CAV Strike Proxies For Battletech

 

As per usual, I'm late to the game with this. Miniatures for CAV Strike Operations have been on my radar for the better part of a decade, but I resisted picking them up because I could never seem to find them locally, and the ones online were $12-$15 each if you include shipping. With zero comparison pictures online to help me see how they would even look as proxies, picking them up just didn't seem worth the risk.

But then, last month, I found some for a deal I couldn't refuse. Combined shipping on Ebay is truly a boon and a blessing.

I bought three at first, a Tiamat, a Kestrel and a Spector. Assembling them, painting them and seeing them next to my official Battletech miniatures, I knew I had to have more. Perhaps more importantly, I knew I had to photograph them. I had to spread the word, because pictures like these would have been all I would have needed to pull the trigger on these miniatures years ago. Pictures like these would have sold them for me, and yet I haven't seen any like them online.

I'm half tempted to check out Heavy Gear Blitz just to see how well they proxy with Battletech, but I'm running into the same problem with those that I ran into with CAV. Sure, I've seen a picture or two of primer-gray HGB minis piled up with a single Catalyst official sculpt, but it seems like so many of these little stompy robot games suffer from lack of advertising and lack of pictures like these to really showcase the sculpts and how they compare to other miniature lines. Now, I don't pretend to be skilled as a painter, but even a shoddy, sloppy, thick and dollopy paint job on a CAV Strike miniature propped between two Battletech minis would have been all the advertising I'd need to buy in, even at the Kickstarter level. Heck, I totally missed the advertising on all three Reaper CAV Kickstarters. They just weren't marketed or spoken about anywhere that I could see it.

So, that's why I do posts like this, and posts about books I like. Many of my favorite things never get advertised, never get mentions in blog or news posts or newsletters. There are so many beautiful, exciting products that I wait for with bated breath, that I only find out about because someone posted something related to it on a Facebook group I follow. It's a total failure of advertising, and so, well, here's me trying to help make up for that.