And then an Army Happened

I have been playing DropZone Commander for slightly more than a year now, focusing primarily on the Shaltari army for that game. As is my usual pattern with war games, I got off to a good start on producing a painted army, but then stalled a bit, and never finished. This time around, I have been focusing on having at least one or two new models painted every time I play the game, and, over the months, an army just... sort of... accumulated.

This might only be the second time I have come so close to fielding a completely painted, competitive army. The first being my Warhammer Fantasy High Elves, from over 15 years ago.

While working my way through Hawk's products, I have built up a much better feel for the difference between their resin and plastic products. One easy place to spot the difference in resolution is in the lift vanes on the Shaltari constructs. The Tomahawk Grav tanks in the photo above are all resin, with very finely detailed patterning on the fins, while the Kukri anti-air vehicles, in the foreground, are injection molded plastic. The plastic pattern is much the same, but the mold does not support the extremely fine lines shown in the resin.

Hawk's metal infantry are also quite richly detailed, for tiny 10mm troopers. You can see one squad of Firstborns here, picked out with ivory colored trim on their warsuits. Overall, I am pretty happy with them, but I might decide to go back and add some more extreme highlighting in the future, so that some detail shows through from more than six inches away.

My Braves suffer from some of the same lack of contrast, but some of them came out reasonably well. Squad  IV looks particularly not bad, considering. Notably, this is one of the metal squads. Hawk's plastic infantry are fairly flat, and not as interesting to look at.

Dave Lewis' ability to design models so that they look cool, and take paint almost automatically continues to impress me. There are lots of other highly detailed resin lines out there, but not all of them look good as good with a basic paint job as these do. One of these days, I need to try painting a real showpiece model.

There are still plenty of models that I would like to add, or finish, to allow myself more options in army construction, but I have to say that I am pretty pleased with the results so far.