now be able to take on heavily armored infantry a bit better.  Here is the redone loadout standard crisis suit from above along with the new one that I assembled this week.  For the final model I decided to use the standard pose for the torso and legs but gave him a bit more of an active pose above the waist to contrast with the relaxed look of last week's model.

And here is the whole ally force made up of Commander Enforcer suits.  I think there is enough variability in the poses to make the squad look dynamic enough and not just carbon copies of each other.  I'd struggle to find a way to add another model from the same core model without copying one of the other poses though.  Game rules-wise, this ally force consists of Commander Farsight and a troops Crisis suit squad with one upgraded to a shas'vre with the fusion blades signature system.

The next step is thinking about how to paint them.  This will be my third successive project on the blog that, if not continued, would add to my hobby pile of (unpainted) shame so I'm definitely completing something before moving onto anything new.  Since I've been having fun modelling the Tau, I'll probably continue working on them as well.  My original Tau force is painted up in a WW2 US army green scheme with the corresponding white star decals.  I'm not sure if I should continue it with these models or come up with something new but related.   The standard Farsight color scheme is a deep red with some grey trim. 

Commander Farsight model

If I went with that, I'd go with a "russian" decal style with red stars instead of the white to signify the "ally" status and the more martial stance of the Farsight enclaves as well as the "communists in space" stereotype that the tau in general evoke at first glance.   Alternately, I could continue the motif a bit further by doing a WW2 Russian brown base color instead.  Alternately, I could research a USMC scheme to contrast my US Army one for my main Tau force.  I admit that I'm fairly ignorant about WW2 USMC schemes beyond watching some John Wayne movies as a kid and vaguely remembering a patchy camo.  Over the weekend, I'll try and look up a few more options but feel free to comment if you have any ideas in the meantime.