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Simple and effective PJ.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
There's a stick right up his bot!

Performance increasing mod!

 Thargrim wrote:
Nice bot!

This game has been on my radar for a while, aesthetically it's right up my alley. I need to look into the factions a little more and consider giving this game a go. Might grab one of the fleet starters, i've narrowed it down to Union/Commonwealth/Imperium.

On the official website I did have a slightly hard time figuring out the visual style of each faction at a glance. Putting a painted set of each faction starter above the faction description might help with that. The gallery is kind of a wall of images, a lot of which are blank.

Commonwealth and Union are starter factions as they do not have a lot of complex rules, favors range, are not too slow and have higer survivability. Imperium sits in the middle ground, not to hard but not too easy either.
Models gallery will allways have more blanks then not, as WC makes rules 12-18 months ahead of their model production. It is allso a pdf rules set, so balance changes to the game and units happends very frequently. (like they do for all warcradles games)

I went with the Commonwealth, was pretty happy when unboxing the starter fleet. The resin ship was really clean and crisp, no mold slippage or excessive flash to clean off. It's obvious that magnetizing the weapons is a smart idea.

When it comes to the 2 large hovercraft (transport vs shockwave) i'm kinda baffled on that choice. Going to be a fun hobby project though.

 Thargrim wrote:
When it comes to the 2 large hovercraft (transport vs shockwave) i'm kinda baffled on that choice. Going to be a fun hobby project though.

For me the bridges more or less hold in place without glue, so can try both variants before committing.

 Thargrim wrote:
I went with the Commonwealth, was pretty happy when unboxing the starter fleet. The resin ship was really clean and crisp, no mold slippage or excessive flash to clean off. It's obvious that magnetizing the weapons is a smart idea.

When it comes to the 2 large hovercraft (transport vs shockwave) i'm kinda baffled on that choice. Going to be a fun hobby project though.

The new faction starter boxes are good, price is steep but in the long run it pays off. I jumped on the game before they existed..............
Yes, the resin work is of good quality, and the plastic casting has in practical terms 0 flashing. From a hobbyist aspect, it is a good range. (20 and 21 resin models might not have a perfect fit though, but it was their first years, so it is kinda natural to expect)
You dont need magnets for the gun turrets, blu-tack does the job just fine, i use it on all my ships and the turrets have not fallen off yet.

Remember, the pdf faction orbat rules takes priority over any printed faction rules, so allways use the pdf orbats.

 Thargrim wrote:
I went with the Commonwealth, was pretty happy when unboxing the starter fleet. The resin ship was really clean and crisp, no mold slippage or excessive flash to clean off. It's obvious that magnetizing the weapons is a smart idea.

When it comes to the 2 large hovercraft (transport vs shockwave) i'm kinda baffled on that choice. Going to be a fun hobby project though.

Like Blackfang said, see if the top parts (the bridges) can just clamp on through friction. They often do.

And yeah, the resin ships are 1 part molds... That's the positive side about a model with a large flat bottom and no base: you don't have mold lines on them, except maybe a bit of flashing at the very bottom of the model. Magnetising is also fairly easy if you use magnets that use imperial system dimensions, rather than metric. I'm in Europe, so I do have to drill them out slightly to 4mm holes to get that snug fit. Very easy to do, although that diameter does mean I use my cordless drill to do so (as my pin vice cannot take it).

Made some good progress painting the Commonwealth starter box units already:



I almost went full leadbelcher metallic on all the hulls but thought it might be too much metallic stuff going on.

Nice start, i did my ships white just as the box art so seeing some variation is nice.

Woah, great start to the fleet!

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
Nice start, i did my ships white just as the box art so seeing some variation is nice.

I actually think the mechanicus standard grey is too dark, they kinda bleed into the darker blue tabletop mat and don't pop on the tabletop. To me a lot of the ships look like bare metal in the artwork. I think the Russian fleet was definitely meant to be white colored in the spartan games iteration of this faction. Maybe i'll shift to dawnstone or administratum grey for the rest.

Well, kinda how warfare marine vessels is ment to be, to blend in with the sea, that is why there is alot of grey tones chosen for the factions in regards to the studio artwork.

As for commonwealth studio artwork, it is my opinion that one can take the studio design in two ways, white as mentioned in the lore (The white army), or a bright silver that in direct light appears to be mirror white. (the latter seems to be the case of the borodino box art style to my eyes)

I did a "dirty white" where i used black,grey and white spray and bathed them in a thinned down black oilpaint.

But thing is, each faction has its own hull design so even if you would paint the commonwealth say blue, you would still see they are commonwealth ships, so in the end, any colour is better then plastic grey and resin white.

Colours on battleships is always a bit contentious.

It's a world where you can become obscured/harder to hit through generators, so I always imagined real world camo patterns take a back seat in this setting.

My French are bright Magenta and tbh, When those are on the table, people tend to come and have a look, simply because they stand out on a blue/green sea board.

I had thought the white navy got it's name from their white uniforms, or at least that's the only lore i've seen about it. Regardless, I shifted from mechanicus grey (on the Rurik) to AP uniform grey (on the Kustov), I think the weathering shows up a little better now:

 Thargrim wrote:
I had thought the white navy got it's name from their white uniforms, or at least that's the only lore i've seen about it. Regardless, I shifted from mechanicus grey (on the Rurik) to AP uniform grey (on the Kustov), I think the weathering shows up a little better now:

The white navy was called that for the same reason the white army was - because the color was the symbol of monarchists and traditionalists that took up arms to uphold the pre-revolutionary order against the Reds.

