Monday 29 January 2024

A Tale Of Two Kill Teams: Necron Tomb World And Heirotek Circle

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

Today I'm going to talk about my Necrons. Ever since I started collecting the Warhammer 40,000: Conquest magazine a couple of years ago, I'd been working on my Death Guard as my main 40k army. However, having amassed roughly 3,000 points worth, I got about half of them assembled and a few of them painted and...then not a lot happened, which continued to happen for quite a while. The army got quietly abandoned and have remained in a partially done state ever since, tucked away in a box. They've been there so long, in fact, that the follow-up to Conquest, Mortal Realms came and went, and another 40k partwork, Imperium, had begun. The bad guys this time were Necrons. 

Hmmm...

Around the time Imperium began, a couple of friends started making noises about starting up some games of Kill Team, and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to do something with the Necrons. I figured, if I just put together a Kill Team, I'd avoid getting bogged down with the idea of putting together a whole army, like I had with the Death Guard. Also, if I didn't enjoy putting together and painting the Kill Team then I could sell on the rest of the Necrons from Imperium and try something else. With all that in mind, I designed a Kill Team using the miniatures that had come with the first few issues of the magazine and found I could easily put together the required amount of points.

Then GW released a new edition of Kill Team, with an entirely new method of force creation...

No problem. the miniatures I had worked out perfectly** to make a decent roster based on the Tomb World force from the compendium that I could select my Kill Teams from. I put together fire teams of Warriors, Flayed Ones and Immortals, using the Royal Warden as an Immortal Leader. I worked out a nice quick and easy way to paint them, and got them done in time to start playing some games with them! 


This was more like it- instead of having an army that was half finished* here I was with a fully-playable force, fully painted! Okay, so it was only just over a dozen models but that wasn't the point. It changed my whole outlook on the hobby and I vowed that I would never get bogged down in a huge project again. From now on, skirmish forces were the way to go** It's an important thing to note when painting for the tabletop and for your own collection (and a lesson it's taken me a long time to learn) that there's a balance to be struck between the time you want to spend on the models and the level of finish you want to achieve. I've always been a painter first and a gamer second, and the urge is always going to be to paint everything to the highest level but I know that, even for only a handful of models, that's just not practical if I: a) want to ever get them finished; b) want to be able to play actual games with them, with the potential for them to get broken, worn, chipped... So, the aim is always going to be to get them good enough for me to be satisfied without spending hours and hours on them.

Skip forward a few months and, having played a few games with the force (with a fairly even rate of wins/losses) the Tomb World list gets supplanted by a bespoke list from the Shadowvault boxed set: the Heirotek Circle. I managed to secure myself the upgrade sprue for a bargain price on Ebay and, once again, I had a new Necron force to paint up. This time, I wanted to try something a little different, colour-scheme wise, and I initially played around with a sort of pale, off-white, but they unded up looking too close to my Nighthaunt Warcry warband***  I saw some miniatures online (I think they were some of the new Squats) that were painted a dark teal with a dark red shade**** and that lead me to develop the paint scheme I went with. These ones took me a little longer to get around to getting finished but, in terms of paint time on individual models, they were really quick and easy to do, yet looked good enough to satisfy my aesthetic desires. 

Fast-forward a few months again and our Kill team campaign is drawing to a fiery and dramatic conclusion. I've won a few games, lost a few and drawn a few, and had a lot of fun along the way (always the most important thing) and it's been really nice to be able to play with a mostly fully-painted force. So, where do we go from here with the Necrons? Well, when our Kill Team campaign does come to an end, I'll most likely be retiring the Kill Teams and sticking them on a shelf, where they'll sit as a proud reminder that I can sometimes finish one of my own projects and act as an inspiration for more. I have many more Kill Teams I want to have a go with and I want to shift my attention to them. I'm not completely done with the old undead robots yet, though. I have all the models I need to be able to put together a full Combat Patrol set, and a couple of the guys in my gaming group are twitching to have a go at that format for a few games after the Kill Team campaign is done. I know a change from Necrons would be nice, but it'd also be nice to have one last hurrah with them before moving on. All that remains is to decide how I'm going to paint them: do I go with the colour scheme from the Tomb World Kill Team, or the one I used for the Heirotek Circle, or something completely different? 

As for the Death Guard, well, I don't think they'll stay tucked away in a box forever...

Watch this space...

Thanks for reading!

Stu


p.s. if you like what I'm doing here, a click on the link below and the donation of the price of a pot of paint would be a wonderful gesture. I'm thinking of adding special stuff to the Ko-fi, like competitions and prize draws, so it'd be a good idea to at least have a look there now and then 😁 




*and that's being very generous. Half-started would be more like the truth...

**up until Warhammer: The Old World came along...

***I must remember to show these at some point

****I wish I could remember who did them, so I could thank and credit them for the inspiration


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