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Recently I looked over my armies and just thought if it isn’t to many. I have 8 armies in total, 7 fantasy and one 40k. They are

Skaven, about 1500 points

The Empire, maybe 3000 points

Dwarfs, 1000 points

Tomb kings, 750 points

Vampire counts, about 1500 points (lots of stuff extras like zombies).

Chaos dwarfs, 1300 points (forge world)

Orks, 1000 points

Orcs and Goblins, 2000 points

I have sold of parts that I did not enjoy painting or similar. The thing is now I am feeling quilt. It just seems be so many armies and now I am already considering another one (druchi). The quilt is coming from the money invested and my “butterfly” effect (getting interested in one army for about a month then losing interest in it for half a year). My reason for posting this is that I need to vent and get some tips about this. It just takes away part of my joy for the hobby when I am thinking about this. I hope I posted this in the right forum and would eb externally grateful form some help.

TGO

I think it is something that all people suffer from, at one stage or another and to varying degrees. Myself, I am terrible for it and it has only got worse as I have got older because I now have the disposable income that I didn't have in the past to indulge my whims, exacerbated by the fact that I am a very slow painter (and not a very good one either) so I very easily get put off, distracted or discouraged so I often end up leaving projects half-finished for years at a time. The choices as I see it often boil down to:

1). Sell/trade your stuff and pare your collection down to one thing you are interested in.

2). Make peace with yourself and continue working at your own pace perhaps in the knowledge you will never get anything and everything finished.

3). Make a P&M blog or similar on Dakka or an equivalent to help motivate yourself.

4). Try and train yourself to only buy new stuff after you have finished other things. Or perhaps introduce a rule not to play unless it is painted, for example.

Some, all or a combination of the above might help. In my own case, I long since made peace with my conscience that I would probably never finish my collection in my lifetime since I accrue stuff faster than I paint but I am certainly going to have a jolly good go. I now put an army profile article in my forum sig for every finished army I complete. It isn't much but it is at least some motivation to get things done.

What I did, was pick the factions I wanted to do first, put everything else away, and work on it until I've hit a target (1000 points orcs&goblins, and 1000 prs marines). Once that target is hit, I can either continue for another 1000 points, or rotate to something else.

First off, there's no such thing as too many armies.

Unless they're interfering in your enjoyment of the game. If having so many projects ongoing is messing with you, then it's time to downsize.

My first question would be which armies are fully or mostly painted? Those should probably get priority for keeping unless you really don't like them, in which case they go out.

For your larger armies, if they're mostly painted, I'd set a standard number of points at which the army can be considered done. Maybe 1500? Then paint up enough units to complete that army, put it in the box and call it done. Having complete armies on hand for sharing or variety in play is a great thing. Having a bunch of incomplete armies can be a drain.

For myself, I play alot of games and have quite a few armies and forces, some of which I've just resigned to be very slow growing that I'll add too when I get time. I find it's nice to be able to bounce back and forth between armies. Variety is the spice of life and all that.

I've got like 7 projects (WW2 US, WW2 Soviets, Malifaux Gremlins, Zombies, EOTD, Ancient Greeks, Ancient Persians) on the go at once, and tend to work on them as I need them in game. I'm doing a FoW campaign for a few months so will be working on them, then after that I'll put them away and work on my Malifaux stuff, and once they are done I'll go back to something else.

Putting the stuff you're not working on out of the way makes quite an impact on reducing backlog terror and the issues of where to start. It should make progress a bit more obvious too.

At least the armies you collect are within the same games system! Try remembering rules and stats for that many games/armies, across different scales (which is a situation I often find myself in, and then caught out trying to get a flank charge bonus with a Tiger tank )

I normally try limiting myself to 1-2 armies per system, simply because otherwise I get lots of armies that I simply won't use, and if someone says "hey, you want to play game x" it's not like I can play them with 4 armies at once. For skirmish or team games (Blood Bowl for instance) it doesn't matter so much, but having lots of armies for mass-battle systems also means you have to think of storage and a real PITA whenever it comes to moving house etc.

As a secondary, minor consideration I also like to sell an army after a few years (unless it's a particular favourite) as I like to think I'm gradually increasing the percentage of painted armies out there in the gaming world

Do you lose interest with the armies painting-wise or gaming wise or some other reason?

If its painting wise perhaps you could go small next time, say 500 points, get them painted up and if the passion is still there add another 250 etc.

If its gaming wise perhaps try making whackier lists or just playing fun scenarios or silly objectives, just to spice things up and make it more fun.

Do you perceive your hobby from a gaming or a collector view? If you don't enjoy a certain aspect of an army you don't have to feel guilty to get rid of it, my personal problem is that i suffer from the shiny miniature syndrome, (whoaa that's cool!) And then have no use for it, but then i see myself more as a collector than a game.

And

feeling quilt

? is that some kind of fetish?

I like having lots of armies because I'm a kitbasher at heart. Spontaneity is very important to my enjoyment of the hobby, which is why I barely paint anything. But I'm okay with that.

I have almost every army in 40k. Just missing DE and a few flavors of Space Marine. I even have armies that don't have rules like AdMech, LatD and Deathwatch. Even have a full custom race using other models.

