Save your GEV trees!

By which I mean the little strips that the fins and turret are attached to.

I was assembling some Combine Infantry last night, ones and twos for "making change," and made a couple of interesting discoveries. If you superglue a GEV tree (after removing the GEV parts, of course) flat to an infantry base with the protrusions up, it makes a decent looking piece of high-tech debris, either a construction beam or chunk of a vehicle. You can also file/cut off the portion of the protrusions that stick off the main rectangle, glue the cut side down, and you get a low wall with buttresses. Coolest of all, if you take two of them and lean them up against each other with the protrusions dovetailing, you get a very cool looking barricade (put it in front of two guys standing side by side, that's the only way there's room).

Of course, some might argue that making these micro-dioramas is inaccurate, because these infantry may be placed in clear terrain, and you don't want the mini to suggest that they have a defensive bonus. I would say 1) What are your infantry doing in clear terrain? Oh, you may be playing Ogre. But, 2) even in "clear" terrain there will be the occasional tree, bombed building, old wall, etc, and infantry will gravitate to these points. Doesn't give any bonus over what infantry already has, their intrinsic defense includes duck-and-cover.

The other thing I did was remove the figures from one strip and make casualties. I cut off guns and the cables to the backpack, spread and flattened legs and arms, scraped a hole on the front of one suit, and glued them onto bases. The small weapon guys I put face up, the big-rifle (100mm HEAT) guy was face down. This looked pretty cool.

Note that the base I removed the three figures from I bent to a ninety degree angle and glued to a base - the corner of an ex-building.

I would not have thought you could do this with 15mm (or whatever they are) figures. I must say I think this bismuth stuff is much more forgiving than the lead figures I worked with years ago; doesn't seem to break as easily when you abuse it. I don't think I did a particularly good job, but if I did it passably, some of you can probably do it great. Just don't tell Steve: if we found a new feature they may want to up the price (ie Combine GEV=$1.90, but Combine GEV plus Infantry Barricade=$2.25") : )