Dead-Com: The Plague Unknown

First miniatures are fully painted and based for my probably most ambitious project ever when it comes to little toy soldiers.

I'm converting Deadzone plague miniatures into aliens from X-Com. This was mostly because I didn't like the appearance of Deadzone miniatures all that much, and none of the factions felt quite right for me. And in my long tradition of "playing things as they're not supposed to" I finally decided to start Plague with main focus being on Stage 3 and shooting.

Then I heard that the local Deadzone dealer (first game is always free and you can use my miniatures...) had been planning an X-Com homebrew expansion to Deadzone, and then things clicked. Visual style was then decided upon - X-Com aliens. From the '94 version.

For the moment I'm not looking for actual rules for Deadzone X-Com because I hardly know how to play the basic game. However, the project can be seen right in the Mantic forums, here, for anyone interested. And if there ever will be a playable set of rules, I bet this army conversion project will serve as a nice starting point for playing actual X-Com games.

I don't usually do astonishing conversions to my miniatures, because I don't think I got the needed skills. Or if I got the skills, I don't have the patience - which is quite funny. If someone had a mission to get me really bored, that person would have a hard time accomplishing his goal. But then when it comes to such projects as assembling, painting & overally finishing a miniature, I start rushing and leaving things only half done. Then the end result is usually rather ugly if I've tried to do any big conversions.

So... when I was going to make a Muton out of Stage 3 plague trooper and two Ethereals from two Reaper's cultist miniatures, I had to learn some patience. Every time I have tried to sculpt anything from milliputty or greenstuff in a big way have failed, because I just have to do everything in one go, even if it takes blood, tears and ten hours sitting in front of desk (yeah, in that way I'm patient.)

All in all it took days to finish these miniatures, but it took only a little while to paint them. I forced myself to add epoxy only one appendage at a time, and then leave things to cure overnight.

Results are far from perfect, but to my level of experience I'm quite happy with these. Only Muton's plasma rifle looks utterly ridiculous, and that's probably what I need to train next in the way of putty - making even simple details. Flash was quite unmerciful on the Ethereals, but I think they look nice enough for tabletop play. It's a shame I didn't cover the weird chest-belt with robes when I was still applying epoxy to the Ethereals - somehow I thought that some other detail than reddish orange robe would be welcome. But it wasn't.