The Cult of Sobriety - dusting off my GSC

[Zoatibix]

Hello folks.

 

In order to sort my actual life out, stop buying and selling armies but mostly because of a huge vet’s bill I am going to focus on my GSC guys for the next year.

 

I originally painted them in this yellow and blue-black scheme. I like the yellow. It’s not that common a scheme for GSC (which appeals to my special snowflake side) The skin definitely needs more work.

 

 

But then I fell out of love with that and stripped the army about halfway through painting it.  Then spent ages experimenting with other schemes…before starting to repaint them in exactly the same scheme. This is not a plan generations in the making but it might take that long to finish the army.

 

Anyway, I then lost interest in a lot of stuff. Haven’t been wargaming, mainly stayed in my room playing Stellaris and wallowing in depression.
 

Few months ago put my other armies in the loft and struggled through to actually get my Nids painted.

 

Now that those are pretty much done, I am dusting off the GSC.

 

I have done a bit of rebuilding to sort out the weapons for the Acolytes, etc. Tried to give the Metamorphs a bit more of a different look.

 

But…the paint scheme still eludes me. 
 

I took the common orange/white GSC and merged it with an old experimental Tyranid  scheme. And I really like the contrast of colours, the Little Green Men vibe etc.

 

However, despite carefully documenting…that sounds a bit pretentious…I just wrote down the steps in my notepad as I went along… I can’t replicate the skin. 
 

But I can persevere with that.

 

I just can’t decide between the two schemes.
 

I did think of doubling down on it and using the two schemes to differentiate units. Country Mouse and City Mouse super team!

 

 

Except they kinda clash in a way that I don’t like.

 

Next week is my first game in ages. Going up against Chaos Knights, so any tips against those?

 

 

 

Edited September 12 by Zoatibix

[brother_b]

Hey glad you’re with the cult, I hope all smooths out for you and I’ve spent some time with Stellaris and the blues myself.

 

I like the classic look for the orange and purple, it looks easier to replicate. The green guys are awesome but the purple guys look more cohesive.

 

 

[INKS]

The more classic purple like skin is nice. I like it. But the green is different. So I don't know, hard to decide. The green is unique, the purple is good and classic.

[Brother Tyler]

I can't really help you with advice for defeating Knights, and I can't help you with a paint recipe.

 

For what it's worth, I think that green GSC models would really stand out, making your models very distinct from most other GSC models that are seen. That's totally up to you, of course, but I'm a big fan of that kind of snowflake mentality.

[Maximus]

I'm gonna throw a curve in here and say I like the orange, but with the lilac skin. I painted my Neophytes with orange clothes to represent their hi-viz mining coveralls (some even had silver bands on, like a hi-viz jacket). The Acolytes have red clothing, for a similar reason. The skin on my Acolytes is kind of coconut shell crab, with this replicated on the skulls of the Neophytes.

Hope you find a solution that you're happy with.

[Rogue]

Of the models you've shared, I'm drawn to the metamorph with pinkish skin and orange robes.

 

I think the various Cult units benefit from some variation in skin tone. For example, my neophytes, acolytes/metamorphs/genestealers, and aberrants all have different tones; and if I were doing it all over again, I'd have the acolytes and metamorphs as colour stages between the neophytes and stealers - it's helpful to have visually distinct units on the tabletop, rather than a sea of the one colour scheme. 

 

I can't offer advice specific to Chaos Knights (having never faced them), but as more general advice, I'd suggest working out what you can and can't kill, and then do your best to play around the stuff you can't deal with. Knights armies are likely to have a low model count, so ganging up on a few of them may mean they then struggle to score objectives and secondaries - if you can ensure you are scoring them (rather than committing everything into a drawn-out and potentially fruitless attempt to bring down a big knight), you'll come out on top.

 

Which detachment will you be playing?

 

Edited September 14 by Rogue
Typo-hunting

[Zoatibix]

Detachment will probably be whatever works best as a ‘generalist’ army. I don’t really focus my army builds, unfortunately.

 

As to the skin, I am planning to start with a strong green for the Purestrains working down to a more human but still greenish tinted hue for the more Completely Normal Regular Human Dudes.

[brother_b]

I own a chaos knight army, and this matchup feels like it would be horrible.
 

Not only do knights have ways to clear chaff with high volume shooting, they also get sweep attacks on their Melee knights and hell dogs.

 

I like to charge forward with my knights and I’m guessing your opponent will too. That means you will likely get into close combat.
 

Maybe trying to swarm objectives with bodies might work? We really don’t have great anti-vehicle and much of it is close combat. What we do have we can almost guarantee to get a chance to use against knights. Especially acolytes.

 

 

[Zoatibix]

Firstly, thank you for the feedback and advice. 

 

I’m going to go with the orange/white scheme. I do see the orange/white a lot because I think it works really well on the models but I’ve only seen one other army combine that with a green skin tone so it’s different enough to satisfy my special snowflakeness.

 

 It’s gonna be a bit more challenging to do but I feel that would be a change for my other armies which being Drukhari and Tyranids both having a lot of purple and black in them.  It’ll be more of a change for me to paint. 

