I bought this game today. It looks really interesting with its level of complexity though I am only on about page 3 of the rules -- reading as I punch tokens and trim the ships out of the sprues. I am in the habit of painting the figs in most of the games I own, and was just wondering if there are any good examples of players who have painted their fleets? Obviously there would need to be 6 distinct paint paterns to distinguish the races etc. I'm just hoping there are a few examples out there to inspire me before I start the painting project.

There is one guy who was painting his fleets a while back (he actually had 14 sets of ships so he was painting one for each race.) Not sure where the thread went, but if there's pics to be found, they'd probably be on BGG.

I have done some simple flashing for my set as well as some complete recolors so I had 14 complete sets of distinct colors for my races.

The first 2 are the Jolnar - Pink and the Muaat - Gold

On the subject of painting, I'm not quite crazy enough to paint them race-specific or with any significant amount of detail, but I am considering picking up a second copy of TI3 to get 14 sets of ships, at which point I'd need to paint the duplicate 6 sets to keep things organized.

The thing I worry about, though, is that after I've colour-washed these 6 sets, I won't be able to just dump them all in a plastic baggie because they'll stick to one another after a month or so of disuse of the game (it doesn't get pulled out very often these days.) Are there any tips to prevent the peices from getting too sticky in a plastic bag? Perhaps using something other than stardard water-soluable paints? (But hopefully not something that would melt the plastic.)

I would prefer to avoid needing to use a compartmentalized storage solution as I normally would for other painted minis. I suspect that would take up too much room to be fit in the TI3 box.