The opponent for the Ghar battle squad in the Gates of Antares starter box are the Concord infantry. I can’t find a good close up of the painted plastic squad on its own, so here’s the whole set’s contents shot. The Concord are in cream and green on the left.

As before, here’s the front of the sprue…

…and the back.

As before, click on the pics for bigger versions.

Having seen some of these assembled when I was at the Derby show, I know that they look pretty good when they’re put together. At least, I thought so. There were others who thought that their legs looked a bit off. I couldn’t see that myself, and I rather like their non-“heroic” scaling too. Certainly it’s a point of difference from 40K.

The sprue itself has enough bits to make 5 Concord troopers with or without some sort of special weapon (on the right, below). I’ve no idea what it’s called, it’s just something a bit bigger as squad support. The standard rifle is on the left.

The sprue also has a support drone (where I suspect the real firepower lies) which played as a separate unit in the demo I had. It also includes two spotter drones (one for the squad of 5 men and another to accompany the drone): so 2 whole units per sprue, apart from bases. The support drone has a choice of 2 weapons, though one of them doesn’t seem to do anything much against the Ghar.

So here we have another sprue of armoured humans in space. I think it’s pretty nicely done, and it’s worth recognising that it’s a hard thing to make really striking. These look like being the reference point for humans in space in the game, and so are fairly vanilla in appearance. And in any case, how much can you do with humans in space? I’ll answer that another time.

Personally, I think the styling is interesting. The armoured suits are a mix of both soft shapes that blend into each other, and hard edges. You can see what I mean on the legs, below. This is a deliberate part of the design rather than anything to do with the models being “soft”. This much is clear from looking at the rest of the sprue.

I also like the helmet design, though here we come to what might be a bit tricky when it comes to cleaning up the models. The mould line’s got to go somewhere, and here it goes down the middle of the face. I understand why they’ve done this, I just wish they’d tweaked the design so it could have been avoided. The face is the focal point of the model, and any small misalignment will be a real pain to tidy up.

Overall, the mould lines are very subtle, and the small sink holes on a couple of arms may well have gone by the time we see production sprues. In any case, I don’t think they’d show on the final model, so it’s all fine anyway.

Everything on the sprue is nice and sharp where it needs to be, and overall I think it’s another good showing from Warlord. I assume that there will also be a sprue of bases in the style of the Ghar battle squad’s shallow, lipped base, plus possible flying bases for the drones.