The WIP Takeover

 

Over the last few months, I have embarked on a crusade against WIP armies.

In fact, my first article on FTN, which you can read here, describes a bunch of ways I’ve come up with (read: stole/borrowed/perfected from various other sources from the internet) to deal with your gazillion unpainted and WIP models.

And today I want to share my current:  “No excuses, hobby like a champion and get shit done!” project with my own collection.

As some sort of disclaimer, it’s really for the gamer out there that wants to have his army look nice.  If you’re into the high-end award painting armies like Win-it-all-Abramowicz, that’s something I’ll cover in another article.

The unified army of whatev’s

The base of this project came from my good buddy Eric, whose goal was to have an army of each codex painted up so he could play whatever he felt like when he woke up in the morning.

Now this idea is great except  for a small detail

The idea of one army per codex is somewhat dated with the new way comp works.

In ye olde times, a gentleman gamer would select his army from one codex only.

This usually meant a beginning and an end to an army.  My eldars are turquoise and white on brown bases and my Space Marines are Orange on grey bases.  It was of no consequence because you would never use them both in the same army.

Now with all the formations and multiple CADs and Decurion shenanigans, if I want to include Space Marines in my eldar army, I have to either change the bases or paint some new ones.  And then what if, god forbid, I want to include Space marines in my eldars!  The logistics alone would destroy the motivation of the best of us!

As such, 2 things come to mind:

1- All the armies I own should fit together

2- I don’t need an army of each, only specific staples.

Unto point one: armies fitting together.

There really is little point or interest in having all my models the same color.  It would get extremely boring extremely quick.  But by focussing on certain eye-catching colors and basing, I can get a lot of random units to blend in each other.

Here’s the base I picked for my United force – and a shameless plug to a 1$ e-book on how to make some exactly like that)

Simple and not to show-off, brown sand and grey rocks work well with almost any paint scheme I want to use.  It’s also a lot less expensive than getting resin ones.

The eye catching color I use is neon green – for 2 reasons.  First, it was already on most of my models.  Second, just like the bases, this color works well with pretty much everything.  It’s also a color I enjoy painting, which helps, considering it’s one I will be using a lot.

Unto point 2: Focusing on the staples

Now here are the first things I did for the United Army of Whatev’s

A bunch of Chaos Daemons, a Culexus Assassin and a Librarian Conclave.  Also, the Inquisitor shown above was probably the 4th unit I embarked upon.

These are models that you end up playing in a lot of lists.  The Culexus and the Servo-skull totting Inquisitor were in every single ETC team list and can be taken with almost any army ( even in the ITC format where CtA Allies are banned ).

The daemons are an obvious choice, as almost anyone with psychic powers can summon them to bolster their army.  Even in the Daemons, I picked the units I’m more likely to use.

The conclave is a personal favorite.  It’s a formation ( well 3-5 man formation, but still ) that is almost a must-have in a psychic-heavy army.  Some armies like the Cent-Stars, IG-blobs, DraigoStars are build around it, but anyone playing a generic Gray Knight army benefits form this.

Another great choice would be an Imperial Knight, as you can play it with an absurd number of armies.

So once you got an and  a couple of staples painted up, what do you do then?  Well, that’s entirely up to you.  Such is the beauty of the United Army of Whatev’s.

This was The French Douche, Max Dubois, reminding you:

No excuses, hobby like a champion!

 

My writing program automatically changes Eldars to elders.  Please note, I don’t refer to old people as “pointy-eared bastards” or “OP-Cheesebags”.