Tuesday 15 December 2009

An early retrospective.

So is the pledge actually working? Sort of. It has cut down on *some* of my madder impulse purchases but I still ended up buying a load of maidenhead stuff in 2008 and Space Hulk and the new High Elf army this year. It has probably prompted me to paint more stuff then I would have done without the added spur.

What the pledge hasn't really helped to do though is reduce the number of unfinished projects on my list. The raw count of purchased vs painted doesn't provide much incentive to pick up some figures which are two thirds finished and see them through to completion. I guess this is partly due to my rather puritanical take on the pledge scoring system.

With this in mind I declare 2010 as the year of getting things finished. I still want to buy fewer figures than I paint but I will primarily be trying to complete projects rather than just randomly painting stuff up.

For something like Space Hulk completing the project is obviously just a matter of painting all the figures in the box but for other projects 'completing' is likely to be a little more vague. In some cases I have a large pool of models for a project (some of which don't work very well under the current rules) so painting them all wouldn't necessarily be all that fruitful but getting an army to x number of points with options would be a better goal (in the short term at least).

When I do end up buying new miniatures I'm hoping that I can justify them as adding to particular projects rather than just being shiny and nice. I think I will be making use of proxies in some cases so I can try before I buy and find out what works instead of ending up with units which get purchased, painted and never used.

Another thing I plan to do in the coming year is actually get out and play more games with the miniatures. It has been pointed out to me that if I spend half as much time playing games as I do painting up the miniatures for them I might actually get good at some of the systems. That would be nice.

6 comments:

fiendil said...

Something that may be of interest:

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2009/12/epic-of-necrons-and-edenites.html

And the manufacturer's site: http://www.exoduswars.com/

In terms of actual expenditure, I'm more excited by the mutterings about someone casting up "astronuns".

fiendil said...

And check out the Guild, by the same lot. Does their infantry look familiar as well?

fiendil said...

I took to setting boundaries to painting (and building) jobs a while back. I pick out 500 point blocks of models, or the equivalent, and paint those blocks, without regard to any new shinyness I may pick up, and I try not to get distracted by what I'm actually putting on the table.

For instance, I got the Searforge and the Sisters painted this year, where I've mostly been putting Cryx on the table. It's only now, at the end of the year, that the rotation of blocks has got to the Cryx.

Biggest problem with "completing" is that once I'm actually fielding the force, I tend to go "hey, what about that option", and pick up a new model/unit. Which then leaves the project incomplete again...

And the proxies plan is a good one. It's one I really should do more of.

fiendil said...

Oops. The Exodus Wars, it's not the Guild, it's the Khazari who might remind you of another range of OOP models.

Maccwar said...

Ooo that 6mm stuff looks nice. How long before GW try and C&D them though?

fiendil said...

Reckon if GW tried it, this other lot could just point to the Terminator and say that theirs is a rip off of that... *grin*