AGPO

Okay, vacation is over and I'm back at my painting desk. With contrast out, I'm going to try and break the back of my backlog in a single month. I'm waiting to pick up all the Contrast Paints when back in the UK (It's about 100€ cheaper with discount retailers and the shoddy exchange rate) so the first half of the month will be assembly and zenithal priming, with a production line of backlog minis to follow: This month I pledge: 80 clanrats 40 grot stabbers 40 freeguild guard (Perry miniatures) 10 daemonettes 5 assorted test minis. 8 Scuttlings 7 Stormcast 1 griffhound 1 daemon prince 5 hellstriders 3 character minis 40 Saurus Warriors 50 Skinks 10 Ungors Tl;dr: That should take me to 300 battle ready minis this month. Time to see if contrast is worth the hype in terms of speed painting. I thought 4 bloodthirsters in a month was bad.

So I didn't get round to making a pledge this month, since I was away on holiday for a month, but I do need to post the (almost) finished minis from last month's pledge. 4 bloodthirsters and Scyla. I'm waiting to do the flames until I get my hands on Contrast paints, which look amazing for wet blending.

I love this basing scheme! How did you achieve it?

As @ManlyMuppet88 says, spruce composition is one factor, achieving dynamic poses whilst minimising mould lines are others. That last point is huge when comparing the newer models to the older ones. I put together some seraphon recently and the mould lines were horrific.

The edge paints are re-formulated versions of the dry paint colours. People were thinning the edge colours to use as layers anyway so GW decided to just give the people what they want.

Short answer - I work with refugees. My best friend and gaming buddy works in paediatric intensive care. Perspective is a wonderful thing when it comes to almost all frustrations in life. Long answer - when I'm playing with the right people, the way the game goes doesn't matter because the principle thing I'm getting is time with these great people who share my hobby and passions. I enjoy being around them and gaming is a great vehicle for that. Win or lose ive got what I came for, which is fun. On the other hand, if I'm spending my hard earned free time playing That Guy, those little gaming frustrations are gonna bubble up because you're already frustrated by the social side of things. This applies regardless of your style of play. Some of the best people I've met in the hobby are hyper competitive players who I thoroughly enjoyed playing even as they tabled me in two turns flat. Likewise as an avowed narrative player, we have more than our fair share of That Guy in the narrative scene. Find the right people to play with and those frustrations disappear.

Scyla is done, just haven't posted him yet.

Bloodthirsters are almost there. One more needs wings finishing then it's just a matter of highlighting weapons, armour and the wee details.

If it were me it would depend on how much painting time you're going to have over the next 2-6 weeks. If it's going to be enough to make a decent dent in your collection then maybe make a start? You could always on those minis or sections of minis that you wouldn't use contrast on anyway, like centrepiece minis or metallics. It'd also depend on the army. I've painted huge numbers of zombies and Nurgle minis by giving them a Corax White spray and two coats of Athonian Camoshade. Some armies can do very well with just washes. On the other hand if you're working on Witch Aelves I'd definitely wait on these.

@dekay is 100% on point with this. Synergy is vital in a game like AoS, and the number of possible combinations is almost infinite, especially since you not only have to manage internal balance within your own army, but external balance against every army you could possibly take. There's a famous legend about the inventor of chess being offered a reward by their ruler. They took the chessboard and asked for a grain of rice on the first square, two grains on the second square, double that for the third, double that for the fourth and so on. The emperor agreed only to be told that this was more grains of rice than currently existed in his empire. That's what you're facing. That's without taking into account that a big part of the hobby for competitive players is list writing, which is about trying to make the game unbalanced and giving yourself an edge going in. You're never going to get a vibrant, actively expanding game that's 100% balanced when a large part of your player base is dedicated to rowing in the opposite direction. The best balancing mechanic you could introduce would be to limit the game to only use certain pre-made armies. That's going to be deeply unpopular with a hellva lot of players. The number one issue affecting game balance though is always going to be the existence of competitive, casual and narrative play alongside each other. Competitive players will always try to break whatever balancing mechanic you can come up with to get an edge. Narrative players want lots of cool options to keep things fresh and casuals just want a system that's simple, easy to pick up and means they can show up with their collection and not be stomped into the ground by an optimised list. You can't please all of those groups at the same time. You could try and limit the options and update all points every time there's any new release or shift in the meta, but that's going to eat up tons of resources. It'll also p*** off any narrative player waiting on updates or wanting expansions, as well as casuals who need to get new rules set and write a new list every time they want a pick up game. Thankfully, there's a neat solution - talk to your opponent. If you both go into a tournament setting knowing that trying to build a better army than your opponent is part of the game, great! You're all picking from the same books after all. If your casual or narrative games are always one sided because of a certain combination, maybe speak about leaving that at home. If you're playing someone scraping together their first 1.5k points from the starter set and minis they thought were cool, don't bring a fully optimised list. This game didn't have any points for the first year and a bit and it worked just fine. tl;dr - the best balancing mechanic in this or any game is an adult conversation between you and whoever you're playing with.

