So it was time to paint me some Zoats... What can I say about the Zoats? I guess they are kind of a strange race, but I guess most of the Rogue Trader stuff is kind of strange, so they fit in fine with the setting. I have been wanting some Zoats for some time and this year I decided to do something about it and so I managed to get 5 Zoats fairly cheap from Ebay.
In the Rogue Trader days the Zoats were a Tyranid slave race created for war. Apparently they usually would roam around in groups of 4 sporting weapons like bolters and heavy bolters. But since they were allowed same equipment and weapons as Tyranids, they could also wear power armour, use gravitons, conversion beamers or whatever stuff you can think of from the Rogue Trader days.
In the Rogue Trader days the Zoats were a Tyranid slave race created for war. Apparently they usually would roam around in groups of 4 sporting weapons like bolters and heavy bolters. But since they were allowed same equipment and weapons as Tyranids, they could also wear power armour, use gravitons, conversion beamers or whatever stuff you can think of from the Rogue Trader days.
When GW made some Zoat models I guess Tyranids were already becoming something else and so the models were equipped with more bio engineered weapons, but the fleshborers still kind of looked like bolters, the missile launcher looked pretty funky and the leader was equipped with power glove and a flamer which looked like a mix of the fleshborers and an imperial flamer.
My combined Tyranid forces so far!
So when I painted my Zoats I decided to give them a look of semi bio enginered and tech equipment. It will not really work perfect with the never Tyranid background, but I think it will work fine with Rogue Trader weirdness and still be fine with my Hunter-Slayers. So the weapons was painted red, to look semi organic and tie the Zoats in with my Hunter-Slayers and I still decided to paint some metal parts on the flamer, missile launcher, power glove and armour. I also decided to do the hazard stripes on the flamer, it might be kind of silly, but I think it ended up looking good and when the organic weapons already looked a bit like bolters and flamers then why wouldn't they also mimic the hazard stripes?
Ready to go to war.
I am not planning to do a complete Tyranid force for later 40K gaming, but I have acquired 8 more Hunter-Slayers which I will paint and I have a bunch of the old plastic Tyranid Warriors, which I will probably paint at some point, so I guess that some day I might have enough Tyranids for more than just small skirmish games.
I don't really count the Genestealers as part of the Tyranid army, but if needed I have 24 painted Genestealers and a Patriarch, so they could reinforce an army too. So that almost concludes my Tyranid adentures...
I just got one more thing to hunt down! I would REALLY like to have the Proto Tyranid to lead my forces, but so far I have not managed to get one.
What a beast!
Very cool. Good luck tracking that beastie down.
ReplyDeleteGreat old style Zoats and Tyranids. :)
ReplyDeleteAh those bring back memories... the WD Tyranid list was my first 40k army :)
ReplyDeleteMaybe the hazard stripes are... a joke. Xenos can't have a sense of humour? Or maybe some kind of instinctual visual mimicry of their opponents.
ReplyDeleteYes, exactly, I was thinking that even though the weapons might be organic in nature, they still mimic the weapons of the imperium, so I thought hy could they not mimic the hazard stripes too.
DeleteAlso as some people pointed out, on Lead Adventure Forum, nature already use black and yellow as warning signals. Just look at the wasps.
Anyway I think it looks cool, which is the most important to me :)
also thanks to everybody for the comments. Even though I don't reply to all comments I always enjoy reading what people think of my work.
They look great. Zoats are on my list of things to acquire. I used to have the heavy weapon guy years ago.
ReplyDeleteI've been collectinga rogue trader era Tyranid army for about 2.5 years now. It took me 2 years to track down my protonid (pics hardly do it justice for the amount of detail on the model especially considering the age), best estimates according to the collecting citadel miniatures yahoo group which is really the best source for rare citadel/GW models and number thereof in the world these days, is of 17 of these in circulation worldwide that are known of. If one pops up you are easily looking at between $400 and $600 USD for it as a starting realistic price. I was extremely lucky with mine but it's still the single most expensive model I've ever brought. By contrast the Dominators are far more common and pop up frequently. The Dominators were originally meant as the Zoat Overlords so you might consider getting them first, also because they are cheaper (there's 2 on ebay right now going for ~$350 USD, ignore those, $100 or so is an upper max, have patience, check every few days, they will pop up.
ReplyDeleteNice beginnings of an army you have there, my own Hunter Slayer numbers are at 131 and rising, I may have gotten carried away in acquiring them heh, hopefully the new codex in January will allow them to be playable as a whole.
Anyways, (pics coming once I figure out how to transfer them from my phone across) my army and collecing blog so to speak for the army can be found on warpshadow.com here:
http://www.warpshadow.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16054&sid=ac1d6276c004d97d91b401e04aa636e0
Have a gander, it might just help you out in terms of model ideas. :)
Have a great day,
Auretious Taak.
NB: It's 6:21am here in Sydney (Australia) and I've been gaming all night so there's a bunch of spelling mistakes in the post above and a few sentences make sense to me but may not to others. It's because i should be asleep instead of randomly trawling for rt era 'Nids online hehe!
DeleteUgh, I had no idea it was so rare. Well I guess I have to use a lot of patience and hope that I have the money when one pops up.
DeleteI plan to get some Dominators too, but their price tag is keeping me from buying any right now.