AGPO
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Posts posted by AGPO
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****** it, I'm in! I used to really enjoy these but the last couple of years have not been kind to my hobby time. This year will be different and my SO and I have resolved to make at least half an hour a day for hobbies as a form of self care.
This month, I'm going to get my Nighthaunt that have been sitting in a box since I panic bought Soul Wars just before it was discontinued and picked up a bunch of Mortal Realms Magazines on the cheap. 76 models in total, including Lady Olynder. If all of them get done I'll move on to my Necrons.
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He's got a really creepy vibe to him. I love it!
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These are superb! Am I right in thinking these are Eman and Duncan Louca's sculpts? I'm seriously considering going down the same route. What printer are you using for these?
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7 hours ago, Overread said:
Stormcast don't have to be in the box. In fact historically Old World never had a single faction dominate the start collecting box; it always varied. There's no reason a new edition couldn't feature two entirely different non-stormcast armies. It's the Age of Sigmar not the Age of Stormcast. It would further help GW to solidify popularity of other factions and of the setting as a whole. It also takes them a further step away from single-faction-domination marketing. Which whilst that is easy and Stormcast are clearly going to be very core; it also can backfire to waht 40K wound up as.
AoS has way more factions and diversity so mixing up the marketing and promotions away from Stormcast is essential unless the long term plan would be to remove many of those new factions. I really think the launch of AoS showed that that isn't a viable sensible strategy for a major wargame.
6 hours ago, Enoby said:I have a feeling that, right at the beginning of AoS, Stormcast were intended to be the Space Marine equivalent for marketing and attention but they seem to have lessened this a lot. Either because Stormcast weren't as successful as they had initially wanted, or because they felt another approach would be better overall. Either way, we're better off for it.
Part of the issue for the Old World was that it didn't have a single beginner friendly faction that was low initial model count and forgiving to paint and play. First Gen Stormcast definitely filled that role even if with Soul Wars the minis did get a touch more fiddly. High Elves and Empire in contrast were way more fiddly both to model and play, and the huge 40 strong units of 8e just exacerbated that fact. With the Nighthaunt and Necrons GW has been doing a much better job of making the other side in their starter sets beginner friendly, so hopefully this is the model for 3e.
The other thing GW makes no bones about is that having a single "favourite child" faction works really well for them as a business model, and has in the past been credited for subsidising al the risks they take with new factions and specialist games. 40k has roughly twenty factions. Let's say for the sake of argument 50% of new releases are for Space Marines (possibly a slight exaggeration) and about 50% of people have Space Marines as their main army (probably an underestimate) with the others evenly split at about 2.5% of each release. That would mean that every two releases, they'd have released something to interest 52.5% of their customer base. If players were evenly split between each faction (5% each) then they'd take 11 releases to exceed that number of customers reached. Even if moving to an even number of releases model tripled the size of the player base it still wouldn't work out so well for them.
Given the huge overheads on developing a new range of models, I don't blame GW for falling back on their bankable factions every couple of releases as long as they still do some interesting stuff. With the return of specialist games, all the new factions for AoS, the return of Genestealer Cults, Warcry, Killteam, Blackstone Fortress, Underworlds, giving Thousand Sons and Deathguard their own unique unit rosters etc. I'd actually say GW was in its most creative period I can remember for decades.
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3 hours ago, Kyriakin said:
I feel "brown" (i.e. ex-WHFB) Beastmen should become Destrction (it could even be a narrative event), and the god-themed Beastmen remain within their god-aligned armies.
Maybe the latter can perform double-duty, but I feel brown Beastmen would feel like a bigger deal - both in terms of narrative and gameplay - in the "small pond" that is GA Destrction.
Batsmen are as chaos as they come. Their epithet has been the True Children of Chaos from 2nd ed WFB through to 2nd ed AOS. The new lore strongly reinforces this connection. Tzaangor, Slaangor etc are all explicitly still beastmen and the likes of Morghur are explicitly chaotic characters carried over from TWTW. This would be a retcon greater than making Allarielle and the Sylvaneth destruction.
2 hours ago, Kyriakin said:Oh, OK. By "white box", I meant the official AoS boxes.
I didn't know plain white boxes were a thing (except Made to Order, maybe), so might need to edit my previous comment so as to not be confusing.
Plain white boxes are for mail order only stuff, since they haven't bothered to print new boxes once the WFB stuff ran out for the stuff that was never stocked in stores since the transition.
