Driller Blitzers are a hybrid between a Tank and a Hunter. Strong as a Tank and fast as a Hunter is a fairly dangerous combination. Combined with a Pit to take cover in, these like fast abominations and very difficult to dispatch from range when in numbers.
Driller Tanks are similar to the standard Tank, but when taking cover in a pit, they turn into little abominations. Without using some of the special weapons available in Dark Side, these could be a bit of an issue - at least when trying to deal with them at range.
These took about twice as long to paint as a single Driller Worker or Hunter which makes sense since they have at least twice the surface area than either of its smaller cousins. I'm not extremely happy with how the yellow stripes turned out - mostly because I knew I could have done better if I took a little more time with them. Truthfully, I have been rushing myself a bit on these as there are a lot of other models from different games that I'd like to paint and don't want to be painting Drillers for the next couple of months. All in all, I think they turned out fairly well for rank-and-file creatures.
Paints used on these models:
The Driller Workers are the most numerous of the Driller Xenos with 43 in total. They were fairly fast to paint at around 15 minutes each. I probably could have spent more time highlighting or more carefully applying the red, but I didn't want to be painting Drillers for the rest of the year and believe that how they turned out was a good compromise.
Another shortcut that I don't regret was to completely skip removing the mold lines. Most of them are hidden by the painting technique and dark colors anyway. There is so much texture on these guys that trying to remove some of the mold lines would result in doing more harm than good. Trying to go through and get rid of all the mold lines would have likely doubled the time-per-mini. Generally, I don't mind putting in the extra effort for characters and other unique figures. I even cleaned up the original Invader Xenos as for the most part the textures were far less affected and a clean removal was possible. Anyway...glad to have saved time on these.
As with all Drillers, the pits can result in these guys providing an increased challenge due to the +1 damage required to put each of them down.
The Driller Abomination has the ability to create new pit zones. It is somewhat similar to the mold zone creation of the Spoiler, but it only creates them when granted an extra activation rather than every time it moves. That results in fewer pits which offsets the additional difficulty the pits create due to the protection they offer to all Drillers. Workers and Hunters require 2 strength to eliminate and Tanks require 3 strength to eliminate and can really cause problems with poorly equipped characters.
I'm not sure exactly what determines if a machine is a Bot or a Sentry Gun, but apparently, the ability to move is not the determining factor as this one can move quite quickly.
This model looks to be a homage to the Portal Sentry Turret as it is similarly shaped and has an extra leg. Similar to the Buddy Bot, I've never played the game it is represented in, but from the description, even the behavior is quite similar to the rules of Invader.
Paints used on this model:
