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Flashman wrote:I agree your point is valid Luna, but as others have noted, your painted stuff looks great, so it's bemusing to hear you don't enjoy painting

But that's not really fair, for example, a tall athletic person wouldn't necessarily enjoy basketball, maybe they like go karts which are
absolutely bad because they probably wouldn't fit, but in their mind go karts > basketball

I prefer to play with a painted army, and will plan my lists for the local tournament around the painted models in my collection. If i have an unpainted unit i feel the list needs it becomes my next grandiose painting project, in order to make the list

If i were to field my orks i'd HAVE to take some unpainted models, as i have about 500 pts of my 18000 or so actually painted. My necrons are about 2/3 nicely painted to 1/3 poorly painted previous paintjob that is being upgraded

My Dark Eldar are being run unpainted right now, as i'm still thrashing out what scheme i want to paint them.


I have no issue with playing against an unpainted army. I vastly prefer playing against a painted one for aesthetic pleasure, but the game is more important than the paintjob, to me. Some of the nicest painted armies i've played against were run by utter WAAC TFG's too, so looks aren't everything


I'm a glacially slow painter, with minimal artistic talent. I can paint to a decent quality, but it takes me a long time per model (about 2 days per ork boy) to get that quality.

It doesn't help that i have severe nerve damage in both hands, periodic tremors if i hold them in one position too long and a dodgy spine that limits my ability to paint for long periods (though good painkillers can help if i'm in a pinting mood..).

I also have only about an hour per night to myself, between work and kids.

I will get them all painted. This is carven (slowly and shakily) in stone. It will probably take about a decade.

Theduke07 wrote:

LunaHound wrote:

Irdiumstern wrote:Painting is the most boring, painful, and slow part of the entire hobby for me. I much prefer converting and playing, and I'd rather not waste time on painting.

Exactly, not only is painting time consuming and not fun, it LOWERS the resale value.
So logically speaking, why would i put effort into something counter productive?

Lowers resale value? Why buy them at all if you're only worried about the value you can hawk them for later?

Because you are ignoring the collecting and gaming aspect.

mikhaila wrote:

LunaHound wrote:

Irdiumstern wrote:Painting is the most boring, painful, and slow part of the entire hobby for me. I much prefer converting and playing, and I'd rather not waste time on painting.

Exactly, not only is painting time consuming and not fun, it LOWERS the resale value.
So logically speaking, why would i put effort into something counter productive?

Logically speaking, skip buying the figures altogether, and invest the money elsewhere. )

Why? i enjoy collecting, gaming and modelling ( ok kit bashing since i suck at this lol )

Phototoxin wrote:

LunaHound wrote:

Irdiumstern wrote:Painting is the most boring, painful, and slow part of the entire hobby for me. I much prefer converting and playing, and I'd rather not waste time on painting.

Exactly, not only is painting time consuming and not fun, it LOWERS the resale value.
So logically speaking, why would i put effort into something counter productive?

Because I'm playing a game I love and not treating my armies as a FOTM MtG deck to be chopped and changed at every opportunity?

And how do you judge to what you perceive as FOTM army? Because its not painted is that all? Atleast give GW some credit that their launch are effective ;P
wow cool yakface added FOTM i proposed.

Delephont wrote:Are you serious? There are three ways in which you can sell your army on the second hand market:

And which of the 3 ways do i fit into? If you think my efforts can fetch anything worthwhile of my time, i'll be brave and say this.
I WILL sell you my painted stuff for the prices you claim i can get. The way i do things, isn't it just so cool :3

Anyways, the majority of the quotes im responding to have 1 thing in common.
They put painting as top first reason for warhammering over all the other reasons. Which is not fair and certainly not true ( according to the poll )

Of course because everything is a personal preference, i fully understand ( and agree ) that painted armies are more fun to look at
and certainly adds another element of excitement during a game.
I only wanted OP to know that there are various reasons to why an army is not painted, and he doesn't really have to hate it as much.

