I finely did it

Man, this is something I’d LOVE to get into if I had friends who played it.

Here’s my downstairs bathroom wall. A potential miniatures player crying out for a game!

COOL, 2mm must be insane to paint! How much detail can you get on them at that size?

Yeah without players its more a modeling hobby, but still I think solo games might be fun. I have one friend who wants to play FoW but not ready/able to invest yet, so I will be building a Panzergrenadier company next. Maybe if you start building an army your friends might take an interest, and get the bug.

EDIT: Are those A&A minis?

I think A&A minis will work for FoW there the same scale IIRC, you just might have tweak the game a little if your missing units.

Of course I actually have no interest in painting them, so I had thought about doing any US forces all green, Germans dark grey, British tan. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it seemed like it would be functional. Of course, that would probably make real mini players sick to their stomach.

Battlefront has paint sets prepackaged for the different armies, most only have about 6 paints and come with a painting guide. If you just did the basic paint job (no detail) I wouldn’t think it would take all that much longer then want you were thinking.

I don’t play any of these grognardy war-sim games. But I do play Hordes. Which is a pseudo-sequel to the game Warmachine. Warmachine is basically a mech-combat game. But the mechs are steampowered and the infantry use lighting powered longswords and steam-armour.

Hordes takes the rule-set of Warmachine and changes around the resource mechanic and swaps out the steam-mecha for bigass monsters. I haven’t actually played Warmachine, but I’m given to understand that each turn you have a number of resource points to spend on spells and abilities and whatnot and they replenish every turn. In hordes, you can only activate a creatures abilities by building up rage which your commander can then use to cast his spells. Build up too much rage and the monsters go berserk and kill everything, including your own side. It adds an element of suspense as just when you’ve set up a perfect counter attack, your 15’ tall elephant-thing carrying around a siege cannon decides to stop what he’s doing and bullrush your commander. However, play it too timidly and you don’t build any rage which means you can’t access the full capabilities of your army. The best part is, both games are compatible with each other. So if you want to command an army of steam-powered pirate mechs and your buddy wants to build an army of undead dragonspawn, you can both play together!

I don’t have many pics on hand. Just the Skorne starter set that I painted a while ago (that is actually my first attempt at painting). And a couple of minis that I painted for a friends army.

Excellent paint job on those minis the detail is fantastic! I hope my first attempt at painting miniatures turns out that well, what scale does Hordes use?

The Warlock in my Skorne starter is on a 30mm base (he’s the guy with the Edward Scissorhand weapons). The two cyclopii (the dudes with the oversized falichons) are on a 40mm base. And the Titan (the bigass elephant thing) is on a 50mm base.

I used to play Battletech like it was my religion. Until the Clans crap gayed it up.

This summer, I retrieved my Car Wars rulebooks from home, and set to converting it to 3" scale. This allows you to buy Hotwheels cars off the shelf, glue them onto a 1.5x3 inch base and go for it.

I used to play 40k until I realized it was $40k when they raped the Tyranid army lists.

I’ve heard this sentiment many times from other miniature gamers. What happen, are games decided by the player who invests the most?

You build your army out of individual units (or boxed sets of grunts). These can cost upwards of $60 and even higher for a single tank and $40-50 for a box of grunts (lets say 10 guys in a box). I haven’t played Warhammer, but I’ve heard that 1000 points is the baseline army, with 2000 being more common. A 2000 point army would consist of about 40-50 figures (again, I haven’t played Warhammer, so I’m not sure on the exact numbers). All these minis start to add up in price. Even moreso if the game uses metal (like Hordes and Warmachine do). Then you’ve got the rulebooks which cost more money. And in the case of Warhammer, there’s individual rulebooks for each faction in addition to the main rules. Then you’ve got paints. a 9mL bottle of paint will run you about $3-4 per bottle. A good brush will cost about $20-30, and you’ll probably need several brushes. Oh yeah, don’t forget about terrain, which you’ll need if you’re not playing at your FLGS which may supply terrain.

