Adeptus Mechanicus - Hypaspists in progress

A little forward progress on the Hypaspist units over the past week. With 24 of them to do at once, I really start to notice how similar the various casts are. While they are nice models and I'm not complaining about the detail, there are only three variants, and to be honest at arms length they do all look about the same. Eventually these models will become the Praetorians for the Army and I'm scheming on how I'm going to build the replacements. I have several boxes of the Wargames Workshop Greatcoat Troopers, and at 18 in a box, the two boxes will allow me to build three 12-man units. I'm hoping that with the judicious application of Cadian arms and Pig Iron heads, the to-be-build Hypaspists will end up looking a bit more dynamic than these Iron Brotherhood sculpts.

...But back to the task at hand - the Iron Brotherhood models from MicroArt Studios. In order to keep myself from going completely insane while batch painting them, I decided that I would alternate the cloak and trim colors between the two units. One squad would have red cloaks with white cog trim and one would have white cloaks with red cog trim. Holy cow does painting all those little cogs ever get tedious! I still have the white cogs to do on the first unit, and then an entire pass of highlight red and while for all 24 models. Once that's done however, the rest of the detail work shouldn't take much time at all - the various hoses and lenses, some gold details on the bionics and I think I can call them done!

Our local gaming group recently kicked off a Special Operations: Killzone campaign, so I took a little time and banged out a small campaign map. We're keeping the map campaign rules extremely simple for this initial go - the tiles are simply a means for us to keep score. After 8-10 strategic turns the player who holds the most hexes (via winning games as the attacker) wins. Depending on how that goes, the next go-around we may try to add a bit more flavor to the campaign map with various tiles providing bonuses or detriments, as well as including add-ons such as the bastions, power generators, etc. that come with the Planetary Empires box...