Message brought to you by LunaHound from Im ok with you not painting your little gray men Mafia

LunaHound wrote:

Flashman wrote:I agree your point is valid Luna, but as others have noted, your painted stuff looks great, so it's bemusing to hear you don't enjoy painting

But that's not really fair, for example, a tall athletic person wouldn't necessarily enjoy basketball, maybe they like go karts which are
absolutely bad because they probably wouldn't fit, but in their mind go karts > basketball

I dunno, generally speaking you get good at something because you enjoy doing it.

However, I admit that enjoying painting miniatures doesn't necessarily mean you would want to paint an entire army of them. My local GW manager doesn't own a painted army. He just likes painting single miniatures.

jbunny wrote:Not sure if your joking or not, but maybe instead of them only doing a half ass job, maybe life got in the way and they had to stop painting a bit. Maybe it takes a while to get that level of detail and so it's play with half painted models, or not play for a year.

Obviously you missed the part where I said it gives the appearance of a slack job.

I prefer the appearance of an unpainted army to a half-painted army. But frankly, I'm happy just to play.

biccat wrote:

jbunny wrote:Not sure if your joking or not, but maybe instead of them only doing a half ass job, maybe life got in the way and they had to stop painting a bit. Maybe it takes a while to get that level of detail and so it's play with half painted models, or not play for a year.

Obviously you missed the part where I said it gives the appearance of a slack job.

I prefer the appearance of an unpainted army to a half-painted army. But frankly, I'm happy just to play.

And thats the difference in us. You see the negative "He's slacking", and I see the positive "Wow that's going to look great once he finishes" I'm glad I see the positive in things and not the negative on trivial things like painted toys.

LunaHound wrote:

If you're only worried about the re-sale values you're either in the wrong hobby

There is nothing wrong with buying warhammer for gaming and collecting.
Of course this still falls under "everyone have a different opinion of why they are into warhammer" .
Please review yakface's poll thread to see that painting is NOT the only reason people are into warhammer.
Please accept this truth even if you think painting is the SOLE reason for some of you.

As i stated, painting is a hassle, this is a personal opinion, if i can game without painting them, i'll be happy with that.
As i stated putting in time to make a mini presentable is time and effort consuming, and it doesn't always fetch a good price ( in direct comparison of time spent ).
What i painted i can only sell at MSRP value which averages something like $5 earned per hour.

Hence is why i don't like painting my minis, which i'll state over and over again will not apply to most of you that ENJOYS painting.

Luna, don't bother trying to use logic or explaining how you enjoy your hobby to a bunch of closed-minded people who insist on defining your hobby for you. You won't change their minds. Just keep on enjoying your hobby the way you choose to do so, and let the high horses pat themselves on the back for painting their armies.

sourclams wrote:

JeneralJoe117 wrote:If you're only worried about the re-sale values you're either in the wrong hobby, or the wrong army. You buy this hyper expensive, legal crack because it's fun, not because you want to make a few quid selling it on.

How in the world can you make that statement when GW flip-flops on whatever makes a good army with nearly every codex as the metagame shifts?

If you pimped out your Space Marines in 4th ed, you probably had a bunch of footslogging tactical marines with las cannons and plasma guns in minimum squads.

Then you probably moved to Land Raiders and TH/SS Terminators once 4th ed came out, and then you probably moved to lots of light mech with razorbacks, dakka dreads, predators, and maybe one Land Raider with a TH/SS squad and/or speeders. That is, if you didn't jump onto the SW or BA bandwagon with their 'new and different but better' marines.

GW in many ways forces players to 'churn' through models in their release cycles by making the 'new' the 'best'. For players that don't want to simply sit upon gigantic stockpiles of models, wanting to retain resale value in order to sell gently used and buy newer isn't something that one can really criticize.

Truth be told I don't play the game out of a need to win. I play vanilla marine. I could play BA or SW and be better, but I don't. I like my army and I don't feel the need to flip-flop for the sake of winning.