I mostly feel annoyed that I don't get to use so much of it. Seems a bit of a waste, but on the other hand I'm loath to sell it all.

filbert wrote:I think it is something that all people suffer from, at one stage or another and to varying degrees. Myself, I am terrible for it and it has only got worse as I have got older because I now have the disposable income that I didn't have in the past to indulge my whims, exacerbated by the fact that I am a very slow painter (and not a very good one either) so I very easily get put off, distracted or discouraged so I often end up leaving projects half-finished for years at a time. The choices as I see it often boil down to:

1). Sell/trade your stuff and pare your collection down to one thing you are interested in.

2). Make peace with yourself and continue working at your own pace perhaps in the knowledge you will never get anything and everything finished.

3). Make a P&M blog or similar on Dakka or an equivalent to help motivate yourself.

4). Try and train yourself to only buy new stuff after you have finished other things. Or perhaps introduce a rule not to play unless it is painted, for example.

Thanks for the good advice. Have started to sell models and will problably put away those that I cannot sale. Have always wanted to do a blog but lack a good camera.

Eggs wrote:What I did, was pick the factions I wanted to do first, put everything else away, and work on it until I've hit a target (1000 points orcs&goblins, and 1000 prs marines). Once that target is hit, I can either continue for another 1000 points, or rotate to something else.

Sounds like a good idea, I am more of a collecter (enjoy gaming but are not that social) so maybe a certain sum would be a good idea instead.

Jehan-reznor wrote:
And

feeling quilt

? is that some kind of fetish?

Misspelling, were meaning guilt

 Ratius wrote:
Do you lose interest with the armies painting-wise or gaming wise or some other reason?

I can love the lore and imagining how great this army would look on the battlefiled and the history it has and then suddenly getting the same interest in another army and losing all for the first one for a long time.

Thanks for all the detailed answers. Will problably keep what I have but orginaise the armies (so that all from one faction are either on my painting table or my desks). Then when I start buying again (after christmas) do it for a certain sum and paint it upp (enyoj both painting and painted armies) before I can continue with buying for that army or for another.

Gotta catch 'em all!

I like to think my hobby is collecting boxes of models to keep the dust from settling on shelves. It sort of helps, sort of.

 The Green one wrote:
Recently I looked over my armies and just thought if it isn’t to many. I have 8 armies in total, 7 fantasy and one 40k. They are

Skaven, about 1500 points

The Empire, maybe 3000 points

Dwarfs, 1000 points

Tomb kings, 750 points

Vampire counts, about 1500 points (lots of stuff extras like zombies).

Chaos dwarfs, 1300 points (forge world)

Orks, 1000 points

Orcs and Goblins, 2000 points

I have sold of parts that I did not enjoy painting or similar. The thing is now I am feeling quilt. It just seems be so many armies and now I am already considering another one (druchi). The quilt is coming from the money invested and my “butterfly” effect (getting interested in one army for about a month then losing interest in it for half a year). My reason for posting this is that I need to vent and get some tips about this. It just takes away part of my joy for the hobby when I am thinking about this. I hope I posted this in the right forum and would eb externally grateful form some help.

TGO

I have 23 partially-completed projects on my desk or in my storage drawers. 23.

At some point you just have to embrace the madness. I've found it helps to focus on numerically smaller projects - the rules for Battlefleet Gothic, GorkaMorka, Necromunda, Mordheim, and Inquisitor are all floating about online for free(legally), along with acres of fan supplements and house rules, and frankly even if I wasn't trying to channel the "ohhh that'd be cool" impulse into smaller, more completable projects I'd prefer GW's older SG rules to much of the modern offering. I'd also suggest that if you've not already, pick up HH3:Extermination; the Strike Force rules are essentially Kill Team but good, with much more detail, and they work absolutely fine with 40K armies as long as you're not playing with people intent on finding the most broken combos possible. I've found that once you have enough of these small projects going, your new ideas can almost always slot into one of them very easily, which often provides motivation and inspiration to also work on older parts of the same project.

 The Green one wrote:

filbert wrote:I think it is something that all people suffer from, at one stage or another and to varying degrees.
4). Try and train yourself to only buy new stuff after you have finished other things. Or perhaps introduce a rule not to play unless it is painted, for example.

Eggs wrote:What I did, was pick the factions I wanted to do first, put everything else away, and work on it until I've hit a target (1000 points orcs&goblins, and 1000 prs marines). Once that target is hit, I can either continue for another 1000 points, or rotate to something else.

Sounds like a good idea, I am more of a collecter (enjoy gaming but are not that social) so maybe a certain sum would be a good idea instead.

Jehan-reznor wrote:
And

feeling quilt

? is that some kind of fetish?

Misspelling, were meaning guilt

 Ratius wrote:
Do you lose interest with the armies painting-wise or gaming wise or some other reason?

I can love the lore and imagining how great this army would look on the battlefiled and the history it has and then suddenly getting the same interest in another army and losing all for the first one for a long time.

Thanks for all the detailed answers. Will problably keep what I have but orginaise the armies (so that all from one faction are either on my painting table or my desks). Then when I start buying again (after christmas) do it for a certain sum and paint it upp (enyoj both painting and painted armies) before I can continue with buying for that army or for another.

The "Get it All Painted" thread was really neat: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/538083.page
... not sure if that counts as threadomancy at this point.