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3 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:
This may not be exactly on point for the thread, but when I get pessimistic about Age of Sigmar or the AoS community I tend to look towards 40k. It very quickly makes me feel that even at their worst things in AoS are reasonably manageable and not that bad 😅
So, so true. The Oldhammer community too has it's fair share of edition wars, disputes over what is/isn't Warhammer and of course the continued bitterness towards AOS. Meanwhile the mainstream of the hobby with AOS is becoming more and more welcoming and open to all approaches to gaming than WFB ever was.
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I'm feeling Nurgle again after last month's work. It'd be good to have both the Fantasy and 40k sides of the project rounded off. So:
Core commitments:
- Horticulous Slimux
- Convert and paint 5 Chaos Knights
- 3 Chaos Warriors
- The Wurmspat
- Festus
- Finish off the details on 3 stretch goal characters from last month.
Stretch Goals:
- Rebase 20 Chosen of Nurgle
- Paint and rebase 7 classic metal characters.
- Gnarlmaw
Much smaller goal this month - 47 minis as opposed to >120, and many of them are just rebasing jobs, but once they're done I'll officially have no unpainted models in my Nurgle collection for the first time in about 20 years.
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I got over 120 minis painted last month after really struggling for hobby momentum through 2020. It's the first time an army project of mine has been fully painted in about two decades. I really rediscovered my love for this hobby in the last few weeks and a large part of that is reconnecting with some old friends on Zoom for hang out and paint sessions. I'd been living abroad for three years and moved back to the UK in March 2020 really pumped to see family and friends. We had a long weekend reunion of gaming planned that ultimately got called off, and id really been missing them, but they've been absolute rocks through the pandemic and that first game we play will be all the sweeter.
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Just in under the wire with this one, but here's my January pledge finished. About 120 minis total, plus a group shot with my Nurgle daemons from last year.
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Late to the party for this, as I missed almost all threads in 2020 (moving countries and jobs during a pandemic will do that!) but this was massively helpful for me in 2019 so here goes:
Annual Goals: In each of the last three years I've made progress in the battle Against The Grey. this year my new target will be 10 finished models for each new one I buy. To help stick to this, each month I'm going to mix things up by choosing a half complete project I've had on the backburner to finish. On the first of the month, I'm moving on to another project. This should keep things fresh and stop me getting demotivated by falling too far behind my goals.
January Goals: Month 1 is Nurgle. I picked up a bunch of Death Guard stuff at the end of 8e 40k to complement my daemons. I've also got one or two outstanding models to finish for my Rotbringers. By the end of this month at minimum I will finish:
- 6 Squads of 7 Plague Marines (42 total);
- 3 Blightlord Terminators
- 8 Death Guard Characters
- 49 Poxwalkers
Stretch Goals:
- Kitbash 5 Nurgle Chaos Knights (S2D, not the giant robots)
- Paint my five prototype Nurgle marked Chaos Warriors
- Horticulous and Festus
- Lord of Plagues
- 3D print a Great unclean One proxy to round out my Threefold Befoulment.
As things stand I'm nearly there with the Death Guard. The Poxwalkers are primed and ready for contrast so I'm pretty confident of making it to some of my stretch goals.
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Nice work! If you do every model from heroforge it's gonna get pricey real quickly. Are you looking at any independent artists for your STL files. Theres a lot of folks like RavenTwin doing great work on WFB/AoS stuff.
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Honestly I think it'd be a shame because it would reduce the uniqueness of people's armies. Maybe it's because I come from an era where taking special characters was a taboo, but I like to play armies with their own unique theme and characters who build a story through game play. When special characters become an auto-include that uniqueness disappears, so it'd be a shame to extend it to regiments. If every skaven player fielded the albino guard as their storm vermin unit for instance along with every special character then every army would feel the same.
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12 hours ago, Zanzou said:
Seconding that changing thread pages is broken for me. Only ads load when I change pages. Of course the glitch is separate from the topic at hand, but still
+1 for this
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I'm kinda peeved about the confirmed square bases, having re-based most of my collection at this stage at great cost to my time and bank balance. Hopefully GW are more flexible with base size and allow the use of movement trays for people who want to use minis for both systems.
For me the major lesson that needs to be learned from 8e is that the number of models required needs to be considered in the pricing. IMO a big part of the reason 8e died wasn't the system itself so much as GW massively inflating the number of core troops needed whilst at the same time pushing the price per mini to 40k levels. It pushed the barrier to entry too high for new players, especially with limited efforts to engage people in small scale gaming.
