Writing retroactively for April 2016. In April I got started with the models straight away. Skitarii are one of the types of models which come in a load of small pieces: Head, torso front, torso back, legs, left arm, right arm and gun, backpack, and the base. Looking at how tiny and complex a lot of the pieces were, my first question was how to approach them: Whether it would be best to spraypaint on the primer with the parts still on the sprue; if I should cut all the pieces off and carefully spraypaint them loose; or if I should fully model the miniature and spray it all in one go.
This is pretty much how the Skitarii Rangers stayed until around December :(
As much as I wanted to play, I'd lost motivation to paint them. I'd started off into a bit of a rut in over-thinking what I was going to do with the completed army much further down the line. I hadn't even finished my first 70 point unit yet, and I was obsessing over how the 2000 point army should be. With these miniatures, there are various combinations you can model them in, and the model typically dictates what rules you use. So if you model a guy holding a rifle, most players will expect that character to have a rifle: An opposing player may take issue to you claiming that the rifle is actually a rocket-launcher. Others are more easy-going with it, but I was trying to plan for a worse case scenario by modelling them for an 'optimal' set of gear. Realistically, for these models I could just model them one way, and replace them with another £20 box in 6 months time and model those a different way (Although it's a bit different for the expensive models, but there are ways around that). So with over-thinking happening, reading and re-reading forum posts, and trying to avoid unforeseen problems, I got stuck in the rut, and nothing got done.
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Writing retroactively, for April 2016. I knew that I had upcoming surgery, so I'd be house-bound for a little while. I'd been chatting with a friend who had recently gotten back into 40K and was in the process of painting his Flesh Tearers Space Marines. I decided that this time stuck at home would be a good opportunity to get back into Warhammer myself, so started pouring over the website to pick out something I liked. I decided I really liked the look of the Skitarii faction, so after checking them out online, I headed into town to visit the local Games Workshop store to get as much information as I could. I picked up a copy of the Skitarii army codex, and as the starter box has a character from the Cult Mechanicus, I bought that book as well. The codex books are essentially a short collection of story background for the army, along with each available unit, their rules and special gear. I headed home to obsessively read the two books, but went back to the store a couple of days later to buy the 'Start Collecting Skitarii' box, the painting guide, glue, paintbrushes and all of the paints recommended from the painting guide for the colour scheme I'd chosen. When you're getting into a hobby like Warhammer, one of the first things people often say is to expect it to be expensive. At £25-50 for most boxes of models, you can see how that quickly adds up. But what isn't immediately obvious is that in order to make your models look anything like the ones in the books, you're looking at using about 30 different paints, and at £2-3 per pot of paint the cost of materials quickly overshoots the cost of models. My £50 'starter bundle' thus became almost £200s worth of gear.
The £20 army codex on top of that (which I needed to buy two of), and the £50 main rulebook (Which I actually managed to buy second-hand from another player a little later on). Nobody really tells you that if you're trying to replicate the quality you see in the books, for even the smallest legal army, you're likely paying out over £200. (Of course nobody really plays using an army that small, so it's probably closer to £400.) This is something I've wanted to do since I was about 10 years old, and ontop of that, will give me something to focus on and hopefully get me involved with local gaming communities, so I bit the bullet and dove in head first! This is the first real venture I've had into mini war gaming, so it makes sense it's also my first real venture into blogging too! I thought it might be interested to keep a record of my adventure down the rabbit hole of miniature war gaming, specifically Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000.
I'd first become interested in 40k back when I was in highschool. A couple of friends played, and said they'd introduce me to the game. Kids being kids, and them being much more well off than I was, they'd lost interest by the time I'd scraped up enough money to buy my first box of Tyranids. So I never did get to play, but the interest never went away. Almost 20 years later, after discussing it with a friend I've caught the bug again! I plan to write about my journey into 40K, collecting and playing the Cult Mechanicus and Skitarii forces Writing the first couple of posts a little retroactively, as it's taken me some time to make up my mind about what approach to take the blog! |
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