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flowing-paint · 7 years ago

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Progress and updates

A quick post to update all my (limited) audience on my hobby progresses.

Painting

Death Guard - Warhammer 40K

I am actually committed to finishing 1000 points worth of Death Guard models because I’m planning a game with my WH40K friend by the end of this month. Despite having a lot of painted models, it’s still not enough. I also had to buy more plague marines because those I had were not sufficient. They were not even close to being enough... I will probably have to use my USCR Mercs miniatures as proxies, ‘cause you know: they come in fucking power armor! While counting points and units, I was going through my models and thought I may write a list of what I have and my painting progress.

1x Mortarion (Forgeworld one)

1x Typhus (Painted)

1x Leviathan Dreadnought

2x Contemptor Dreadnought (Painted)

1x Wheelbarrow (Rhino) (Painted)

1x The combine (Plagueburst Crawler)

2x Foetid Bloat Drone

1x Myphitic Blight-hauler

2x Lord of contagion (1 Painted)

10x Plague Marines (only THREE Painted)

10x Baby Plague Marines (4 Painted)

1x Malignant Plaguecaster

1x Noxious Blighbringer

5x Blightlord Terminators (1 Painted)

5x Deathshroud Terminators (2 Painted)

20-ish Poxwalkers (5 Painted)

This is it: all the units I have. It makes me shiver if I think how many of these guys are still in the “grey plastic” stage. Moreover, I paint almost only in subassemblies so all the unpainted models are still on a sprue in the box. Every time I get depressed I take a look at this group picture and I get going again!

Casting

These days I am using my really limited free time trying my hand at silicon mold making. Silicon mold making, the hobo way! I came to this because my wife creates her own molds for soap making with RTV silicone and I felt I could try that. It’s all still too embryonal to write something here but I would like to try to create some scenographic bases for 28mm miniatures and see if I can do some mass (re-)production. For now, I’m just having fun with small bits/trinkets I got at work that I try to copy. Geared wheels, metal fittings, etc... If I will succeed at this stage, I will start producing the masters and then copy them. If I end up with some interesting result I may also think about selling them on the eBay! Not that I’m super sure I will be able to do it but still... I will keep it simple and try to make some sand and stone patterns to use in Age of Sigmar.

New hobby Juice

I want to give a big shout out to this new item I bought the other day on the eBay: Shadow War Armageddon. I guess everybody knows what I’m talking about but for those living on Mars, Shadow War Armageddon was a boxed game in the Warhammer 40k universe released in 2017 that was called by some “Necromunda 2.0″. Here is the picture of the box I just bought:

This boxed set is crazy value for a couple reasons:

It allows you to play with just a bunch of minis. Rules for a lot of factions are available.

It comes packed with some amazing terrain. Take a look here, here and here.

In the box, you get a bunch of Orkboys and some Marine scouts (which represent all the models you will ever need to play this game), the rulebook and those mythical artifacts called “weapon templates”. For the newcomers, they’re not in WH40k 8th edition anymore but I used to use them a lot in Warhammer Fantasy (dragon flames and salamander venomous spit were template based damage).

However, the most interesting thing about this game is not inside the box: it’s how it came out and disappeared in the span of less than on year. The game was released in April 2017 and was welcomed with tons of e-ink in praises and reviews. GeeDubs themselves, impressed by the reaction to the game, decided to release a separate rulebook for those that already had everything needed to play and didn’t want to buy all the stuff. Despite all this, the game went immediately out of production and today you only find the terrain (see links above) and the rulebook in GW website. Let’s see if this theory I came up with makes sense.

The game “Shadow War Armageddon” was only a market test to verify the audience reaction to a possible Necromunda re-launch. Now that we know how the story ended, it is easy to get to some conclusions. Let’s say you have digital designs for the new Necromunda in you pc, people keep asking for it but pulling the trigger means making a lot of new molds, advertising campaigns, etc: a lot of money. So GW came up with a super-cheap / super-effective idea:

we create a bunch of terrain --> We are going to sell it anyway

we grab a couple sprues of high selling factions (SM and Orks)

we grab old Necromunda rules and revamp them

we stuck everything in a big cardboard box.

What’s the cost of doing this? Well, I work in product development and I can tell you that, apart from the design costs (new book, new box) it’s only the cost of the logistics. This means that GW investment in this game was close to zero. So they put themselves in the advantageous situation where they could potentially earn a lot of money because of all those nostalgic gamers while testing the ground for the launch of the new Necromunda. As soon as they saw all the traction this boxed game garnered the New Necromunda project got the green light and got released at the end of 2017. Shadow War Armageddon immediately vanished to avoid cannibalizing the new market but the support still remained online for those who bought it. Does this make sense to you? I think therefore that this set deserves some more attention that it is now receiving... but I know that GW is really heavy in exacerbating our shiny syndrome so that buyers only think about new things.

Well, the post turned to a sort of GW market strategy review when I just wanted to write down some updates instead. If you have any comments please feel free to drop them below!

...game on!

#warhmmer 40k #Death Guard #Shadow War Armageddon #molding

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