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The hardest part of any project is starting the project. Once you get going, it is easy.

How do I decide what to paint first? I start with the things I have an idea of what colors I am using. So, if I know my XXX is going to be red and blue I grab those and start painting them.

I try to remove any obstacles to starting so it takes as little effort as possible. Sometimes, I choose what to paint by simply sticking my hand in and seeing what I touch, and then I grab all the models that are in the same unit/smilar.

Somewhat contradictory, I also ritualize the start a bit. I.e. I take out my painting mat and set it out on the desk. Then, I take out the brushes I will be using and place them next to the mat. Then, I grab my pallette and water cup and go wash them and prepare them. Then, I pull out my paints and set them out behind the mat. Finally, the models go on the mat. Now, my mind is committed and locked into painting, the what is secondary to that.

 usernamesareannoying wrote:
thanks everyone, this was helpful.
i suppose i need to change the question a little...

how do you focus on making a choice when deciding to start a new army?
what makes you finally decide which idea to go with?

i have the start of a votann army(in the box) already, do i expand on that?

i have a contemptor and 40 mkvi marines lying around that ive been wanting to do something with but what... i have no interest in 30k

ive had an idea of doing a chaos marine list but using 30k mechanicus units as a dark mechanicus army... do i pick up on that idea and run?

i also want to start a gravis marine army

all of these thoughts plus i want to get a leviathan dread haha

@lord_blackfang - thats crazy... lol


Automatically Appended Next Post:
i realize that this is an odd topic and ultimately its up to me but i think talking stuff out loud helps sometimes.

A lot depends on why I’m starting an army. Normally it’s because something speaks to me. Either gameplay/style, Lore, or minis.

When I started my Eldar it was a mix. The Falcon was the hook. I’m a sucker for grav tanks. But they also played way different then my Ultras. Fast moving, hard hitting, but fragile. Collecting them fit that theme. Start with the tanks, get some passengers. Add bikes. Look at what else needs to be added to make a viable force.

Tyranids were more of a lore draw, with play being secondary. They are a counter to the Ultras, with the evocative battle of macragge. Snow based both armys. Also they are my horde army. I wanted the typical hordes of gribbles, with a few monsters/synapse to back them up.

I’ve just started Necrons. They are a “why not?” army. I have 2 copies of their side of the Indominus box. So what would it take to make that a full army? Not much. I added a doomstalker (so I could field the CP) Will eventually add the nightbringer. But I wanted them to call back to the classic 2nd/3rd ed silver tide. I don’t like most of their vehicles. So any support is going to be from destroyers are the tripod walkers. Might be shooting myself in the foot, competitively, but that’s OK. I just want a fun TAC army that looks cool to me and is reasonably balanced. Odds are by the time I get it up and running we’ll be in 11th, so not bothering to get the codex. Rules change, but models (mostly) endure.

My Soulblight was a modern re-do of my old WHFB 5-6th ed undead list. I wanted to get new shiny sculpts to bring an old army to a new world. Playing in a Path to Glory league helped motivate me to get it done. Got 2k painted in half a year, which is crazy. Still some odds and ends to finish.

 usernamesareannoying wrote:
thanks everyone, this was helpful.
i suppose i need to change the question a little...

how do you focus on making a choice when deciding to start a new army?
what makes you finally decide which idea to go with?

i have the start of a votann army(in the box) already, do i expand on that?

i have a contemptor and 40 mkvi marines lying around that ive been wanting to do something with but what... i have no interest in 30k

ive had an idea of doing a chaos marine list but using 30k mechanicus units as a dark mechanicus army... do i pick up on that idea and run?

i also want to start a gravis marine army

all of these thoughts plus i want to get a leviathan dread haha

@lord_blackfang - thats crazy... lol


Automatically Appended Next Post:
i realize that this is an odd topic and ultimately its up to me but i think talking stuff out loud helps sometimes.

What do you want to PLAY?

If you don't want to play 30k, it really doesn't matter that you already have some 30k stuff lying around. You should really try to offload them, unless you want to repurpose the stuff as Chaos Marines. Is a Chaos Marine army something you want to play or is it just an excuse to buy the 30k Mechanicus models you think are neat? I think one of the hardest things about cool models in large scale wargames is that while its really easy to feel like you need a whole army to justify it. If you want a Leviathan it might just be best to pick one up as a hobby project. Trying to find an army to justify purchasing it is how you buy a hundred models to own the one you want.

