Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Having a boring day and were just wondering how people build their armies. I realized that since the community is huge there got to be a lot of different ways people use to build their armies to their liking. I like to build my armies after my own lore but the same time trying to make them feel realistic so my Orc WAAAAGH Thog(fantasy) is not composed of just a lot of units but of Thogs raidurz (a mob of boar boyz and orc chariots), Burzags Fighturz (2 orc mobs and 1 black orc mob), the stabby hooded tribe (2 night goblin mobs and lots of artillery and squigs) and last the Horde of the steppe (goblin wolf riders and savage orc boar boyz).

All my armies have a similar structure divided into different groups and the all have their own leader with my general commanding those characters with maybe some supporting characters not belonging to a tribe or regiment. Some of these armies get a lot of backstory for me (how Thog united these different tribes) while others just exist (my empire army just have different regiments).

So how do you build your army? Do you do as I do or do you collect what you like, what is a challenge or enjoyable to paint or do you have some other way? Please tell so that we all can have a little more fun and maybe get our own ideas for how to build our armies.

Heavy construction equipment is not essential.
A little glue and primer and you're good to go.

I started collecting my Dwarf army a few figures at a time. When it seemed like I had enough, I made a list up for what I had. I added a few figures here and there where needed. Eventually I started just painting whatever I felt like and adding it in, subdividing into individual regiments when there were enough figures. Last time I totaled it up there were 4000+ points without any runes or Characters.

This is not the best way to do it.

It really depends! Sometimes if I really like the look of a single miniature or unit I'll get that and then possibly add some more units to build up an army.

My most recent FoW army was a splurge of about £100 or so - had a firm idea in mind what I wanted, made the army list up, and then bought it all online at the same time from about 4-5 different manufacturers. Including paints for it, decals, even a little dice tin (with German Heer-themed dice).

But, a lot depends on what system I'm buying for. I'm making up a War of the Roses army at the moment which I've built a core of some Perry miniatures for as well as some of their metals, but will add to over time. And, a new force for Infinity which I'm starting with just a 'starter box' set, but haven't actually made any army lists or thought about what I want to add to it, other than just looking at the miniatures I like!

 The Green one wrote:
So how do you build your army?

I like broad categories and then alternating between them. Every army in different games are going to be different, but I find categories tend to jump out. They can be super broad like infantry and vehicle, or maybe being a bit more specific will work better. So I might paint up some anti-tank infantry and then go for a transport. And then maybe a regular infantry squad that is about shooting. Then maybe a combat vehicle like a tank or tank destroyer. With historicals and fantasy it can get even easier. Especially in ancients where you might have infantry, heavy and light, cavalry heavy and light, artillery and then some specific stuff like chariots or elephants or whatever i unique about the army in question.

So I figure out categories and then just alternate between them until I have a game worthy force and then I play it and see what I should make next based on that.

In the case of my IG, I see a massive pile of kits for sale, get a discount voucher to add to that, and fill the trolley.
After that, it depends on the standard types of list, like mech, blob, scouty, etc. A couple of priest-like add-ons sneak in there along the way.

As for my Eldar and SM, it's what the army needs, like drop pods or Warp Spiders.

My Ultramarines started as a chance to paint something a different color and slowly snowballed up from there. At some point I decided to make the push for a full battle company. At this point I add things that look cool or units that would be useful on the table.

A lot of my armies start as an idea or a theme. My re-booted Eldar force is Saim-hann. My goal to to keep everything hovering off the ground. Bikes, grav tanks, etc. Getting dirt on your boots is for lesser races. There will be some foot troops disembarking, mostly aspects. The whole army was started with the release of the Falcon grav tank. So sexy, I needed to own it.

My old undead force started as “rot-fee”. All clean skeletons, some ancient cadavers in the form of wights and vampires. No ghouls, zombies, etc. While I did eventually add some (carrion) the overall theme of my army switch to undead bretonians. More or less blood dragons before they were a thing.

A chunk of my chaos army was collected under the retinue rules. This was when you took a character, and then needed to take at least the same amount of points in troops as their retinue. Some of my characters at the time were based on my group’s rolemaster campaign that recently wrapped up (like the desert nomad and his mounted marauder troops) or conversions “When witch elves go bad” with Jain Zar leading howling banshees converted to fantasy.

#1: Do I want to paint all of the options?
#2: Are there tough ladies in the army?
#3: Are there pointy ears anywhere (and if not, could I add some)?
#4: Read all the rules over and over again and agonize over what will work and what won't and just give up frustrated and tired and throw it down all cobbled together cuz feth strategy.

I'm a sucker for starter sets. Even if I never play the game, it's another rulebook to pour over, two new armies to collect and paint, and a completely different aesthetic (whether scale, setting, race, or combination thereof) to enrich the display cabinet... assuming I ever get them built and painted, that is.

I started with AoBR and expanded both armies primarily with whatever I could find cheap on Ebay. For the orks, that meant more boys, a trukk, and some PK arms to convert the included nobs (this was 5th ed, after all - you couldn't not take can openers wherever possible and I still entertained the idea of playing... plus, they looked cool). For the SM, it was mostly vehicles, again based on what I could find cheap on Ebay.

Seeing how those two collections grew and my painting pace didn't come anywhere close to matching my rate of acquisition, I changed tactics, ever so slightly. I still wasn't playing, so I began thinking that more small armies was better - I could revisit one and expand it with more direction if I ever wanted to game with it.

