Battletech painting spree!

 o/

Making up for this year's paucity of painted BattleTech Minis!

In a little over a week's time since my Mercenaries Kickstarter minis arrived, I've painted a company's worth of miniatures! Of those, nine were from the KS and naturally (as you can see) they're not all painted in the same color scheme. 

First up are the Defenders of Andurien: 

The Cicada unit leader is a 3D printed mini, the other three came in my KS Mercenaries boxed set and 2 salvage boxes. Also, with the acquisition of the 'new' (to us) table, these are likely the last pics to be taken outside by the house's siding. 

White with blue & green stripes on the arms & legs, how hard could that be?

Bloody awful is that answer to that question!

Don't expect to see anymore Andurien mechs from me!

This lance is armed with: 6 machine guns, 3 flamers, 7 small lasers (6 rear facing) and 8 medium lasers. Clearly this lance is meant for routing out insurgents and pacifying occupied settlements. As such,  I don't expect much out of them on the tabletop...

The Buffet Assault Group's first contract was as a 2nd line support and garrison unit for the Duchy of Andurien during their secession and invasion of the Capellan Confederation. I say 2nd line as they're not a canon unit and therefore not listed in any of the official histories of that time period. The TBAGers didn't see any heavy fighting until first the Capellan counter attack, followed by Marik's reconquest of the Duchy of Andurien. Up until now I've not had any Andurien Defender mechs to run with my TBAGers. This lance is cheap enough to do just that. 

The CCAF is nothing without it's tanks!

Second to be painted is this armor lance which rounds out my Capellan Confederation's Homeguard company. Although, as they're camouflaged, they could easily be one one of a dozen or so Capellan units. So far the Homeguard has been an oh so inflexible 7 Urbanmechs lead by a lone Raven RVN-4X. Hopefully this lance will help mitigate that somewhat. 

Both Urbie lances have 1, 2, 3 & 4 colored stripes on their tops to differentiate mechs. As cavalry's traditional color is yellow, that is what I chose for this lance. 

The Vedette, while kinda worthless in any era prior to maybe the civil war is still fast, cheap and annoying for an opponent to deal with (and the new mini looks great!). The 2 Bulldogs are as always, under armored and over gunned. That said, with their even average speed, they're practically recon tanks compared to the Urbie horde. Lastly the LRM carrier has plenty of long ranged punch and is wrapped in cardboard as one would expect. Since the launcher covers are down, its also an easy proxy for an MRM carrier if I wanted to go that route. 

My opponent was shocked at what a Piranha could do in Alpha Strike at point blank range, and in the rear arc. He killed it in one volley, but by then it was too late and all six points of damage had already been done to his Nightstar!

This past Friday I played my first game vs. an Ilkhan era opponent. We played 250pts of Alpha Strike using whatever era we wanted. I'm not sure which faction my opponent was playing, not that I'd even heard of several of them when I looked that era up on the master unit list. While perusing the MuL, I looked to see what the Capellan Confederation's unit options for that era were, and following that: watch this space for future additions to my Capellans. 

A Griffin IIC and 3 points of infantry.

Speaking of that game, I fielded a late succession wars era, combined-arms binary of my Hell's Horses Iota galaxy. My opponent, 'Badger' (yes his actual real life name) his assault star's lightest mech was an 85 ton Stalker. He was keen to see what a mostly light-medium combined arms force could do against an assault star. Turns out that they can out run, out maneuver, and damned near overwhelm said assault star which was outnumbered by more than 2:1 at the game's outset.   

I've never had any want to field the Savannah Master, so these will serve as two points (platoons) of Fast Recon mechanized infantry. Just imagine a bunch of infantry laser rifles poking out of the side windows! 

I won, though the victory was pyrrhic, as both sides were retreating by games' end. I'd taken down three mechs, with a 4th deep into structure, for the loss of 4 mechs, 2 light tanks, and 2 points of fast recon infantry. In terms of point values of units killed & disabled I was ahead by a mere 25 points! 

These guys planted the final, killing blow to a Sagittaire assault mech! 

Not sure if that makes up for them being such a pain in the ass to paint...

So pleased was I with my force's victory, that I painted up all of the unpainted units used save the Firefly, which I am likely to give to another faction. This leaves me just 1 mech short of a fully painted Iota binary. My paint jobs also drew several compliments which I always enjoy.  While none of the opposing mechs were painted, of the 4 separate forces that Badger had brought with him, collectively about a third of the mechs were painted. 

You just know that the pilot would love to swat that little Elemental out of the sky!

The red & orange ombre was lost under the yellow of this one. 

Speaking of, I met quite a few BattleTech players that evening, and several of those folks play 40k as well. Also, the FLGS has a BattleTech campaign in the works, so I am looking forward to that as I have only ever played 1-off pick up games.