I've made a video review about the new Egyptians for those interested:





This was an incredibly well designed set and really easy to assemble. Perfect balance between large enough parts to see the model progress during assembly, but still enough detailed parts too for the different builds.

At first i was like, the heck, new faction?? this dont like anything in the range, but then i remembered, sultanate..........
It is a hovercraft design and sutch ships are not lean and sleek. I like it.

One thing that i feel is underappreciated about this range is the vast differences in model design.
It is like they are trying realy hard to get gamers who care not for naval games, to become interested. All they need is a bit more exposure at various cons in u.s and eu.

My view is DWars has been growing steadily. One downside is that WC can't do the huge releases that Spartan Games used to do which really got a lot of attention.

At the same time their growth is more measured so they shouldn't suffer the issues that plagued SG whereby they were almost always focused on only one game system at a time and had to drop others from the focus which resulted in a painful cycle of hyper attention and product focus followed by sudden periods of silence.



WC do have their own design approach and their use of plastics does mean that a lot of core ships can be covered by one or two sprue perfection. Sometimes more for a few (eg Alliance).




For me the big thing with the Egyptians is bringing some much desired visual diversity to the Sultanate fleet. They get a lot out of their plastics ,but it can also mean that a lot of their ships feel and look very similar. So having the Egyptians is a breath of fresh air.

They've also previewed one of the skyships for them at a previous convention and it looks so sweet. You can see all the standard Sultante designs in it, but its also different and even looks a touch more flamboyant in design.

I love these new Egyptian models. They also just paint up lightning fast if you go for a largely metallic paintjob:



I used a spray of retributor armour for this, picked out some details in Green stuff world Siren scale green (the teal metallics) and slapped on an all over shade by mixing 50% GW magos purple contrast with 50% medium.
The whole thing gets drybrushed with silver and a gloss coat gets applied.

I then pick out some silver details and shade with nuln oil. After that, pale blue grey on the decking and hovercraft parts with thinned GW gryph charger grey on the deck and pure black templar on the hover elements.


After that, I apply silver to the weapons, pick out the casings in GW blood angel red contrast and shade them with nuln oil.

Stark contrast to the traditional eu region palette.
On one side of the coin it combines realy good, but on the other it is just too mutch gold for my personal taste. (never been a fan of models where majority of the colour is gold/copper/brazz/bronze, too flashy for my taste)

They should brighten up your cabinet pretty good =P

Yeah, it's very heavy on the gold this... It does stand out a ton on an ocean table however, so it's definitely aimed at catching the eye.

My purple French follow the same "in your face" approach though, but they only have golden accents, so it's not as crazy as this scheme.

If/when I get a chance to build an Alliance force I'm going for the heavy bronze/gold look.

Great news everyone, a new 2 player box is coming in october, Fortune and Glory, AND it is two mercenary fleets: The Honorable Eclipse Company vs The Crimson League.
This is the perfect recruitment box since it comes with the rules and gubbins box, and both fleets can be used by any of the 8 factions. HEC can be found in the Union orbat, TCL can be found in the Sultanate orbat.

Box content in spoiler, HEC facing left, CL facing right.

I do like that box and that both sides can be built as mercenary forces for anyone to take makes it really easy to buy. No having to split the contents.

It's an insanely cleverly designed box to release this late into the game cycle.

It's pretty much useful for new player getting into the game, but also for veterans... So the timing is absolutely perfect.

Can't wait to see the rules for the HEC Airships/Sentinel Generators, as well as the civilian ships.

FLGS has them up on preorder for 80 euros, so I'll be grabbing 3. Going to have to see if anyone wants a sultanate half.

Irdiumstern wrote:
Can't wait to see the rules for the HEC Airships/Sentinel Generators, as well as the civilian ships.

FLGS has them up on preorder for 80 euros, so I'll be grabbing 3. Going to have to see if anyone wants a sultanate half.

Wow that price is insane, do they have international shipping?

One thing about the model range is that it is like a baseball game, it goes from home run to 1 ball strike-out in an instant.

I personaly did not like it when the covenant got the UFO models earlier this year, but the latest alliance battleship to be released next month is possibly even worse for me, it is just simply "over the top". (some will however adore this ship, but hey we are all different)




Oh and btw, her torch, that is a Solar beam weapon.............
One thing is for shure, bring out that ship in a demo game and heads will turn.

See both of those are ships from the past - the UFO ships were a big thing in the original force (although slightly less perfect circles, but they were there). The Liberty model is actually tame compared to the original form Spartan Games (which was very much a marmite model even back then)

Also one of the alternate builds for the Liberty lets it have just a regular massive laser gun on top so pretty easy to proxy for that if you don't want to use the statue.

This is the original

I know the statue of liberty is french-sculpted and iirc theres a counterpart twin of it in france, but its a symbol so strongly associated with the US that I think it was probably a thematic mistake to use the design for a french ship.

I think it was thematic mistake to cut her legs off and mount her on the Eiffel tower! Otherwise I adore the "flanderized national architecture on boats" design of DW and I actually regret that Warcradle didn't commit to it as fully as Spartan did. But this particular one is a fail to me.

Maybe she'd have worked better as a huge figurehead at the front of a ship