In short, miniature wargaming is expensive. Especially Warhammer. Although Privateer has recently jacked their prices and are coming close to beating out GW in most expensive hobby evar. It’s not the WotC model of “he who spends the most money wins” it’s “you need to spend $x to even be able to play”. Where ‘x’ can equal hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars. And this may just be overblown intarweb nerdraging, but I’ve heard that GW occasionally releases new faction books which can completely alter a given army. Meaning all those figures you’ve spent years collecting and painting are now useless.

FoW is pretty popular at my FLGS, though I don’t play it myself. It looks like a lot of fun, I’ll have to get into it someday when I’m done painting the hordes of other minis I have. I’m the type of player who won’t put something on the table unless it’s painted.

Squeaky summarised some of the GW complaints. However in general I wouldnt say miniature wargaming is expensive particularly for historicals where there is no dominant commercial player.

TMP is worth checking out for community stuff. Lots of great WW2 or SF rulesets and players there, all can be gamed cheaply (my fave is 2 hour wargames for SF skirmish).

Also many of the best rulesets are free so that doesnt cost you a penny.
http://www.freewargamesrules.co.uk/

Also it depends on your scale of preference. Part of the reason I dont game above 15mm scale is the expense (and the painting hassle). When going into a new period I just break out my old wood kreigspiel blocks (or cardboard will do) and use those to get a feel for the rules. if I like it I might upgrade to minis.

That makes FoW sound cheap,

Normal size 1500pt Army for FoW (which uses metal and resin 15mm scale)
Spent so far:
$45 = Rulebook
$36 = Afrika handbook (covers all armies in the Afrika and Mediterranean from 1942-1943)
$43 = Paints
$100 = Miniatures
left too spend:
$120-$160 on minis too finish up my 1500pt Motor Company.

Totaling about $400 for the entire force and some extra gaming aids. But of course you can buy other units too use as substitutes to change up your main force but you’re still limited to 1500pts (unless you want to play in the 2000+pt games) . And armies never become obsolete, its based on history they have strict guidelines :-)

I’ll need to make my own terrain so that can be anywhere in price depending on how nice I want to make it, the table will be 6’x4’. I’m guessing I’ll spend around $150-$250 just on the terrain.

Then comes buildings and vegetation which again can be really expensive the desert is cheaper though, and I did run across some inexpensive alternatives like Paper Terrain that people say is top notch and stands up very well for gaming. Lets say about $100 for buildings and a couple oasis.

I’ll need to make markers for things like Objectives, minefields, barbed-wire, smoke, and entrenched troops. $100 maybe

I shouldn’t add this all up I might discourage myself, but yeah Miniature gaming is expensive especially for someone like myself that tends to go overboard :-/

Except for suckers like myself that love to build and grow with a game system, and drool over those 200+page Color Rulebooks.

Well actually I am right there with you. But it doesnt HAVE to be that way :) Its just a lot of fun!

Depends on what you want to do… you can actually get away with much cheaper paints if you have some patience to do an extra coat and are willing to thin appropriately (a 3:1 or 4:1 mix of water and Future Floor Wax is popular). And you must be buying some crazy brushes! You can usually get Windsor & Newton Series 7 brushes from Blick’s for much less than that (considered the ‘top brushes’ for minis). Okay, looking at dickblick.com right now, they do have a list price of $20+, but typically sell for under $10. You can go with any of the artist quality red sables and be fine, most likely. Sure, being a Golden Demon winner with Delta paints from Michael’s is harder, but it has been done I believe :)

I’ve dabbled with painting random minis, but have never played the games. I can paint for cheap - the rest costs serious bucks!

Yeah that seems like quite a bit for brushes. I got my Series 7 brushes from dickblick.com for under $10 a piece I think. I can’t imagine using anything but Series 7 now after having had them for awhile, get those first and you won’t need to go through 8 sets of brushes before you realise you should have just got the Series 7 ones. Also, I think Vallejo makes boxed paint sets for FoW that are good for getting started with one faction. I really like Vallejo paints, second only to the P3 line in my experience.

