Hobby Progress – Dropzone Commander

I’m not sure what happened to the last seven days of my life; they passed by in a complete blur. However, I’ve returned to the land of the living today with a quick update on my hobby progress for the last couple of weeks.

I’m still having fun with my Tau Empire and my Tyranids, but my focus for the past two weeks has been learning Dropzone Commander and experimenting with the units in my chosen army, the Shaltari Tribes. As such, most of my efforts in free time have been expended in that direction.

I did buy a table’s worth of terrain from them, which comes in at a very reasonable $35.00. It is printed on heavy duty card stock, and the “ground” tiles are printed on equal quality stock. While the buildings required some gluing and assembly, the board only took a couple of hours to complete.

Completed table, with my Chihuahua “Ragnar” for scale comparison.

I also assembled a decent amount of Dropzone models, giving me a force of roughly 2,500 points ready to play. Once I got them assembled, I decided to go ahead and prime the army with Army Painter Flat Black. I shrugged, figuring there was no time like the present for airbrush work!

    

The models were very easy to assemble, with minimal mold lines and injection stems. They were also super quick to paint given their size. I started with a flat coat of Alaitoc Blue over the entire model, and then highlighted the edges with Lothern Blue. I’m also highly impressed with the intricate detail work involved with these models; the gems that encrust the Shaltari vehicles and aircraft were perfectly formed, and I didn’t have any noticeable miscasts in the entire batch.

Here are a few more close-ups of the units to show my airbrush work; over the coming weeks I’ll be completing the detail work and adding more units to flesh out my choices, in addition to more 40k related material.

The gates teleport Shaltari infantry and vehicles from the

mothership to the surface below.

Infantry are necessary to win Dropzone Commander games;

Shaltari Braves and Firstborns are among the most resilient.

The Warstriders form the heaviest armor and largest diversity in the Shaltari line.