I have to admit: I am a sucker for ‘premium’ game pieces. I imagine that comes with the territory of miniature wargaming; nearly the entire purpose is to have visually appealing game pieces to play with, and using little bits of paper or whatever for a token is going to take away from that. So I wasted a bunch of money and time on getting every available asset token for my four factions:
This was the first time I’ve dealt with their new 3D printed sprues; they’re mostly fine, but there’s significant tension in the resin, and that potential energy rapidly converts to kinetic energy when you clip the sprue, so make sure to hold on to the part you don’t want to fly into the unknown. I’m still discovering bits of resin around the room.
Held off for some time on buying these, as essentially every person I found talking about the asset tokens were asking about why the stands didn’t fit into the slots on the base. It seems TTCombat fucked up the sizing of one or the other during their initial production runs. These Shaltari mines were the first thing I bought as they were released later than the rest, and I wanted to see if they had dialed that in.
Promising! So emboldened, ordered up the rest at a premium direct from TTC, just to ensure I’d likely get the newest stock, with two of each standard asset pack to have enough of the commonly used assets. As seen in the first picture, it seems to have worked out fine. I imagine you’re out of luck with getting the properly sized assets in the battlefleet boxes until those stocks come down enough for a new production batch, unfortunately.
Getting them prepped was extremely tedious, as each token stand has to have the base shaved clean to sit flat, get one or two support bits trimmed down, then glued individually per stand to make sure they’re as straight as possible. Doing that a few hundred times adds up, but alas, all life is suffering.
As a comparison to my old and very dusty generic plastic tokens: they’re a bit larger in scale, and the new ones lack the varied heights of the old tokens. That latter is likely my complaint in particular with the new tokens, as the small variance in stems makes the old tokens look more dynamic on the table.
The other kind of token, of course, are feature tokens!
I do have to say, rules-wise, I was pretty disappointed that the only heavy feature carrier for PHR was basically just a Priam with a feature stapled on. Regardless, I’m taking the approach of building one supercarrier and one pocket battleship per battlecruiser box, so that’s what I ended up with. Getting the features to slot in securely is a delicate balance of adding just enough layers of varnish to the features and the slot itself; I ended up with two coats of gloss varnish on the feature and one in the slot, but I think just a single coat on the feature would work better, as though they fit they’re just a little too tight to smoothly remove or slot in.
The astute among you may notice the sunfish in the middle; it’s incredibly easy to convert an Agrippa/Pompeius sculpt into a feature carrier with a few magnets. First time in a while I’ve bothered with it, but getting three feature carriers out of the box was too tempting to ignore.
There’s also those Philonoe monitors, of course, which do serve the purpose of spewing out torpedo tokens. I’ve wanted them for a bit but couldn’t justify getting light ship sprues I didn’t otherwise particularly need, but eh fuck it. The other light ships are a bit low on the painting queue priority list.
Shaltari were actually first, but I slacked on getting them done for so long since I’m really burnt out on dots.
I like them more than the PHR ones rules-wise, in that getting to carry two features per ship is more interesting than a single feature. Went with a Painite because it seems to fit with the idea of brawling over a dropsite you put some features on, and then a Mesolite because I like how the guns look more than those on the Natrolite. Plus those bits had been used on the Painite, so you can’t build both from one box anyway.
These ended up needing two coats of varnish in the slot, and 4 coats on the features themselves to friction fit.
Ran one game with them so far, but it was against a newer player with a mostly borrowed list/models, so can’t say too much about how they perform or impact the game. I do think there’s a lot of value in treating them as drop and always forcing at least a contested dropsite until they go out of their way to remove the feature.
My rules issue with player features is how they behave somewhat differently than scenario-placed features; you can end up in a situation where a dropsite has two military outposts/orbital lasers/hangars, one from the scenario and one placed by you, but they activate at different times, and if on a station one interacts with the weapons/launch control feature, while the other doesn’t! Wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some other shit like that I haven’t noticed yet too. It’s a bit unintuitive and as a result we didn’t even play it correctly the first time trying out features, because it didn’t occur to us they’d be any different in that sense.
Finally, on a whim I decided to make a silly video:
This exists mostly because I was cleaning up and found the Corruptors I had leftover from using their plasma guns to cudgel together a Nephilim, and while I could have set them aside to paint up like regular and add into the Scourge army collection, I just wasn’t in the mood for that and decided to do something more interesting.
The intentionally quickly tossed together Warrior costume was extremely easy to do; everything was already on hand, with the only real prep work to do being spraying down the visor with a matte varnish, as it was a strong mirror and clearly reflected back the camera and room. You can still see some of that on the helmet, but it’s not as obvious so that’s fine. As a result I’m blind while wearing the thing, plus it’s rather uncomfortable thanks to the plastic tube jammed into the small space available in front of my face inside the helmet.
Ultimately, I believe the Giger seminal film joke alone justifies the existence of this video.