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The flip side of this is that toxic behaviours and gatekeeping can quickly ruin the hobby community in an area. I've seen a handful of "That Guys" quickly devestate a community because when busy people have to make a choice what to do with their free time, not having to deal with anti-social behaviour can be a deciding factor. This in turn means the remaining players are more likely to have to deal with the problem player on any given night rather than a well adjusted person with diverse interests. The negative network externalities quickly lead to downward multipliers which drive people out of hobbies.
Happily as the TTRPG community has shown in recent times, the reverse can also be true. Positive examples of diverse, well adjusted groups of players have led to people being more confident and open with their hobby and shown it's fun and accessible for everyone. Perhaps because of the more competitive nature of a lot of clubs and the fact that many people tend to start at public clubs rather than home games, wargaming still lags behind on this front.
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On 10/31/2019 at 7:55 PM, Sleboda said:
TLDR; Help us out. Spell it out. 😉
Shouldn't that be: "Too long; didn't read?"
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10 hours ago, Fairbanks said:
Going to give the online retailer benefit of the doubt here. They don't have a massive warehouse full of the stuff where they can just go and get a replacement one. Then take into account that for every person who actually has an issue, there's another trying to rip them off, and the only thing they can really trust is that they did their job correctly... [SNIP]
But if you thought the store treated you salty, then they probably don't deserve your service.
This is pretty much my point. Every company screws up from time to time, it's how you respond to it that makes the difference. In my case it was a matter of fact that they didn't fulfil the order, and their records showed it. The basic polite thing to do in that situation is apologise, even if you can't do anything further, not act like the customer is the one in the wrong.
They've not lost my custom because of a messed up order, they lost it because they responded like a**hats.
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53 minutes ago, Kramer said:
Regarding contrast paints and third party. Talking to my flgs owner and gw staff. It seems gw stores are supplied first. Up to the point the flgs gets 2 colours restocked every week meaning a 17 week cycle to refill everything.
Could be what they’re struggling with as well. No reason for the bad attitude though.
Yeah, that's what really got me about it. A simple apology, maybe some small gesture would have resolved the situation easily. Everyone gets supply chain issues from time to time, it's how you communicate it and handle it that makes the difference. The fact they were instantly defensive and confrontational and wouldn't even apologise meant they've lost my business, that of my club and family. A few thousand euros a year spent with them gone over bad attitude.
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I know GW has come in for lot of flack recently, but one thing I've never had any issue with them for is after sales service.
A couple of times in the past 20+ years I've had mispacked or mispacked minis from GW, and it's taken seconds to resolve, with them normally going above and beyond. In the past I've had a whole new kit shipped out just for one missing part.
Unfortunately this doesn't always seem to stretch to the 3rd party sellers mny of us use for discounts. I recently I had to get in touch with Dark Sphere regarding the contrast paints I pre-order for a birthday gift. Half the order was shipped almost a month late, with two paints never arriving at all. When I contacted Dark Sphere the customer service attitude couldn't have been more different. They were confrontational and just complained about It being GW without lifting a finger to resolve the situation. Turned out they'd cancelled my order without informing me. They couldn't even muster a basic apology.
As a result I'll not buying from them again. I'll suck up the price difference and order direct from GW. Any one have any good/bad experiences with GW or other online sellers?
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On 7/4/2019 at 8:27 PM, Weazel said:
I'm adding a couple shots here to illustrate my point. These are pure contrast paint jobs (one coat) over a zenithal prime. Only things layered are the dots on some of the mushrooms, otherwise it's just Contrast Magic (tm).
Out of curiosity which primers did you use for your zenithal prime? I've found mechanicus - grey seer works for darker colours but falls down on some of the warmer and paler paints. Planning on trying Zandri-wraithbone soon, but it'd be great to get your input since your results are great!
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21 hours ago, SleeperAgent said:
On the subject of price increase, they are straight up gouging. Why is the Lord of Change going up $25? Is it solely because new Demons (Keeper of Secrets, GUO) are $140? That's an absolutely ludicrous reason considering those things coming out at $140 were already ludicrous. GW is playing a dangerous game with the pricing of their products. How long until the community as a whole say "Enough is enough, we are not just wallets for you to pillage".
Given the community has said this about every price increase for at least the last 20+ years, I doubt it'll have much effect.
Warhammer is an expensive luxury good, if we don't want to buy more of it we all have existing armies we can play with. I've never seen the oft-predicted mass exodus after a price rise.
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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.
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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.
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On 6/20/2019 at 4:03 PM, lare2 said:
I love this basing scheme! How did you achieve it?
My Hedonites force is finished at last! (7500+ points)
in Hedonites of Slaanesh
Posted · Edited by AGPO
This is a beautiful army! I'd love to see some closer shots of the chariot conversions and hear a bit about how you went about them