Personally I would like to see people at least put some colours on their models. Even slowly. Just my view.
On the flip side lets say little johnny goes past GW, sees the staff painted models and thinks wow I wanna do that! Buys an army, buys the brushes, gets the paints, sits down aaaaaaaaaaaaand...
Yeah, comes out a multicoloured blob.
Some people get disheartened, and don't want to show off the models they painted, not even for a game, so just use em grey.
I can understand that, but still, just looks nicer. End of the day up to people what they do with the insanely priced plastic/resin/metal they bought with their cash.

augustus5 wrote:

LunaHound wrote:

If you're only worried about the re-sale values you're either in the wrong hobby

There is nothing wrong with buying warhammer for gaming and collecting.
Of course this still falls under "everyone have a different opinion of why they are into warhammer" .
Please review yakface's poll thread to see that painting is NOT the only reason people are into warhammer.
Please accept this truth even if you think painting is the SOLE reason for some of you.

As i stated, painting is a hassle, this is a personal opinion, if i can game without painting them, i'll be happy with that.
As i stated putting in time to make a mini presentable is time and effort consuming, and it doesn't always fetch a good price ( in direct comparison of time spent ).
What i painted i can only sell at MSRP value which averages something like $5 earned per hour.

Hence is why i don't like painting my minis, which i'll state over and over again will not apply to most of you that ENJOYS painting.

Luna, don't bother trying to use logic or explaining how you enjoy your hobby to a bunch of closed-minded people who insist on defining your hobby for you. You won't change their minds. Just keep on enjoying your hobby the way you choose to do so, and let the high horses pat themselves on the back for painting their armies.

I didn't say 'YOU MUST PAINT YOUR ARMIES YOU FILZY PIGDOG'. I'm just saying that if you only buy armies, use them until the next FOTM comes out, then sell your armies and move onto the next one, not painting the army because of something as poxy as re-sale value, THAT seems a little strange to me. Don't think I'm berating your choice, I'm not, I couldn't care less if you paint your plastic fun bits or not.

JeneralJoe117 wrote:

augustus5 wrote:

LunaHound wrote:

If you're only worried about the re-sale values you're either in the wrong hobby

There is nothing wrong with buying warhammer for gaming and collecting.
Of course this still falls under "everyone have a different opinion of why they are into warhammer" .
Please review yakface's poll thread to see that painting is NOT the only reason people are into warhammer.
Please accept this truth even if you think painting is the SOLE reason for some of you.

As i stated, painting is a hassle, this is a personal opinion, if i can game without painting them, i'll be happy with that.
As i stated putting in time to make a mini presentable is time and effort consuming, and it doesn't always fetch a good price ( in direct comparison of time spent ).
What i painted i can only sell at MSRP value which averages something like $5 earned per hour.

Hence is why i don't like painting my minis, which i'll state over and over again will not apply to most of you that ENJOYS painting.

Luna, don't bother trying to use logic or explaining how you enjoy your hobby to a bunch of closed-minded people who insist on defining your hobby for you. You won't change their minds. Just keep on enjoying your hobby the way you choose to do so, and let the high horses pat themselves on the back for painting their armies.

I didn't say 'YOU MUST PAINT YOUR ARMIES YOU FILZY PIGDOG'. I'm just saying that if you only buy armies, use them until the next FOTM comes out, then sell your armies and move onto the next one, not painting the army because of something as poxy as re-sale value, THAT seems a little strange to me. Don't think I'm berating your choice, I'm not, I couldn't care less if you paint your plastic fun bits or not.

Who said non-painters only buy/sell flavor of the month armies?

I prefer to see painted models on the table, but at the end of the day I'm mostly just glad to be having a game. I could say seeing painted models involved in said game is a nice bonus.

As much as i'd like to see a painted army, i can totally understand if its not all painted up! Many opponents i play against are in various stages of completing their respective armies... especially those of us who play horde armies!

What I do hate however is proxies... it just erkz me! But thats another chat for another time/thread!

For anyone just coming into this thread, here is a summary

Person 1: I think you should paint your army and here is why

What person 2 thinks person 1 said: If you don't paint your army you are lazy and not a true gamer and should be spurned!!

Person 2 replies: That element of the hobby is not always for me because ...

