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After years of playing dawn of war, I finally convinced my one friend to make the jump into the hobby. He is starting Tau, depsite their disadvantage of having an outdated codex, I think this was a decent decision on his part being that tau unit point values with keep the costs down and painting Tau is terribly daunting. However my other friend is expressing a strong interest in the imperial guard (more specifically Vostroyans and FW Death korps of Krieg). I love the IG they're really cool, but i don't think it is the best army for him to start with. Mostly because of the price, he wants to do a gunline style list with lots of leman russ tanks, also painting all those guardsmen will get tedious. I am just afraid that like $200 in he decides that it isnt worth the time or effort cause he barely has 1000 pts and while me and my other friend are playing games, going to cons and tournaments he is stuck at the painting table and watching his bank account rapidly deplete. I was hoping someone who plays IG could offer some advice on how to get into playing them and keep focus building the army or if anyone has any suggestions of which way I can try to push him to make the army more affordable and manageable. (I though an allied daemonhunters approach would help cut costs).

Mech IG armies may leviate the painting problems, but not cost. You jsut have to paint scores of vehicles (roughly 5 or so for a 1000 point game, add on two or three more for a 1500 point one, and so on) which is alot easier than painting individual troopers, and all you need really are the basic core troop choices and an HQ (a single battleforce can solve this problem as it contains 2 infantry squads and a Command Squad, which you can use as your company command squad and two veteran squads). Mech IG armies are also very competitive, as Mech Armies are in general. If he likes Vostroyans or DKoK, just buy two standard squads and a command squad (he should have these already) and fill out the rest with vehicles (Russes and Artileries are best, maybe a few Hellhound and/or it's variants for clearing out horde armies and Cover Save peoplez). Cost will still be an issue, as tanks dont come cheaply, but it should make painting easier.

Thanks, I just hope that he can get past sticker shock, which deters many people from this hobby I'm sure.

Ebay and painting the models either in mass or one at a time help.

For example, today, only paint rifles on all your IG models, tomorrow, paint all the hats.

Ebay. It saves lives...but more often bank accounts.

Also choose a simplistic paint scheme and take advantage of colored primers or spray guns to coat the entire army at once. My Nid army numbers close to 400 infantry models alone (not counting MCs and Termie-sized models) and I basecoat them all in Yellow first (since that's the color of their skin), which saves me almost a full day's worth of time as now I only need to wash and highlight the flesh (it takes roughly 1 hour for me to finish one model, which includes basecoating the skin, washing it, and highlighting it. Then basecoating the carapace and highlighting that, then a final quick job on the teeth. This just cut my entire workload by 1/6th of the time.

I don't think ebay is gonna too much of a help in this situation, i just hope my friend doesn't get turned off to the hobby cause its gonna take a lot of time and money, i really don't wanna become the owner of more half finished armies lol. Thanks for the paint scheme ideas mechaemperor i honestly wouldnt have thought of that.

Make sure he is aware that his army is particularly expensive and tedious. Yet it pays off because it is competitive. But the point you bring up that he might lose interested because it is too daunting of a task. This is true, I convinced my uncle to start playing and he liked Imperial Guard. So I got him started off with two battle forces, some ratlings and a basilisk. Turned out he hated assembling them so I had to assemble his army for him. But by that time he didn't want to paint and he had decided he didn't have time for the game. So now we have an army sitting in the corner that I have no interest in playing and he wasted over 200 bucks. He didn't even get to enjoy the experience of playing a game.

I suggest that if your friend does not seem to be interested in the modeling and painting aspect of the hobby tell him to be cautious. Because if you are not interested in modeling and painting, it's pretty tough to stay interested long enough to get to the point where you can play fun games.

Hit up Craigslist, you can find great deals there.

Ebay is good, especially for 60-70 dollar battleforces. When painting men, do 10 at a time in an assembly line. And do small games at first so he can play what he has. Combat patrol rules are a blast. Don't forget you can always proxy models too.

Right.

You don't have to buy a 1500 points army on day one. Buy a tank and some troops, paint them and play some games.

Buy another unit. Paint it. Add it to your army list. Slow and steady, man.

Edit: Sorry. I forgot to add. Good luck, and welcome to the hobby!

A guard army doesn't have to have a lot of guardsmen.

My 2K list only has 56 guardsmen.

But it can be expensive. I'd suggest that you encourage him to work out a full army list for the points that you're aiming for and cost out the whole project. Some armies are dramatically more expensive than others.

If he sees what the final price will be and is happy with that then better for him to have an army that inspires him than one which he isn't enthused about but was cheaper.

Also have a aim for his army. I currently own at least one model from every single army in large part due to being indecisive in the beginning, resulting in a huge number of purchases on eBay and ending up with a grab bag of junk that dont really work well together, resulting in me needing to shell out more money for more troops.

MechaEmperor7000 wrote:Also have a aim for his army. I currently own at least one model from every single army in large part due to being indecisive in the beginning, resulting in a huge number of purchases on eBay and ending up with a grab bag of junk that dont really work well together, resulting in me needing to shell out more money for more troops.

Really? I don't see how you ended up buying one model from every army... that's crazy dude. I'm picturing in my head it went something like this. "Oh I'll play Orks". Buy a battleforce. "Nah I'll play guard". Buy a tank. "Nah I'll play chaos". Buy a daemon prince. "Nah I'll play space marines because those land raiders are uber cool". Buy a land raider. etc etc

I totally understand how you could own a little bit of every army, i started playing 40k when i was like 12 and bought whatever i thought was cool, i currently have about 2500pts of space marines, about 1000 of it in boxes, a small eldar force, some tyranid warriors and 40 genestealers (all space hulk ones? lol) some tau stealth suits and firewarriors. Yes an aim is very important lol or else you'll lose yourself in a pile of useless mini's