Of course the last time I was trying to chose the scheme for this army it made my depression worse and I had to put everything in the loft apart from my Tyranids and just try and focus on that so you know at least I got unpainted models from 15 years ago painted so swings roundabouts…. .

I’m going to begin by painting one of each unit type in the chosen scheme so that I can work out which actual kind of shades of skin and stuff I want for them.
 

Rogue’s suggestion about putting in the different colour schemes for the various generations is something I have tried doing with some test models. Ironically, this had mixed results! Definitely want to give that another go.
 

For example, a nice strong green for the Purestrains and then going down to a more human shade for Neophytes. Use different undercoats and/or washes to add a little more subtle variation to squad members.

 

But I will keep these the same strong kind of blue black and the red black for the claws across all of them. And hopefully the different skin tone as well might have the Metamorph being more similar than the other acolytes because they’re quite difficult to tell apart from the weapons. Maybe tattoos.

 

So once I’ve done, say, a unit each of metamorphosis and Acolytes, plus a character or two I can see how I feel about the look as a whole on the tabletop. If I have gone off the scheme I’ll just paint the next batch differently. 

It will make the different units easy to tell an apart a part at the very least.    What not to do is to go back to my old habit of stripping an army but I’ve almost finished painting … which I’m absolutely awful for.

 

Background-wise a couple of ‘stealers landed in different places on the planet.

 

Not sure how this battle is going to go I’m really casual player. I just basically want to shove models around the table and roll some dice while admiring the other army’s paint job.  My list building is quite basic and the other guy is bringing a league list so I don’t know if that’s the narrative league or slow grow or competitive because we had lots of stuff going on at the club.
 

We’ll see how it pans out hopefully it will be entertaining. Because last couple of years though most fun could’ve memorable events I’ve had playing 40K have been with my GSC army because even though times they’re a bit of an uphill struggle they do wacky things sometimes.
 

Hopefully the plucky heroes of Phanit Prime can hold out against the invaders of Chaos.  

 

[Zoatibix]

But this guy looks really cool…

 

Maybe I should go back to the armies I have actually got schemes for and finish those off. 

Edited September 16 by Zoatibix

[Xenith]

 

 

These are the winners for me! 

[grailkeeper]

The green looks a big ninja turtly.

 

It's an unusual name- what's the lore behind it?

[Zoatibix]

It got to a point last year where I felt that I had gotten into an unhealthy cycle of buying/selling compounded by painting/stripping what I had worked on.

 

This army was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

 

So this is my sobriety with the hobby.

 

In terms of lore, temperance movements could be great ways to look like a wholesome and draw in folks. 

 

 

[Dr. Clock]

 

 

These are the winners for me! 

I will also never not vote for the classic purple doodz

 

Green ones are close, but read less hybrid and more just alien.

 

In terms of alternating a scheme - My GSC are definitely a combo of 'team red' and 'team blue' in terms of uniform. In headcanon they were originally penal miners and the colours were used to keep them separate. But now that the overseers are cast down, the different colours can all wash together! Thus, my Magus is the only model with red on one side and blue on the other. This is obviously no help in-game, but visually it does make them look more like a 'rabble' than a uniform militarized unit as is so common with 40k armies. Obviously this is all just food for Hive Mind thought - the best scheme is the one you like best.

 

Cheers,

 

The Good Doctor.

[Zoatibix]

I do love purple…so much so that both my Tyranids and Drukhari are already purple. So I thought it might be a break from that.

 

There’s definitely some work to be done getting the skin to look more human hybrid than alien, as you say.

 

Rather than gaming yesterday I did the unit identification colours done on the whole army. This is just colouring the base rims for now.

 

Built three Neophytes with Mining Lasers to bolster my two squads.

 

Dithered about having a spare cult icon model and squad leader for the Flamer Acolytes. I had one squad of ten but was thinking of trying to build to allow for two squads of five.

 

Ended up promoting the cult icon guy into an Iconward.

 

This left a spare body from the re-equipping of the various units. I realised that he is actually the last model of the Operation Overkill ‘simpler build’ box. 
 

Feeling that this veteran deserves a little respect I gave him the spare Iconward and a new head.

[Zoatibix]

Not sure which of these I prefer.

Foward my brothers whip guy, or Follow me skull guy.

[Rogue]

They both work. My experience of the whip arms is that that they're mildly awkward on the tabletop (snagging, getting in the way), so I'd probably go with skull guy.

 

Regarding the skin - have you tried a flesh tone but with green shade? The stock GW method for neophytes (from Duncan) was Bugman's Glow, shade with purple, then Cadian Flesh as a layer over the top (it also works with Kislev Flesh). That gives a nicely 'alien' effect without making them too 'other'. Perhaps something similar would work for you - a lighter base layer (to allow the green shade to look greener), and then different tones over the top to differentiate various units.

[Zoatibix]

I’m slightly distracted by watched Strictly Come Dancing but…

 

The blind guy is about to dance and Claudia is dressed in a homage to Princess Leia…but I digress…

 

I will try that for the flesh. Cheers.