I now hunt for deals, exclusively, grabbing a new system's starter box or army lots when they're cheap. Also expanded into self-contained miniature boardgames, for similar reasons. That's how I started FoW (Open Fire!), Mantic sci-fi and fantasy (DKH and Project Pandora, plus a Crazy Christmas grab bag or two), and Infinity (Haqq and Ariadna starter boxes, since the rules were free and Icestorm wasn't even yet conceived). That's how I plan to start Bolt Action, when I find a good deal on a starter set (by then, I'm hoping for a not US vs. Germany set to crop up).

The contents of those nice, cheap bundles, if I like them (which I almost invariably do), guide future deal-hunting. The Mantic grab bag, for example, had a smattering of Marauders, Forge Fathers, and Orcs, but consisted mostly of Dwarves, Undead, and above all else, Elves. Guess which three fantasy armies I'm collecting, which grow every time I've got the funds and a sale crops up on the big unit boxes.


Maybe it's a backlash against rampant 'special snowflake syndrome' or maybe I'm just boring (and crotchety ), but I don't like to make up fluff. I like fluff, mind you, and I can justify anything I put together, in fluff terms, but I don't write my own backstories. I like working within an established (albeit expansive, in many cases) framework, with my creativity directed toward making everything fit in seamlessly. It's why any undead I use must fit the medieval European aesthetic. It's why I insist that scrap-fu is an art and ork machinery must feel plausible (at least in their terms), not just 'rolled in the bits box and greebled some more'. It's why I cringe when people mix mythologies (or, worse yet, ignore them entirely!) while naming Hive Fleets. It's why I chose an existing but obscure (Angels Porphyr - like the scheme, barely any established fluff to weigh me down) SM chapter and will keep things Byzantine, if I name characters or theme a display board.


TLDR: Buy cheap, spread the love (between armies and systems), organize legal units, just in case I ever start playing.

Glue.

I usually rinse the sprue in warm soapy water, then I cut off the parts I want to use. Then I scrape the mold lines, assemble the models, base and decorate the base, finally prime, paint, add decals, and seal.

Thats how I build my armies.

xraytango wrote:
I usually rinse the sprue in warm soapy water, then I cut off the parts I want to use. Then I scrape the mold lines, assemble the models, base and decorate the base, finally prime, paint, add decals, and seal.

Thats how I build my armies.

D

I am positively OCD about that sort of stuff.

One of the things that first drew attention to my painting was how clean the miniatures were.

I would become apoplectic if a miniature had a mold-line showing, or any flash on it.

I also don't assemble most of the models until the parts have been painted.

I tried the 1970's style and tutorial recommendation of leaving the parts on the sprue, and painting them on the sprue, and then cutting them off and touching up before assembling, but the extra work was too fiddly.

I did discover that trimming mold-lines off plastic while they are still on the sprue is WAY easier than trimming the mold-lines after they have been cut off the sprue (I'll get some photos of my few finished Rohirrim Horses to show the effect. There is not a mold line existing, and I was able to cut out the undercuts on the miniatures due to the sculpt for Injection-molding). It took me about ¼ of the time it took a friend who cut his from the sprue first.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To answer the Op....

I use the pre-existing worlds created by others, predominantly.

For Fantasy, this would be Tolkien, Howard (Conan only), Moorcock (Elric only), or Greg Stafford (Glorantha), but primarily Tolkien, since I am recognized among a few professionals as being somewhat knowledgeable in his cosmology, and theology behind the sub creation of Ëa, Arda, and Middle-earth).

For Sci-Fi, I tend to primarily use the Imperium of the game Traveller, but have ventured into the. 12-Colonies of Kobol as per the Ron Moore, 2003 Battlestar Galactica (where I got to go to a viewing held by Moore in. Berkeley, where we grilled him for hours on the mechanisms and cosmology behind the universe). Moore's world of BSG has probably the most realistic space combat in existence (there is a bit of "fixing" the flight of the fighters, but they primarily fly off of an in-world physics programmed into Maya's animation. But the Capital Ship Combat is nearly spot on: Lasers and beam weapons at light second ranges would be useless, and projectiles carrying nukes would be most effective, but even then not a sure thing (The Pegasus has 100 meters of armor around its main belt, and around 20 meters at it's most vulnerable. The poor Galactica has to get by with a belt of only 50 meters and only 15 meters in it's more exposed regions... Although some of its belt armor has been stripped), and ranges would be in the five to thirty mile depth of field.

But... I sometimes use some worlds of Traveller that I created myself back in the 1970's... A set of worlds that exist in the Great. Expanse: Öomed, Cumbri, and Wa...

And... I eventually want to do something for Ghost-in-the-Shell/Kōkaku Kidōtai/攻殻機動隊

Oh... And I do historical.

And as for buying the figures... Whatever grabs my attention is first, usually the core units.

And then the supporting units.

MB

P.S. As for buying the figures... Being a bit OCD' when I wind up with a lot of cash, I tend to buy a lot of expensive figures.

This is how I wound up with all of my FW Epic Tau (I am still trying to get four of the Orcas), and my Thunderbolt Mountain Orcs/Great Goblins. Dropped nearly $1,000 on each... It was painful, but a comforting pain.

In terms of my newest army, Cryx, I was first looking for army lists, casters and how the casters play.
In this case I decided for eAsphyxious and eGoreshade.
Play style is important for me.
The next was core units the casters support like elite cadre.
In this case Banes all the way.
The next decisions were concerned with Warjacks and supporting units and solos.

The next step was buying the models and units and painting them.
Now I'm done with this. But I still need more Banes ...