For terrain I have heard very good things about the paper terrain. I am going to get some for my Spinspur minis since no one at the FLGS plays it. For something like FoW though you should check your local game store, they probably have players and a ton of terrain ready to use with tables.

Thanks for the tip I’ll check them out.

Also, I think Vallejo makes boxed paint sets for FoW that are good for getting started with one faction. I really like Vallejo paints, second only to the P3 line in my experience.

Yeah I ordered the boxed paint sets for my British Motor Company, Real handy for a beginner like myself who doesn’t own any paints :-)

For terrain I have heard very good things about the paper terrain. I am going to get some for my Spinspur minis since no one at the FLGS plays it.

For the price and apparent quality its the way to go I think.

For something like FoW though you should check your local game store, they probably have players and a ton of terrain ready to use with tables.

I wish my LGS did but all they carry is 40k and lots of RC stuff, when I asked if they plan on carrying FoW the clerk said “Flames of What…” :-(

I do have one Friend that really wants to play FoW and a few others I believe I can persuade into playing, maybe we’ll be the ones to get it started around here :-)

As an old Warhammer 40k player (stopped cause I didn’t have the space to store or assemble stuff) I can say that any and all complaints about GW’s prcing are true. They will gouge you til you bleed for their models. That said, nothing is stopping you from using whatever models you like to play a game with buddies, and GW employs some of the best sculptors in the business so you do tend to get your money’s worth in a fashion.

With a typical 40k army being 1,500 points worth of models you are looking at 200-400$ worth of GW miniatures to build one depending on your army and what units you are including. Warhammer Fantasy armies tend to be 2,000 points and also tend to include more models since you’re playing with ranked up infantry so that’s even more expensive.

Complaints about army books are overstated IMO. You need two books. One is the main rule book, the other is the rule book for your army. If you want to own all the army rulebooks it’s an investment but it’s not needed to play. The same with complaints that army rule books completely alter a given army. To some extent this is true, new army books tend to shuffle units around, but they rarely obsolete models. Just because you can no longer field your old models as the same old unit doesn’t mean you can’t field them as the new unit just introduced. Occasionally things slip by, GW is agressive in driving for constant new rules releases to push model sales, but they don’t want to piss off their old customers if they can avoid it.

I’m an avid 40k player and the normal game size in these parts is 1850 points, and depending on your army faction and composition you choose, you can expect to spend $350-750 on an army of that size. That’s new retail price, mind you. A lot of my stuff I got on sale or on ebay. I just started space marines when I found a great deal on a massive army box - 106 space marines and 9 transports/support vehicles cost me $315, and I’ve sold over $100 of the stuff I’m not using to other people. Still, I have more than enough to play a typical sized game.

A bit of warmachine gets played in my area and people say it costs around $175-$500 for a typical sized army - building around the bigger mechs is a lot cheaper on the wallet then building around lots of massed infantry from what I’m told.

The scary part is that I have over 12000 points of eldar, probably about 3000 points of space marines, 3000 points of sisters of battle, 3000 points of dark eldar and 1500 of tyranids (who got a massive boost in the newest codex release). Oh well… expensive hobbies. :/ I don’t regret it though, and these models tend to hold a little more resale value than my video games do if I need cash in a hurry.

One thing that needs to be said is that there are miniatures gaming systems out there that are better than warhammer and warhammer 40k’s, but with the exception of the historical ones, they lack the rich backstory and myriad works of fiction that add a lot of flavor to the setting. 40k is by no means a perfect game, but it’s still a solid system with some great models and some outstanding iconic imagery out there. Dawn of War may not capture the gameplay of tabletop 40k at all, but it really captures the idea of what’s going in inside the heads of the players as they move their minis and roll their dice.