If I can prime with a brush why buy a spray can or an airbrush? If I can mix highlights with white or cream why buy lighter layer paints? If I can shade with thin paints why buy washes? The answer to all of these is simple - time, effort and consistency. It's the same with Contrast. I've done a couple of army projects now which have been 90%+ glazes over zenithal/white primer. Offer me a 6€ pot of pre-mixed glaze which would always have a perfectly consistent paint:medium ratio and save me having to mix up fresh batches and it's an auto buy. If that product means I get a consistent vibrant finish with just one coat that's even better. That's what Contrast seems to be offering.

Well, that's building, priming and the red basecoats done. I chucked Scyla in for good measure:

This is spot on as far as I'm concerned. Anyone who painted a red or yellow army before the original foundation (aka base) paints came out can tell you that shaving time off the basic stages of an army makes you more, not less likely to invest in adding more detail. If you have a limited amount of hobby time then you achieve what you can in that time. People who go beyond basecoating their minis were already investing more time than strictly necessary, but now they can skip the wash and initial highlights and instead focus on the finer details. As a personal example, I have had two imperial fists armies, one pre-base paints, when a flat yellow took four or more coats of paint, and one painted with the release of the modern paint range. I spent the same amount of time per mini on each army, but the newer ones have glowing eye lenses, a couple of layers of edge highlights and some freehand. I can invest in those extra details because all my hobby time isn't being chewed through just to get the basics in place.

For me the big question is whether it will have the same effect going through an airbrush. If it will it really is a total game changer for my moneu in terms of clearing backlogs. I just wish I hadn't primed so many minis black!

This whole project looks awesome! I don't suppose you'd share your colour recipe, especially for the wings? I love the look youve achieved.

Nice and simple this month. Bloodthirsters. Four of them.

Almost done with my retro daemons. Final ten horrors are done: It's also not strictly AOS but I've done some fire elementals for D&D. They'll double as flamers for bigger games.

Two classic greater daemons done.

)Back on the wagon! This month is going to be a backlog clearing month for me. In priority order: Classic Great Unclean One Three pox leapers Three bile troggoths Khorgorath Classic keeper of secrets Exalted flamer 10 classic horrors Stretch goals: New great unclean one. 3 plague drones NPCs for my d&d campaign

Yup, autocorrect is a pain!

Any head works with a beastman, that's the joy of them. If you want something a bit weird, kronor heads look quite cool.

That's a wonderful paintscheme. If I didn't have so many red 'letters I'd be tempted to go back and redo all of mine that way. What's your recipie for the skin?

The reason we stopped seeing the variety in Imperial Guard and probably won't see it in Freeguild is simply down to the differences in production between metal/resin and plastic minis. With metal minis, the initial mould making process is fairly cheap, but the cost of the materials for each mini is high, so you've got a high unit cost. Plastics are the other way round, with the injection mould being hugely expensive, but each unit costing very little to produce after that. These moulds do however last much longer than the old metal moulds. Overall this means you need to sell far more of each unit to make your costs back, but once you do each one is almost pure profit. There's a massive cost to duplicating within a range, and each new release is a much bigger risk financially. That's also why we get so many marines/Stormcast- they're much lower risk for that big initial investment.

Honestly I love everything about this thread! I've had vague ideas to do a Slaaneshi elves army using dark eldar bits for a while but your work blows my concepts out of the water.

I can certainly see this, especially the idea of a super elite to match the Stormcast. If we accept the fluff that the Varanguard are roughly equivalent to an old school Chaos Lord, then look at the number of Chaos Lords that were kicking around in just one region the Old World and multiply that up by the size of the mortal realms, there's definitely capacity for Archaon to have formed an army that elite who could go toe to toe with Sigmar's chosen. It also opens up multiple choices for Chaos players - a horde of barbarians, a more traditional chaos army with an elite core of warriors and heroes backed up by some chaff or a very low model count warband of champions where your basic soldier is a match for the heroes of lesser races.