Instant Army (just add Tyranids)

I started several projects all at once this week, none of which I finished.  I did manage to repaint 3 Genestealers in my latest hivefleet colours. A fairly random thing to do, given that I'm playing Kings of War at the moment and I haven't used Genestealers in a game since, well, I can't remember exactly when.  There is method in my madness however.  I want to use them as 'Night-Stalkers', the extra-dimensional beings which are literally the stuff of nightmares and a playable army in the world of Mantica.

2 Space Hulk 'stealers and a 'home grown'

My poor Nids have been languishing in gaming limbo for nearly a year now.  I boxed most of them up and took up Necrons following my disastrous performance at Maelstrom VIII.  Since I started playing Kings of War, I thought I'd given up on them completely.  I had a shiny new Undead army to play with (I still have a shiny new army to play with and need to stop faffing around and paint the bloody thing).  But then I discovered the Night-Stalker faction in the Uncharted Empires supplement.  It doesn't actually have any models in production yet, Mantic made all the rules up for them but left it to players' imaginations to come up with the beasties themselves. Very appropriate.  Maybe they'll produce the figures at some point, but in the meantime you can more or less use what you want.  Someone suggested that Tyranids were a good alternative and I saw a few battle reports with the Great Devourer playing the part of Mantica's bogeymen.  I did some quick calculations and realised that I had over 3000 points worth of viable biomass that I could pass off as Night-Stalkers. My hivefleet came back out of storage.

Dopplegangers!  Dun-dun, derrrr!

The main problem was that 40k models come on round bases, some of which are very large and they don't fit into movement trays very well.  I could 'multibase' them and Mantic actively encourages this practice.  It would involve cutting off all the 40k bases and sticking the models onto a unit sized movement tray (troop, regiment, legion etc) in a pleasing diorama arrangement.  However, they then wouldn't be usable in 40k and it was a step I wasn't willing to take.  I considered making special movement trays with round holes sunk into them but in the end just cut up some MDF and blu-tacced them on.  I think it works quite well.

I knocked up an army list and came up with the following 'counts as' models:

Blood Worms - Rippers
Reapers - Hormagaunts
Dopplegangers - Genestealers
Scarecrows - Termagants (I should really use these as Spectres but don't care)
Nightmares - Shrikes
Shadow-Hulk - Carnifex
Void Lurker - Winged Hive Tyrant
Portal of Despair - Spore Chimney (hard luck, I don't own one)
Fiends - (mish mash of favourite models)

Back Row: Horde of Fiends, Void Lurker, Regiment of Nightmares
Middle Row: Horde of Scarecrows, Legion of Bloodworms
Front Row: Troop of Reapers, Regiment of Dopplegangers, 2 x Shadow Hulk

I had a hard time justifying my Fiends which consist of: Zoanthrope, Neurothrope, Venomthrope, Brood Lord, Lictor and Spawn of Cryptus.  But then I said to myself, 'Do they look fiendish? Yes? Well, they're Fiends then, aren't they?'

Fiendish friends

The larger, singleton models were too big to fit on a 40x40mm 'Monster' base but that's perfectly fine, the rules are very permissive.  I've seen several GW Zombie Dragon/Terrorgheists being used in KoW games and the footprint of that thing is massive. You just create as small a base as you can reasonably fit the model on.  In my case its 60x60mm for the 'fexes and the Tyrant.  All my other models fit onto the default base size and still manage to fulfill minimum model count as stipulated in the Kings of War FAQ.  For example, a regiment of infantry should contain 20 models. Ironically, I own enough models to field lots of regiments but they simply don't fit snugly together on the 'multibase'.  You can't fit a round peg into a square hole, or something like that.  To account for this, the rules allow you to field regiments containing only 11 models (minimum model count) but preferably 14 models (preferred model count).  I've managed to stick to the preferred model count so far.  In fact my legion of Bloodworms contains 63 rippers (3 more than a full complement). They are stuck on 15 round bases and look pretty sparse.  Not exactly an exciting diorama but you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Sigh, another collapsing scrum

Not managed to play a game with them yet.  I need to repaint more Genestealers to make another regiment of Dopplegangers.  I can't believe I own so many 'stealers and most of them aren't actually table ready.  I still have about 25 on the sprue.

I'm also working on my Portal of Despair which is a completely new, non Tyranid model but thats super secret and probably won't be ready for a while yet.