What person 1 thinks person 2 said: You painters are arrogant fools who don't understand the hobby!

the conversations seem to escalate from there.

augustus5 wrote: Luna, don't bother trying to use logic or explaining how you enjoy your hobby to a bunch of closed-minded people who insist on defining your hobby for you. You won't change their minds. Just keep on enjoying your hobby the way you choose to do so, and let the high horses pat themselves on the back for painting their armies.

This quote kinda shows how niether 'side' is willing to understand point the other side is trying to make. I think folks are getting offended that anyone thinks that it would be nice if they painted their army when offence was not meant to be given.

I'll admit I have a viewpoint that makes it hard for me to accept a lot of the good reasons not to paint an army. I consider warhammer and GW to be a tiny tiny portion of the hobby and I think others are answering the OPs question from a viewpoint of GW as a hobby in and of itself. I am realizing more and more how different the point system/army building style of gaming is from what I would call scenario based gaming in some respects.

I just don't get why people are willing to pay a fortune for little plastic men with details if they aren't going to assemble and paint them properly - they are made for it after all. If not, why not play a different game where the models you buy are pre painted instead.

I myself like all facets of the Warhammer hobby. I enjoy everything including converting, painting, playing with and reading about them, so it really hurts me when people are just pouring their broken, partly unpainted Orks from a shoe box onto the table opposite me, because that way they clearly show that they don't give a gak about my hobby.

I don't expect people to have their entire armies painted at all times, because some people also have work, education and family, and therefore not enough time to paint it all before playing with it.

I am a student myself, and I don't have the time to fully paint both a fantasy and a 40K army, I would just be happy if people would at least try to paint their army to a table top standard if they have the time, because it would really improve this lovely hobby for everyone.

I like unpainted armies, it makes it easy to spot the people who aren't worth playing! You're not the only one op!

Painting armies is work. It's not done solely for personal enjoyment, it's also done to share in a community, and specifically with an opponent, and possibly spectators. The idea, that 'I don't like work, and for me the hobby is just play' is just a flacid excuse for being undisciplined. Go play a PC, console, board or card game then, there's loads of Warhammer ones now! Painting is clearly an important part of the hobby.

I wont play people with unpainted armies.

I never play anything unpainted.

Unpainted armies are why I have essentially abandoned Privateer Press games (even in PP sanctioned events), usually those people can't even paint 3 models much less the 75 or so needed for 40k. That is truly pathetic.

I don't care what other people do for fun, especially in their own space but in stores and in public, it's a terrible showing. To the op, you are right, it's frustrating, but know the world is peopled with peasants, and you are not one of them, or alone, KEEP PAINTING Brother!

Augustus wrote:The idea, that 'I don't like work, and for me the hobby is just play' is just a flacid excuse for being undisciplined. Go play a PC, console, board or card game then, there's loads of Warhammer ones now! Painting is clearly an important part of the hobby.

Different priorities dictate different out comes. One cannot use one's priority to judge one's discipline.
For example, we can't say a Physicist is lacking discipline because they arn't as familiar at the subject of biology as a Bio Chemist.
And we cant say a Bio Chemist is lacking discipline if they don't share the same amount of knowledge in physics field as a Physicist.

This is the fundamental flaw in our logic in how we judge wild animals. And why we perceive pets to be "smarter"...
When the honest reason is, they can afford to do more different things when their top priority isn't the bare minimum survival which takes all their effort.

LunaHound wrote:

Augustus wrote:The idea, that 'I don't like work, and for me the hobby is just play' is just a flacid excuse for being undisciplined. Go play a PC, console, board or card game then, there's loads of Warhammer ones now! Painting is clearly an important part of the hobby.

Different priorities dictate different out comes. One cannot use one's priority to judge one's discipline.
For example, we can't say a Physicist is lacking discipline because they arn't as familiar at the subject of biology as a Bio Chemist.
And we cant say a Bio Chemist is lacking discipline if they don't share the same amount of knowledge in physics field as a Physicist.

This is the fundamental flaw in our logic in how we judge wild animals. And why we perceive pets to be "smarter"...
When the honest reason is, they can afford to do more different things when their top priority isn't the bare minimum survival which takes all their effort.