As an example, lets talk about my Knights. I bought a Knight pretty early on for ally purposes, then got one of those discount boxes because I had a Knight already and it doesn't take much to own a Knight army, right? The thing is, I didn't actually want to PLAY a Knight army so I just ended up with a few redundant big models that sat on my shelf and a feeling that I needed to keep the army updated in case I'd want to play it. I finally decided I needed to decide what it would take for me to want to actually play a Knight army and decided the answer was Chaos. I didn't have a Chaos army and their more aggressive style fit better with the feeling of a kaiju army for me. Now that I've found something I want to PLAY, my Knights have gotten far more attention than they did for all the years they sat on the shelf.

No matter how much you want to own a cool toy, its not worth building an army around unless you want to play that army. It's alright to buy something because its cool and you want to paint it to paint and display it, but don't start an army to justify the purchase unless playing that army is the primary motive.

I like the topic! I definitely have this cycle where I get really excited about an idea, do a pile of work, and then stop.

I tend to make a plan for a season or so of hobbying, where I think "Autumn and Winter are gonna be Sci Fi for me" and then I'll get myself interested by listening to some audiobooks, looking at art and making terrain for that genre. That tends to lead to me getting excited about one of my dormant sci fi projects and so I'll go and dig it out and get going on it. I'll often get a lot of work done on it and then hit a slump (usually related to having real life stuff I need to do that eats into available time) and then stop. I'll then go fallow for ages, and on that project maybe even for years, before picking it up again.

I think the key to finishing is to get over that slump and then keep going on the project even when you initially have lost momentum. Play a game with that faction, read a book, look at pictures or just knuckle down and do some work on them and usually the embers of excitement will rekindle.

This year I got motivated to clear my 40K backlog a bit, and painted a load of tyranids. Then for practical reasons I switched to trying to get loads of in box stuff built to condense things because I was shifting a bunch of my collection to make space for a nursery in our flat.

That lead to me getting enthusiastic about my Mantic models that had been sat on sprue for close to a decade and then looking at the rules to Firefight and Deadzone, and getting really into both of them. So my current project is to get some small forces done for a few factions there, enough for small games of Firefight and Deadzone.

But of course, at Christmas I was hit with the nostalgia bug for Mechwarrior randomly, went and looked at trying to get Mechwarrior 2 running on my PC, gave up and bought Mechwarrior 5 on sale, and then got really excited about the Battletech universe, and now I've bought some battletech stuff. Sigh.

So I'm committed to finishing both projects now, and Firefight has to come first. Luckily, once I sat down and built some stuff, my interest came back and now I'm eager to keep going with painting.

Honestly that's a lot harder question to answer, at least for me at any rate.

Like I said I jump around projects and there are times I get really into one and go ham on it and finish it. Sometimes I get a big burst of energy, get a bunch done but it fizzles out.

Here's a good example, over the last 5-6 years or so I've been all over ebay looking for Old metal dwarf models because I want to put together a dwarf army 100% metal. Last January I managed to get the final pieces I needed to build out a full 2000pts. Now this was a project for a 6th edition army as that is my favourite edition, but after checking what I had I realised I could use it for Old World. That put a spark in me to get everything together, base it and get movement trays for it. Ultimately leading to this:



Led by King Kazador himself, the Throng of Karak Azul was built! Hell everything is even magnetized which was annoying in itself when trying to figure out a way of getting it to work with the Old World spaced movement trays.

With it all together I painted exactly 6 models then....nothing since then. The motivational spark was gone and I moved on to other things. Right now I'm on a kick to finish a unit I built all the way back in 2009. Maybe I'll get back to it, who knows? Hell maybe I'll just grab a Dwarf and start painting and the motivation will return.

This is a very long winded way of saying I have no idea how to get motivation. Sometimes you just gotta force it.

 usernamesareannoying wrote:

how do you focus on making a choice when deciding to start a new army?
what makes you finally decide which idea to go with?

 usernamesareannoying wrote:
i have a contemptor and 40 mkvi marines lying around that ive been wanting to do something with but what... i have no interest in 30k

+

 usernamesareannoying wrote:
all of these thoughts plus i want to get a leviathan dread haha

Well, those two things right there = a SM (40k) project....
Just because a kit says Horus Heresy doesn't make it useless in 40k. Marines are Marines & those two dreadnoughts have perfectly viable Legends rules.


