I want to base it on the old White Dwarf "Tale of Four Gamers" article. If you're not familiar with this it's where they have a starting force and game with it, before getting more items the following month, gaming with those additions to the army and so on.
With the Dropzone Commander event (The tale of a DZC gamer) we all have a starter set we need to build and paint by the end of February, but we also must have at least 1 game with that force. March with be 750 points with the starter set and commander only (No named commanders), April will be 1k and finally May will be 1500 points. Leading nicely to a tournament a local gaming store is running (Link here)
My choice of starter is the Shaltari set so lets review it:
The Packaging
A sturdy box, with a beautiful colour photo on the front and a description of the contents in the bottom left.
Further more inside with the sprues are instructions on how to build them and a sheet with the unit stats on one side and quick rule guide on the other.
The Models
Within the box are 3 sprues; each sprue contains 1 Tomahawk (2 pieces: Turret and Body), 1 Kukri (2 pieces: Turret and Body), 1 Haven gate (7 pieces: 2 arches, gate crystal arm, 2 sets of fins, 1 head and 1 bottom), 1 Eden Gate (7 pieces, 1 gate body, and 6 fins) and6 infantry models (3 to a base).
There are 4 infantry bases and 3 flight stands
Those of you with good maths skills would have noticed that there are more infantry than bases, this also results in more Haven Gates than is required. The benefit of these is to help expand you force later. Otherwise they can be used for scenery, or test paint schemes.
Many people complain about the detail in the plastic sets, but I have found that the detail on the Tomahawks, Kukri, Havens and Eden is really good and I very much look forward to painting them. The infantry however does lack detail, but I'm not complaining as the less detail for 10mm infantry the better.
So once again Hawk has provided detailed models, even in plastic.
Building the model
The models clipped away from the sprue with ease and needed very little tidying. Just a bit where they were clipped away.
The Eden gates went together with ease, with the fin connections being so snug that glue isn't really needed, I glued them anyway just for transport stability (and my own clumsiness)
The same can be said for Kukri and Tomahawks, although as you can see I have left them apart so they can be fully painted before being glued together.
The infantry was interesting as I initially thought they looked dynamic so started setting them as such. Then I thought the infantry heads were facing the other directions so changed the layout. I only discovered, upon closer inspection, that the heads were facing the right direction after all. But having glued them down there's no chance of me moving them....oh well.
This leads on to the Haven gates....these were an absolute pain in the backside! two arched pieces going into a head (with two fins underneath) and the back where the gate crystal goes into. I glued the fins to the head first and the crystal shaft into the back piece then wrangled with the arch pieces. Out of all the models these definitely took the longest.
Despite the hassle with the Haven gate it still only took 30 mins to remove everything from the sprue and build it.
Now to paint them....
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