There's also a fundamental flaw in using phyicists and wild animals to prove some point about not painting warhams. I'd always thing an animal in wild to be much smarter than something domesticated. As for Physicists, I've yet to get one to balance a ball on his nose properly.

First These "kids" are 2-4 years younger than you, that makes you a "kid" to most of us as well. Not really an issue but you need to understand the difference in free time a younger person will have vs someone at University or in the job market.

Second The hobby means different things to different people. I for instance prefer the following aspects of the hobby in this order. 1 Building and converting 2. Collecting 3. Playing 4 painting.

Third My biggest pet peeve in gaming is seeing poorly painted or badly assembled miniatures, followed by proxies like lego men or paper cutouts, and then having to ask what the ig unit is standing in as.

I love seeing a game one a great table with 2 well painted armies however when that is not an option I would much rather see a horde of gray that is WYSIWYG and assembled right.

Whats odd to me is that people get so hostel about this and other similar issues in this hobby. It doesn't make new people like my self very interested in looking for games.

First its you can't play with anything not painted or its you cant if its half painted even though your showing visual progress in painting your army.

Not to mention your not allowed to play test units by using proxies before you buy the unit. Anything else. Is it alright if i pay with my debit card or should i use cash (joke)

I mean really is it that important. This is why i really only play with one person every once in a while. I'm looking for fun with someone who has similar interests as me. so we can talk and i can get advice about modeling and painting tips. Not somebody can use me as his verbal punching bag/ nerd rage at me becuase he can't properly deal with other people in a social setting.

I only hate unpainted models on the tabletop if they're mine.

Its pretty simple. If you don't want to, just don't play against someone.

But I don't see the point of getting hostile about how someone else enjoys the hobby.

In this economy I am all for testing units before you commit to buying. In my local area we have some people still using Lego men, and coke cans on cardboard bases (dreadnaughts) since 4th ed. way not cool. Test out stand ins for a week or two. not months or years.

This is more the rule than the exception.

Which is sad, I love seeing painted armies go at it.

Warhammer... is a hobby built on ideas and dreams.
The dreams of everyone playing with nice painted diorama scenic movement tray armies....

The reality.... your GW is built upon the variety of customers... which includes collectors
gamers, or friends that just want to hang out.

Your warhammer no longer belongs to a certain group, its foundation and success is built upon countless others.

Wait, am i talking about creation of United States of America or warhammer?
But... im telling you its not so different :3

Not years no but i only get paid once a month and i only buget about 60 dollars US a month so i may not be able to buy them right away depending on the unit.

I'm not hostile at anyone it just seems strange that people through out so much hate in a game/hobby thats what 15yrs old.

All that does is shrink the player pool. which may or may not matter to some people, but for me i live in a smaller town/ area so the player base is very small for me. This area is very dominated by MTG which is fun but not really my thing.

NOW WAIT JUST A MINUTE HERE FELLOWS!!! You mean to tell me that after spending tremendous amounts of time & energy on painting ALL of my minis, that it is perfectly 'OK' to walk in to the FLGS and plunk down minis that are not even primered!?!?! WHO KNEW?!?!?

I dont believe i said anything specific about FLGS. I was commenting on finding a game period.

Yep! Love and Tolerance for ALL.
especially we are all brought together with a common preference.
That is warhammer!

obsidianaura wrote:Maybe you should just play tourneys where they have a rule that armies must be painted.

GW always used to say you could only play games in their shops with painted minis. Last I heard it was there must be visible progress on your army from last time but that was ages ago so it may have changed. I prefer my independant store and haven't been to GW in years.

Shock and horror that GW wants something other than the green of money in their stores. I always believed that gw loves bare plastic grey because the more you see of it means somebody keeps buying more and more kits. While most corporate headquarters have soothing colors on their walls they have interns painting everything bare plastic grey because it looks like green to them.

While I have fielded my share of grey armies I am starting to adopt the idea that a painted mini plays better. Since starting in warmachine I have found this to be true more often than not.