As for how I pick my next project? I go with whatever inspires me. Often with some sort of narrative in mind. Sometimes just a goofy idea.

Ex #1: AdMech - narrative.
Back in sept/oct I knew the one shop was planning to run an Armageddon Crusade.
So I'm looking at stuff on my shelves, and I'm considering the skill lv of the likely opponents (fairly low - if I were to bring the Guard force I just played in the other shops Crusade it'd be akin to clubbing seals), and I've got some misc kits of admech, GSC, etc that've collected over the years, mostly for other conversion projects that haven't happened for whatever reason. So I go looking into those rules & lists. Anything that inspires me in there?
Yes!
In the AdMech list there's a Legends entry for a named Servitor (X101 from Blackstone Fortress). That's awesome! I can lead an army with a SERVITOR! That's exactly the weird type of thing I like to do!
So X101, + 3 Battleclades (already own 1 for KT), +3 units of Servitors (conveniently I have 3 squads that just lost there GK entry).
Ok, that's the core. Though it's not very pts heavy....
Now add in the misc Admech stuff I've already got - a flyer (originally bought to loot for my Orks), 20 Skittari (Vanguards? Rangers? Really just 20 bodies with 2 different types of rifles bought out of the used case) I use them as Titan Guard in 30k v3), a pair of Onagers (also slated for Ork looting). And a whole lot of industrial terrain/fortifications - landing pads, Frag Drills, bunkers, Void shield Generators, gun emplacements....
I've also got several Termite Drills.
So I settled on making an AdMech mining outpost, staffed largely by Servitors & a few "security" units (the 20 Skitari, the Onagers, a pair of skatros snipers as sentries, and 3 Marshals {to "pilot" the Termites since they're dedicated transports}) a Tech Priest, and things you'd envision at such a place. So a couple of Dune Riders, the Termites, the flyer + a Frag Drill (okd by the Crusade runner) & landing pad.
I also have 6 Kastellans - though I don't really feel they fit the theme. I might end up replacing them with Kataphrons in phase II of the campaign as they look more like industrial mecha.
Painting these guys is just a slow metalic slog thanks to all the little bits & details. They probably won't be finished until after the Crusade wraps up.

Ex #2: SM (Blood Angels/Flesh Tearers) - goofy idea.
The other shop I play at is running an Escalation League. For this one? I decided to do something silly. Because the rules (and collection) allow me to.
So a while back I was browsing through the SM roster.... And I was struck by just how many different data sheets there are for Captains. I wondered how many pts they'd all tally up to....
YES, you can spend every single pt + some on nothing but Captains. As BA you can easily exceed 2k.
So I decided to run this silliness for the Escalation.
Well, our League is using a Rule of 2 for anything that's not Battleline or Dedicated Transports. So I top out around 1500something pts for Captains.
Oh well, I guess I can be talked into adding 2 Land Raiders & a Drop Pod...
Fielding this is easy. I've got plenty of Marines that can be used as various Captains (I had to buy a Phobos & 2 Gravis)
and I should be able to have them all painted up by the end of the League.

Painting: M-W evenings - one evening I'll paint some AdMech, another evening I'll paint some SMs. The plan is to paint all 3 evenings, but it usually works out to only 2/3.

 usernamesareannoying wrote:
thanks everyone, this was helpful.
i suppose i need to change the question a little...

how do you focus on making a choice when deciding to start a new army?
what makes you finally decide which idea to go with?

i have the start of a votann army(in the box) already, do i expand on that?

i have a contemptor and 40 mkvi marines lying around that ive been wanting to do something with but what... i have no interest in 30k

ive had an idea of doing a chaos marine list but using 30k mechanicus units as a dark mechanicus army... do i pick up on that idea and run?

i also want to start a gravis marine army

all of these thoughts plus i want to get a leviathan dread haha

@lord_blackfang - thats crazy... lol


Automatically Appended Next Post:
i realize that this is an odd topic and ultimately its up to me but i think talking stuff out loud helps sometimes.

Pick one and put the rest as far away from you as you can (Garage, basement, etc). Sometimes it helps to just have one thing within reach.