Contrast Paints & The Swiss Army Knife of Star Wars Legion

I know I’m mostly known for my takes on different RPGs, but I do appreciate other games as well. Specifically, I do love any game involving miniatures and chucking dice around. Star Wars Legion is how I like to get my FFG fix when I'm in the mood for a miniatures game. I'm not the largest Star Wars fan, but I really like the gameplay of Legion compared to other minis games. Other than maybe Warhammer 40K Kill Team, I've stayed away from lots of the Games Workshop games. This is largely because while I really enjoy rolling dice, I'm not a fan of rolling 3-4 sets of dice to determine if I damaged your unit. In Star Wars Legion, like many of FFG's other games, I roll a set of dice, then the defender rolls depending on how many hits I had. Then we see if any of my hits get blocked. 

Recently, a large focus of Star Wars Legion releases have been surrounding the new Clone Wars box set (you can see me unbox the core set with my cat Oscar here). Eventually, I will get around to reviewing the Clone Wars Core Set, but the darn battle droids have taken me quite a while to get assembled, let alone painted. In the meantime, I'd like to talk about some of the last units that came out for the Empire: Director Krennic and the Imperial Death Troopers, characters made famous from the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story movie. Not only that, I'd like to talk about some new painting techniques that I used to get them looking as good as they ended up turning out. 

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert at this game, so if you are looking for detailed analysis of the point costs and how their abilities play into the metagame of Legion, you aren't going to get it here. If you enjoy playing Legion casually and want to know if it is worth picking up these units, keep reading. 

Before I get into the gameplay of these units, I need to talk about painting. Just like my disclaimer about my Legion skills, my painting skills are not much better. Also, I usually paint in waves: I'll have like 2-3 weeks where I want to get a bunch of stuff painted, and then maybe another 2-3 weeks where I really have no desire to pick up a brush. This is another reason I haven't picked up a large count minis game like Warhammer, as it will take me years to get an army painted. Heck, I've been busy painting all my zombie minis from Zombicide: Black Plague since 2016, and I haven't even touched all the different heroes. 

That was a long way of saying I don't like painting mass amounts of minis. One of the reasons I decided to pick the Empire in Legion was that I could speed paint all the stormtroopers with a couple of colors, then get more detailed on the commanders. Specifically, this tutorial from Teri Litorco was a godsend to me.  Here is an in-progress shot of my terrible chalk attempt of Teri's tutorial from last year. 

However, at the same time that the Krennic\Death Trooper minis came out, the Citadel Contrast Paints were released. This is a newer line of paints that are thinner, allowing you to get some neat-looking effects on your minis without a whole lot of effort – aka perfect for the Chris Renshaw theory of painting. 

Given that the Death Troopers are mostly black with some finer details, I decided they were perfect candidates to try out the contrast paints. Plus, I was curious to see how the white contrast paint worked for Krennic. So, using some generic spray paint I have, I primed all of the minis white. The "official" citadel contrast primers are basically an off-white and a very light gray, so I figured any white paint would do. For the Death Troopers, I covered them in the Contrast Black Templar and then did some green highlights on the helmets. Here is a pic of how the Death Troopers turned out (along with General Veers, who I was painting with normal Citadel paints at the same time). 

For Krennic, I started out with the Contrast Apothecary White, which isn't really the color white but more of the dark shading that you see on the mini. It still makes the mini look AMAZING, so it works for me. Then, I used some Contrast Basilicanum Grey for the belt and Contrast Black Templar for the boots. Not sure what I did for the flesh, as I suck at that. For him and Veers, I just ended up mixing up colors until I had something that looked okay. The hair on Krennic was a weird experiment. I started off painting it Contrast Snakebite Leather, but the color was too bright for what I wanted. After it dried, on a lark I decided to go back over the hair with the Contrast Apothecary White, and it actually ended up working!

Honestly, I am super impressed with how Krennic ended up coming out. It is probably the best mini I have ever painted. Something else you'll notice in the photo is the bases. In the past, I've just used some glue and dropped some model grass on the bases to get something on them, as you can see in the picture below. For these minis, however, I decided to try something new. I used the Technical paints Armageddon Dunes and Astrogranite Debris for their bases. These paints are real thick and clumpy, giving the base some texture. Then, I just dry brushed a different color over top of them to get a good effect. Again, another experiment that ended up coming out really well.

