Reinforcements Arrived

My first big order arrived yesterday evening! Being winter and all, I didn't really had good light to start painting right away so I focused my attention on the MAS holo-ads that I ordered at well.
**note: the pictures aren't really state-of-the-art. I came back from school at half past seven in the evening, my girlfriend and I started cooking a seriously delicious pasta (if you want I'll put the recipe in the comments) and I opened up my package. Being hungry and curious at the contents of my package at the same time, taking the pictures became a pretty chaotic business! ;) Also, I share a 49m square apartment with my girlfriend, so the pictures might seem a little bit crowded which is, in fact, just like it is in real life! :D** 

My thoughts on the MAS product; 
First thought; Damn, beautiful!
Those holo-ads (I bought the three-pack) are a pure quality-product. The acrylic ads are really thick transparent plastic and the printed stickers are a great design!
The assembly was difficult though. Since these were the first MDF-terrain pieces ever that I got my hands on I really had to reinvent the wheel. The lack of a IKEA-manual made it worse. I only had 3 photo's on the back of a paper, and these weren't enough to guide me. I had a few pieces left at the end which caused me to really struggle with the finishing touch. Luckily a friend came by our place and we talked, laughed and drank tea while I tried to fit all the pieces together.

Unfortunately a part of the board wasn't entirely cut through so I had to come up with a solution. My solution was to break the board around it. Luckily, this went well. ;)
Only two pieces broke when I tried to pull them out, but with a little PVA glue this was fixed in no time!
While this may sound like a negative review, it's not my intention. The product is great. It is just me!;) Like any man does, I choose to ignore the manual, neglect to make preparations before I start assembling like a headless chicken and with much enthusiasm I stumbled a lot!

So, after a evening of trail and error, and without further a due!!! Here is the result!

After assembling the MAS terrain, I decided to start with cleaning up some models. I had to decide where to start, but this wasn't a really difficult choice since I've been eyeing the ISS units for quite some time. I had two ISS-boxes; the Bao Troops and the ISS starter, so I decided to start with those.

Painting
And this morning I started painting! ^^ After a day of a lot of homework and some (hour-long) painting breaks, I got my first model done; the Imperial Agent. I choose this model to start with because I really love the model. His pose is dynamic and bad-ass, and the golden and jade-colored trenchcoat (or is it a cape?) gives the model a really nice, characteristic touch!
Painting the gold was easier said than done! I'm not really satisfied with how the model turned out, but that could be the yellow-ish light that I used to take the picture. It looked way better in the afternoon autumn-light.

Reinforcements Incoming!

So I just ordered a large stock of new models. I have saved up a lot of money for some time now to spend it in one single burst.
With a bit of luck I'll finally get my hands on the Human Sphere expansion, which apparently is being reprinted in the past few weeks.

At this moment I'm collecting five different factions;

• Yu Jing - mainly Imperial Secret Service at the moment
• Nomads - mainly Corregidor at the moment
• Haqq Islam - mainly Qapu Khalqi
• PanOceania - mainly Neo-Terran Capitaline army
• ALEPH - non-Greek, which will probably be called Special Situation Section in the future

The ordered units are spread between the five factions that are on the shelf at the moment. While I hope to collect more factions and armies in the future this is enough for now. As you may already know I've just started with Infinity (and wargaming in general) so I'll first get to know these factions.

At this moment I own a 200-point army-list for every faction listed above. I think this is a good start. Every lists has room for some special troop-types; Aerial Deployment, TO-camo skirmishers, hackers, remotes, mines, etc. Every list consist of eight units.
This way people can get a good grasp of the different tactics and options Infinity has to offer, and the step to play is not that big. Every list can be graded down to a easy-to-play and easy-to-learn 150-point list; room for one high infantry and 3 line troopers, just to get to know the basic mechanics.

These factions were purely chosen because of fluff-reasons and aesthetics, since I didn't really have any clue about how each faction plays on the table. I'll take a closer look at each faction and their sectorial armies in later posts. And when I'm more experience with the game I'll even put some strategic thoughts up.
In those posts I will give a more extended opinion about why I wanted to start with these factions.
For now, you'll just have to be satisfied with me liking these factions pretty much, all for different reasons. =)

If the light is nice tomorrow, I'll post some pictures to show my minis. But for now I have to do a lot of homework for college.

See you in next posts!