Slowly working my way through a BUNCH of vehicles and finally decided to bite the bullet and do the camo. Still a lot of work to go, but this is a huge jump in terms of looking done. Masking tape took 8x longer to put on than actually painting did. As someone new to an airbrush, I must say that it's definitely faster and smoother than using a brush, but I really need to improve my aim. There's some nasty overspray in various places which is going to have to be touched up by hand, but I'm generally very happy with this.
Yea, I've been playing in an escalation league and so far I've lost all four of my games badly. It seems like everyone I've been playing as all sorts of powerful rules/abilities, whereas the guard detachment is negated by moving (which is required to win games) and the guard army rule/ability (officers) has been negated by a combo of battleshock and precision shots decapitating my command structure.
I'm not hopeful about the codex. Lucky for me the modelling/painting aspect is the main draw for me, the game is an excuse to hang out and roll dice
I'm in a crusade and have won two of my five games, but I think this is because my list is very close to what was the tournament meta list (mostly by accident due to what I own). The wins were blowouts (a tabling and reduced to a single unit) and all of the losses were close (two were literally down to a single die roll and the third could have been turned around but I misplayed a reinforcements'd pair of sentinels). Agreed that it sucks to be one of two factions that have our special rule turn off it we get battleshocked, especially when it means nothing to 90% of factions. Haven't had any issues with Precision just because nobody has taken it (except for a skatros that whiffed hard), but it would definitely be brutal if they did. As for the Codex, I'm sure it'll be okay for the 5 days we have it before 11th launches.
The core of my army is a TC and LR, both with demo cannons/lascannon/multimeltas, a manticore (sadly my beloved deathstrike is too bad to justify running as itself), a PCS with Master Vox + Grand Strategist that just hides in the back, and some sentinels. Depending on points and the matchup, this gets filled out with some combo of 30 infantry, 20 kasrkin, some bullgryn, a third sentinel, a chimera, and a 5-man scion squad. I also have a castellan, commissar, and psyker but the only really good one is the castellan with one of the kasrkin to give them sustained on 2s.
I've been running a few different lists, my mechanized guardsmen had their chimeras perforated by alpha legion, and that combined with some infiltrated legionaries meant most of my guardsmen died in no man's land far from objectives and some (un)lucky lascannons smoked my LR. Death guard just drowned me in penalties to hit and mowed through my troops. Tau smoked my LR & sentinels early & my troopers struggled to hold onto the mid board. At least I had a decent face off with 'nids, but I still lost with roughly half the points and with most of my guys still in my deployment zone (turn 1 charges suck)
I'm definitely not playing the most "meta" list, and it'll be a cold day in hell before I buy a lord solar, but it's frustrating that the army I got into had a ton of options on how you want to play them, and now it's been reduced to an artillery company that keeps getting their artillery nerfed