Welcome to part 2 of my Combat Zone project. Following on from building and painting the terrain (Making the Ruins) I moved on to painting the two forces.

The Miniatures

As previously mentioned, I was trying to do this whole project on the cheap so I started with one of the forces being made up of some pre-painted plastic miniatures from the game Heroscape. The miniatures were a sort of skeletal looking aliens called the Marro. I had around 25 Marro miniatures. There were five different miniatures in the set but I still felt I wanted a bit more variety. For this I made some simple conversions, turning some heads to look in the opposite direction, cutting the torso in half and rotating the miniature slightly. The result was enough to add a bit of variety. After reading the Combat Zone rules I decided to go with three squads of six, including a leader and sub leader.

For the opposing force I went with Em4 Miniatures plastic troopers. They were originally produced for Combat Zone so it seemed fitting to give them a try. Also the miniatures were £2.50 for 5 so I could keep things cheap. Em4 Miniatures also make some conversion kits for the plastic miniatures to create heavy weapons and command mininatures.

Trying to create fairly even forces I made the troopers into three squads of five. Each with a leader and heavy weapons trooper. Having bought the Em4 Miniatures conversion kits I didn't need to worry about variety. I did tinker a little bit, for some reason I didn't like the assualt rifle the plastic troopers were armed with so I ended up buying so other guns from Hasslefree Miniatures . For these I just cut off the existing rifle and stuck on the replacement. I didn't have time to re-sculpt hands and things, but they still looked ok to me.

You can see the forces in more detail and see how I painted them here.

The Game

As previously mentioned I did actually hit my deadline of getting a game of Combat Zone in. It was definitely a nice feeling to have built all the scenery from scratch, painted both forces and put it all together for a game down my gaming club. I was also impressed with the Combat Zone rules since we managed to get two games in with four players, none of whom had ever played the game before. Very shortly I will be putting up a battle report of the game played which you will find here on my Sci-Fi Battles page.

The Cost

The big question of course was what did it cost me to put on this game? Well here is the break down of exactly that:

Scenery
11 Old CD's	£0.00
Yoga Block (for ruins)	£8.00 (already owned and only used half of it)
Paints (for ruins)	4 tester pots from Homebase (£1.50 each so £6.00 ended up using the equivalent of 1 pots woth)
Flock	£2.00
Fences	£0.00 (made from old cardboard)
Extra bits for Ruins	£0.00 (used all my off cuts of pipework and stuff from the bits box)
Terrain Mat	£0.00 (already owned for other games)
Total Scenery Cost	About £8 quid!

Miniatures & Rules
18 Alien Miniatures	£0.00 (already owned)
15 Troopers	£10.40 (including the heavy weapons and command conversion kits)
New Assualt Rifles	£3.00 (bought two packs giving 10 rifles)
Paints	£0.00 (already owned)
Flock	£0.00 (used the scenery flock)
Dice, tape measure etc.	£0.00 (already owned)
Rules	£7.00
Total Miniature & Rules Cost	£20.40

So there we have it. The whole game, scenery, rules and 32 miniatures all for under £30 quid! This was a refreshing way for me to get into a new game and to also break my own production hell over getting gaming projects finished. I'm looking forward to more games of Combat Zone and of course thinking of the next project I can approach in the same way ...