Happy New Year

Best wishes for the new year!

I will not take a pledge for 2013 as I rarely seem to keep it, but I will certainly try my best to get more miniatures painted than ever before. I will try to paint up a lot of what I already have on my shelves and don't just buy new stuff and paint. I have several sets for all my armies on the shelves (also a lot of Fantasy scenery), so I don't really need to buy much new unless there are some new models that might be nice to use for my existing armies.

I ended 2012 by receiving several minis bought on Ebay.

The most lovely stuff I received was 9 heavy weapon teams for my Imperial Guard army. 3 teams was Cadian and 6 was Catachan. It appears they have been painted before, then basecoated black again. But either the paint has been stripped first, or they have been assembled and put on bases and then everything has been basecoated but never painted. I knew they might have been previously painted before I bought them, so that came as no supprise. The supprise was instead that they had all their ritch details intact.

I plan on having black rocks as a base for both Space marine and Imperial Guard, so black rubble on the bases suits me fine.

The teams are all mounted as two soldiers and one heavy weapon one one base, just as I like to have them (I also guess that this is the best way according to the rules).

3 Catachan teams are armed with mortars, and the remaining teams are all armed with missile launchers. They also have some extra bits and bobs glued to their bases, some of the Catachan units have trees or plants, and this is nice as it gives a jungle feel. I plan to use my Catachan troops as terrain specialists anyway, so this will fit my fluff nicely.

I will have to add some ammo pouches and grenades and other equipment to some of the teams, as they are pretty basic, but I have plenty of that stuff in my bitz box, so that will work out well. One of the teams has a Space Marine helmet, a backpack and a bolter added to their base as decor, and I will see what I will do with that. The helmet can have been destroyed and tossed away so the Marine could regain his sight and continue to fight, but I know of no marine that leaves his backpack or his bolter, so I might have to use some greenstuff to change a little on that base.

Also, some of the teams with missile launchers seem to have spare mortar ammunition on their bases, and I'll see what I'll do with that. It isn't really wrong, but it do look  just a little out of place.

I also got a team of Assault Marines (5 minis) and these have been stripped of their original paint and then basecoated black. There are 3 with boltgun and chainsword, one with a meltagun and powerfist, and one with two chainswords. Not sure about the legality of the two chainswords, so if I don't find that the rules allow this I will have to see if I should chop one arm or just one hand off and replace the one sword with a boltgun. Hope I can find it to be legal though, as it looks mighty cool. 

Two of the Marines are beakies, and I really love those helmets. 1 Marine also has a studded shoulder guard that usually came with the beakies according to pictures of the different generations of armor at Forge World.

I also bought a Tactical squad (10 minis) and a Devastator squad (10 minis), but here I was a little disappointed. The Devastator squad has 4 Devastators, and the rest are just regular tactical marines. The leader of the squad is wielding an axe that probably is supposed to be a power axe, but it looks like it is taken from Warhammer Fantasy and looks a bit Chaos to me. Still, if I paint him up right, I am sure he can become a sergeant in one of my tactical units.

Most of these marines appear to be previously painted and then basecoated black, except for two of them that are blue and green. 

So basically what I am left with is a Devastator team of 4 Marines, missing a sergeant. It seems that these comes in boxes of 5 with some spare equipment, so I will take one Marine from another box (or maybe I have enough body parts in the bitz box to assemble one from there) and use spare parts from the Devastator squad boxed set that I already have to make them a sergeant.

Then I have 15 Tactical Marines, including 2 typical sergeant types, that can be completed with 5 more regular Marines to make two 10 man squads. I know Games Workshop sells both a squad and a team version of these, so if I should need it I can always buy 5 troops to make them in to 20 in total. But I am sure I have so many Marines already, that I either have such a box on the shelves, or have built Marines from spare parts before to make up the remaining 5.