My Visigoths (and entire Army) are now finished!

Well, I've gone and done it.. I've finally finished my southern army yet again. I finished up the tanks this weekend and taken a few glamour shots (hey, might as well call it like it is!) of the whole force. I ran out of my Ogryn Flesh Wash on my gears just before I decided to buy the Visigoths and had to get a pot of the new replacement, Reikland Fleshshade. I've used GW's new washes over the past year while finishing my Space Marine army and I can say without a doubt that I don't like the new formulations. They don't "flow" properly (or at least how I am used to washes doing) and dry on flat surfaces as splotchy messes. I've tried three colors over the past year and had the same issue, including with the Visigoth tanks. I had to do light but heavy dry brushing to cover up some of the splotches (very little paint but with alot of brush pressure) and I'm okay overall with the results.

With these two tanks, I've officially run out of space in my Heavy Gear carrying case. Barring some drastic change in the future like another army book coming out for the South, my army is pretty much done. I've still got an allied NuCoal force still NIB that I'll start if I ever find a local opponent to play against. In the meantime, here is the re-finished army on a part of the city scape terrain. It's just shy of 4000TV that can be fielded as a PL3 Spec Ops Regiment and a PL4 Gear Regiment.

Paratrooper Cadre, General Purpose Cadre, and Fire Support Cadre along with one of the Visigoths and an HRP Support Option Turret

Two Strike Squads, Airstrike markers, and a Fire Support Cadre

Second General Purpose and Fire Support Cadres, Visigoth and HRP Turret along with a Black Ops Cadre

Finished my King Cobras and DZC Cityscape Terrain Review

Finished my triple King Cobras (one regular, two hooded variants) along with the airstrike markers and some additional stragglers (Jaeger Gunner and Chatterbox Iguana). I broke down and finally bought the snakeyes blister I need to make my Black Ops squad legal (which will allow me to use my paratrooper cadre as well) but the ebay seller is taking his/her sweet time shipping them despite marking them shipped with tracking a week ago (with no actual info on the tracking)... grumble... grumble... I've also got some Visigoths that I got a great deal on supposedly on the way as well so hopefully both will arrive next week. As always, the pics below are hosted on dakka so you can click on them to be taken to their gallery page for all your zooming in needs.

I've also been assembling the Dropzone Commander Cityscape set I picked up a few weeks ago and am very happy with my purchase. It's solid cardstock that is preglued and somewhat scored so it's very easy to put together. You just bend into the rectangular shape and then glue down the roof ledges and roof floor into their proper positions. Technically, you don't have to glue either as the tight roof fit is good enough to keep the building in the correct shape via friction and not gluing would allow you to disassemble the building for easy storage/transport as well. The only thing is that I would *NOT* put any models on the rooftop if you don't glue it except maybe 6mm-12mm plastic or light resin infantry as a metal model can cause the roof to fold back down. With superglue, the roof is strong enough to even support a relatively heavy metal model like the King Cobras above (I tried!). A surprising tidbit is that putting the buildings together used up ALOT of superglue; I had 5 of the smaller 0.7oz tubes and still needed to make a run for more to finish the last couple.

The set retails at $45 USD and includes 20 buildings (4 of each of 5 sizes) as well as 24 double sided 1'x1' tiles (enough to make a 4x6' game table). I tend to use 3x4' tables for my Heavy Gear Flash games (see my blog link in my sig) and that is how I built the city above. I took one of each building and made it into two separate "damaged" and rubble states which is why the buildings on the right are so dark compared to the others. As you can see, the 20 buildings populate a 3x4' table quite nicely without any other terrain. If you've got additional terrain, it's probably a good idea to use it on a 4x6' space using all the tiles as the building density you see above would be exactly half. That's not, btw, a complaint as I think the value you get for your $45 purchase is incredible with this set but rather an opinion that a 4x6' table made up to be a true city needs about 1 1/2 sets of buildings and some additional terrain (cars, roadblocks, forests, statues, etc) to feel full.

Here's a close up of the second largest building along with some common and not so common minis for scale. The DZC scale is technically 10mm and I think the building work well for both Heavy Gear (12mm) and Robotech (6mm), the two main games I intend to use this with. The HG King Cobra is obviously the official version (albeit converted a bit in pose) but the Robotech minis are plastic and metal kits from long ago which are a bit bigger than the ones coming out soon (fingers crossed!) from the Palladium Robotech Tactics kickstarter. I've included a tape measure taped to the building as well to give you a measurement of the scale (metric just like the ones shown in the robotech kickstarter pics). Also pictured above are two papercraft buildings created on my upper end of medium grade printer on the best settings using the heaviest cardstock I can with my printer. While I'm admittedly comparing apples to oranges (the DP9 colors are more pastel than the darker DZC pdf files), the quality of what I built doesn't compare to that of the Cityscape buildings.

I definitely recommend the set for anyone looking for a high quality yet cheap and easy to assemble urban terrain set. If the set were a movie, I'd give it 3 1/2 stars out of 4 with points taken off only for a slightly low building density (25 buildings for $50 would have been better IMO) and the strange lack of simple road curves on the tiles (only straight pieces and intersections... no turns). All in all, I'm very happy with my purchase.