Star Saga: Terror In The Deep

 One good thing about the ongoing pandemic was the decision to get some online gaming in as a means to keep playing wargames. From this was born a Sunday afternoon gaming session which initially saw myself, Stuart, & Sam playing a D&D board game with a few Napoleonic Zoom games thrown in as well. We recently completed the D&D and started playing Star Saga, a Mantic games sci-fi dungeon crawler. At present we are playing through the base game with pits the mercenaries against the forces of Mazon Labs. 
One of the expansion boxes is for the Nameless and as this was the only one that was in stock I purchased it and have started painting up the models. The good thing with these boxes is that you can also use the models in Deadzone, so you get double use from the models. The Terror in the Deep box also contains a couple of Asterian mercenaries so they can be used with the new Asterian models I got for Deadzone.

The first models out of the box are Scuttlers, a cheap Troop choice in Deadzone whose low profile should make them hard to shoot. I don't have the Star Saga cards for the models so have provided the Deadzone stats, I would imagine the Star Saga stats mirror those of Deadzone.

The Nameless have an aquatic feel and come in two varieties, the more crab like animalistic species and the squid-men who seem to be the brains of the faction.

I decided to try and differentiate the two sides by giving them contrasting colour schemes. Some of the models seem to blur the distinction so that allowed me to combine the two schemes to hopefully give a cohesive look to the faction.

Next up are the Inkers, again a cheap Troop choice for the Nameless. These are slightly worse at fighting than the Scuttlers but come with the Ink Sack special ability. 

This allows the Inker to deploy an ink cloud (smoke grenade) once whilst alive and automatically upon it's death. Ink clouds block line of sight through squares containing the cloud and give a -1 shoot dice penalty to shots passing through adjacent squares, very handy for getting your melee or close range shooters up the board.

The first Specialists I painted up are the Riflemen, it's worth noting that the names for the Nameless are those given to them by the GCPS (Galactic Co-Prosperity Sphere) military forces who encountered them. Presumably they have their own name for each other, though maybe not.

The Riflemen come equipped with the long range Crystal Rifle which has the Triclinic Shard special ability. This can be used to mark the shooting target and then gives a +1 fight dice bonus for any model fighting the target for the rest of the turn. If you combined with this the Rapid Fire ability which allows you to try and Pin a model you would then get +2 fight bonus dice. This is because attacking a Pinned model itself gives a +1 fight dice bonus. Remembering that a basic attack is always 3 dice showing how good a bonus this could be.

Last up for this week are the Ogres who are sporting a crab-beast feel. As with the Scuttlers I went with a nice bright blue & pink theme to make them stand-out. With the bases I decided to base them up for Deadzone with the same basing scheme I've used for the Marauders and Rebs, I can see these chaps hitting the battlefield in the future (once we can play again).

The Ogre is a Specialist choice with high armour and wounds and the Defender Shield ability. This gives him +1 armour (to a total of 3) and also adds +1 armour to any models in the same area as him. As he is size 3 (max total of size 4 in one cube) he can look after one size 1 friend.

He also has Armour Piercing 2 claws which should help him with cutting up even the most hardy of foes.

I have a few more models to complete for the faction including the mighty Goliath who is a big old chunk of plastic.