Spotlight: Rogue One Rebels - Star Wars Legion

 
  I recently decided to make the plunge into Star wars Legion, and have been furiously painting away at the Rebels.  In about 2 weeks, I'm amassed a decent amount of painted stuff, though I'm still a few units short of a full 800 points.  Just as with previous spotlight articles, I'm going to take a closer look at what I've managed to finish, and share my thoughts on the experience...



Overview:
  I think it is safe to say, that Rogue One is probably my favorite of the Star Wars films.  I love the gritty nature, the overall look of the film, the story and how it ties into the older films, not to mention the way it depicts the harsher reality of the Star Wars saga.  I already knew with Legion that I wanted to do more themed forces, centered around a planet/battle as opposed to taking all the "good stuff" and building an ultra-competitive army, although I wasn't always planning on doing a Scarif force right off the bat.

  Initially, when I visited one of the local stores, they had both the Clone Wars starter and the Rebel/Empire one.  Initially, I had planned on picking up the Clone one, BUT there currently isn't much for them in the way of units... and so, the 41st Elite Corps will have to wait for another time!  Seeing as the shop also had 2 boxes of Pathfinders and Jyn Erso, the choice was easy, I was headed to Scarif!

  The models themselves were not too bad.  Having painted up a bunch of Imperial Assault in years past, I kind of knew what to expect.  They are not the greatest, as I'm not a huge fan of the soft plastic material they use, but things have improved since the IA days.  I think I just prefer the hard plastics of GW or Atomic Mass Games to anything else.  Assembly was a cinch, as there are pegs on all the arms, and everything essentially just slots into place.  That said, there is next to no room for variations.

  I decided to continue with the previously mentioned "Comic Style", and the first order of business was the bases.  Scarif, is gorgeous, with it's crystal blue water, beaches, and small lush Caribbean-style vegetation.  I came up with the idea of doing these "transition" bases that feature all 3 parts: the water, the beaches, and from the beach to the hint of vegetation.   These turned out pretty good, although I was extremely nervous about them, having never done fully painted bases like this before.


Jyn Erso:
  If I'm running a Scarif Rebel list, I obviously have to run Jyn as my leader!  She was also the first model I managed to finish.  Truthfully, I was working on both her and the pathfinders at the same time, but just got so sucked into working on her that I finished up in basically a day!  One issue I had with assembly was with her scarf.  Originally, it had two hanging, flowing scarf sections that were so fragile, and so awkwardly attached, that they just refused to stay on.  I ended up having greenstuff over the sections where they attached and change up the style of the scarf.  Outside of this issue, assembly was simple, but the next issue was with the scheme.  I had to find several examples of her outfit to get the correct, or close to correct, color scheme.  In the end though, it all worked out.

Pathfinders:
  I picked up two units of pathfinders, just so I could run one unit with Bistan and one with Pao.  (The two alien heavy gunners)  Assembly was a breeze, but the hardest part was finding reference and settling on a scheme.  Honestly, I lost a whole day because I was kind of paralyzed, and completely unsure as to HOW to paint them.  Was their vests blue, was it black?  how about the helmets?  I know it may seem silly, and you may say "who cares?" but I sure did, and if I got it wrong then it was going to bug the heck out of me!  (and I didn't want to be forced to repaint them down the road)  So, I spent a day finding as many references as possible, and planned out the entire pallet before even putting on a single basecoat.  Once the paralysis stage passed, thing's went back to running smoothly.

The Rebels:

  Next up, came the squads of the regular Scarif Rebels.  Once again, I gathered references, mostly uniform concepts from Star Wars Battlefront.  To keep things simple and uniformed, I came up with a 3 color scheme: Khaki, Brown, and Grey, each of which had 3 tones in them. (base, shadow, and highlight) From there, I simply stuck to those color combos and varied them up on each model.  the goal was a uniform scheme, yet something haphazard, befitting a squad of rebels.  I was also sure to keep away from some of the colors used on the pathfinders, to make sure that that you can tell them apart on the tabletop.  Doing them in this way, made painting a breeze.  It took me four days to paint fifteen rebels from start to finish.


The "Extras":
  One thing to note, since you cannot do a simple weapon swap on a model, FFG packs each box with a separate model depicting all the possible upgrades.  This also means you'll end up with a handful of extra models that you may otherwise not use, and as a minimalist, the excess kind of bugged me!  Thus, I decided to create squads based on all the extra models.  Now, for those that may not be familiar with Legion, each squad uses a token with their unit type, which can sometimes have to be drawn at random.  The downside is:  FFG only gives you one token per box.  My workaround  was to pick up a bunch of new order tokens from "Recon Tokens" off of etsy.  So now, I was free to form these extra squads.

  The leader of the squad is the female trooper on the right, in the fancy helmet and orange flight jacket.  (I did this so she stands out in the group, as the leaders are required to.)  She came about as my daughter, while looking at all my painted stuff, asked if there were any female rebels.  To which, I happily pointed out the handful of female rebels.  Her next question was, which of the females I pointed out, were the leaders of the squads... thus, I decided to come up this squad: "The Extras" and to have them be led by a female. (My daughter naturally assumed the model secretly represents her, as her favorite color is also orange.) As such, this squad is pretty special to me, and calling them "The Extras" isn't any kind of dig... in fact, they are the only specifically named rebel squad, and is really just a play on the fact that they come from all the extra models I had left form the boxset.  **Forgive me if this came off as virtue signaling

  That said, they were a bit of a rush job.  I finished them, from to start to finish, in a single day because of the release of Marvel Crisis Protocol.  I realized that I just couldn't work on two projects at the same time, i.e. Modok for Marvel, and these guys, so focused harder on these to help clear off my desk.


The List:
  Here's my initial list I've come up with, again keeping in mind that the goal is to develop more of a themed list based around the Battle For Scarif.  I've really only played a single 400 pt intro game, so I honestly have no real clue as to how everything will function, and if there are more competitive choices in regards to upgrades.  Either way, my initial idea is to have Jyn and the Pathfinders scout up a flank, all together, and then work their way across the enemy backlines.  I'm hoping that through the use of cover, their smoke grenades, duck and cover, etc that they'll hopefully be somewhat survivable or a useful distraction.  The commandos and saboteur are in there both for the extra activation, and the added fluff bonus.  (one of the opening scenes of battle show the pathfinders placing a bunch of charges to create a distraction.  From there, I have an even split of Z-6 and MPL-57 troopers.  I'm bringing ion weapons, mostly because I want to make sure I have a method for dealing with vehicles, but I'm not yet sure if two squads would suffice or not.  That left me with 40 points left, and with that odd amount of points, I decided on bringing a medical droid.... which I'll probably proxy with a 3rd party K-2S0 model to fit the theme.  This brought me to 792 pts, so either I could slap on some extra grenades or use the eight points as a "blue player bid" as the cool kids would say.  Again, all this could change over time as the game evolves and I slowly start to make sense of the game.


  ... and there you have it, the start of my comic book style Scarif Rebels!  All I need to round out the list is the commandos and probably one more box of rebels (using the leftover models to form the sixth unit)  All in all, not too shabby for a few weeks worth of work!  In the meantime, I'm going to be working on my Marvel Crisis Protocol stuff for a bit, and then finishing these guys up after the holidays.  I've also got a Scarif Imperial Garrison list in the works as well to counter the rebels, but that is a project for 2020!


As always, thanks for reading!