Ok, we can finally talk about gameplay now. Let's start with Director Krennic. First thing you notice is his cheap cost. While Vader and the Emperor are expensive and thus limit the other types of units that you play, Krennic at 90 points provides another option besides General Veers for when you don’t want to spend a large amount of points on your commander just to get some fancy Jedi skills. Plus, its own abilities aren't bad either. 

Just like the Emperor and the Royal Guards, Krennic comes with an entourage, which *surprise* is a squad of Imperial Death Troopers. This lets you add an additional squad of Death Troopers to your force without taking one of your special slots (so you can 1 more unit of Death Troopers than someone who isn't using Krennic). Combined with some of the other abilities I'll mention later, it just makes it simple: if you are going to use Imperial Death Troopers, you are going to want Director Krennic as your commander. 

Next we have compel, which both Krennic and an upgrade for the Death Troopers come with. If you've got a friendly unit near Krennic that's got a suppression token (but not too many!), then you can give them another token so they can get a free move action. This means you can go ahead and get units into position and then on your turn use that saved action to get a aim or dodge token prior to attacking. But isn't that risky? Eh that's not really an issue for the Death Troopers, which you'll see later, but in the mean time, you've got this:

BAM! Now you can remove that suppression token from those units, provided that they were some of the units you chose with your command cards. Speaking of command cards, Krennic comes with 3 cards to use:

There's really no losers here with these cards. Annihlation Looms gives all your troopers a suppression token, which is a great way to set up compel if your troopers haven't had the "opportunity" to be shot at and gain them naturally. Deploy the Garrison is another great combo with the Death Troopers, and Voracious Ambition is great because you have the chance to go first as it has a low initiative cost, but you can still get 4 units (+1 set of Death Troopers) that you can determine when they activate vs drawing randomly out of your bag.

Okay, lets get around to the Imperial Death Troopers. Right off the bat, you can see how their abilities pair up with those Krennic combos I mentioned. First of all, when you given them an order from a command card, you immediately get to remove a suppression token. This is really helpful for keeping the Troopers from being panicked so you get to keep using Compel. Secondly, when you use Deploy the Garrison and give the Troopers a standby action, they automatically get an Aim token (which is also better thanks to their Precise 2).

Next, look at all the weapons! The Death Troopers are truly the Swiss Army Knife of Legion units: they've got a little bit of everything! They've got great dice for up close, some decent hits for mid range, and even have some ability to pick targets off at longer rangers. Those are just the built in options! When you add a E-11D Trooper or a DLT-19D Trooper to the squad, you get even more options. The E-11D allows you to either get some long ranged firepower or a short range but wide blast option, and the DLT-19D gives you some anti-vehicle options. No matter what plan you put into place at the beginning of the game or even each round when you select a command card, there is a 100% chance that plan will be going off the rails shortly. The Death Troopers give you some insurance against those changes by being adaptable on the battlefield. Add in some Comms Relays (allows a unit to order a nearby unit instead of acting itself) and now you've got even more adaptability. 

So getting back to my initial point: should you get these units if you are just a casual player of Star Wars Legion? YES! Absolutely, in fact you should probably get a couple of these Death Troopers to replace a couple of generic Stormtrooper units. Throw in Krennic so you can have a third group if you want. The minis are so versatile that they are great for most scenarios that you will end up playing. Plus, they are super intimidating - in one of my games, my opponent was so focused on taking out my Death Troopers that I was able to sneak around some Royal Guards and mess up some of his units in close. He knew how dangerous the Death Troopers were and wanted to get them off the board ASAP. 

If you are casual in your painting in addition to playing, make sure to pick up some of the contrast paints! They are great for getting pretty good looking minis painted if you don't have the skill level of some of the expert painters that you see online. I really think the Contrast paint line is going to get more people interested in painting minis because of how easy it makes it. 

What do you think? Let me know if the comments if this was helpful to you at all, and what your experience with the Contrast paints and/or these minis in your Star Wars Legion games. Or, feel free to send me a tweet over on my Twitter! 

*pics of the various cards are taken from Fantasy Flight Games' website*