Finished Hans, Future Plans

Ready for action, but still needs detailing.

I got a wee bit of varnishing in on Tuesday before the Snowquester hit, or missed, yesterday.  Since I didn't ballast the Ravenwing bases on Monday night the spraying was confined to a pair of Hans arms, but now I can field at least one (almost) fully painted walker for my Axis troops.  As I've probably noted before it still needs numbers/icons and basing, but it's as finished as my infantry is.  Despite having it be dry for about two days I haven't actually put a finished trooper next to the finished walker yet, but I'm confident they'll be consistent with each other.



In other news my latest order (Dark Vengeance, DA codex, box of Deathwing, three different sorts of green paint) is en route now.  I'm eager to settle down with the codex and starting looking at options so I can figure out what sort of models I'll want to add.  What's good in the new edition will certainly play a role, but I'm more interested in size, options, and FoC slots for the various units so I can start matching up what I'd like to field with what's legal to field.  I say this a lot, but I'm not looking to build a collection to rival my Blood Angels (stated goal: have a full company, plus all the other fun bits).  I'd like to be able to field full (1850?1999?2000?) armies of both 'wings and maybe regular Dark Angels as well, so I'd like to max out around 5-6k.  I'd do some cocktail napkin math on how much BA stuff I have but I'm not sure I want to see the number.  I probably already have, or will have when the latest order arrives, all the regular DA stuff I want, except for tanks and dreads.  Deathwing shouldn't be too much past what's already coming, again excluding dreads (which can do double duty), and I've had an itch to paint Deathwing for about the last decade so hopefully I'll get them painted in a reasonable amount of time.  The real wild card is Ravenwing, which are mostly a mystery to me.  EV ran a list through Army Builder for me that looks to be expensive (about 10 boxes of various stuff) but unlike Deathwing I have no reference point for the available, let alone desirable, options for such a force.  Then there's the new flyers and double land speeders to consider.  I've wanted to try out a bike army for a while and Ravenwing look like they'll paint up super quick (spray black, maybe reinforce black, edge highlight in grey, 90% done), but I have a bad feeling they'll be expensive enough to get relegated to project status.  I'd love to spend what parts of the weekend that aren't hockey flipping through the codex and new rules, but it looks like I'll have to wait until Monday for that.

Not this Dark Angel.  Unfortunately.

The big loser in all of this has been Warmahordes.  The compressed schedule the latest lockout caused has been running amok through my gaming schedule and taking large bites from both my Dust and Warmahordes time.  While I've been reasonably decent about painting my glorious Axis forces, it's been far too long since I've done the same for the Motherland or Everblight.  I still have Conquest sitting in a box, waiting for love, not to mention all the other stuff (like half a Bethayne list) that's dying for the same.  There's even a seasonal league, with hobby component, going on at this very moment.  The system is still a compelling one, I hate missing Thursday night Warmahordes, and there are still tournaments on my radar, but my hobby muse has wandered into different systems of late.  Warmarhordes had a good long run as the only game in town for the majority of the last year, so I guess this is a while in coming, but I still feel bad that there are things I meant to get painted for the Journeyman league last year that are still waiting to be cleaned and glued, let alone painted.  There's also the small matter of my remaining Christmas models credit that I've had tagged for Raptors and an Uhlan since I opened the envelope but have been weighing other options for lately.  I want a pair of Hermanns for AA and light anti-infantry, there's the new Icarus releases to consider, I'd still like a heavy walker, and I wouldn't mind getting one of the transports and another Sturmgrenadier command squad.  Or I could make a decent pass at finishing off the Deathwing and/or regular DA portions of my impending new army.  There's also the theoretical expansion into Allies and/or SSU, but that's been moved from the back burner to whatever is behind that.  For now my eye is fixed firmly on the first Chapter and the notion of running a shooty 40k army for the first time in a long time, maybe the first time ever.