Stay on Target

The ranks continue to swell.  

We'll get to the title in a bit.  First up is painting, which right now means Empire.  I've had a productive couple days at the painting table, pushing ever further down the road to a fieldable, and painted, Empire army.  The picture to the left is the combined result of two sessions, hence the two obvious halves.  The total haul is thus: six based Spearmen, ten unbased Spearmen, five based horses, one based Warrior Priest, one based Halberdier, and three based cannon crew.  I'm drawing ever closer to the (800 point) finish line and it's very tempting to put basing on hold to push through on the remaining ranks of unpainted Spearmen (and quintet of Knights), but if I'm making the effort to get everything painted before taking the army to battle then I'm not going to cheat on the basing.  It slots in well enough while painting and the brown bases look a lot better than the sloppy black/red/white/blue ones.  I told EV that he could expect a game of WFB when he sees a finished unit of Spearmen appear, so the plan now is to get bases done while finishing the unit.  I've set an internal target of EV's impending wedding about a month and a half from now, which is far enough out to be realistic but close enough to stave off complacency and wandering eye.  More on that later.

Only missing static grass now.

Most of what I'm doing now is converting the old Middenheim scheme into the new Altdorf one which (in theory) saves some time since (in theory) I'm just painting the white bits red.  I'm adding in extra, arguably unnecessary, work on the minis, but one area where I'm not making it harder is the bases.  The Middenheim scheme predates my current "base it before priming" approach, so part of the Middenheim to Altdorf conversion involves ballasting after finishing the painting but before varnishing (so the varnish gives the extra hold the primer normally would).  This means that models now make two trips to the painting table before being fully painted.  While this flies in the face of my desire for efficient painting, it does build in time to fix the damage that post-painting basing inevitably causes.  I've started painting the bases first so I don't slop onto finished feet, but this is impossible with the previously assembled (and often painted) minis I'm working through.  I'll be modifying the two group approach to incorporate one basing group and one painting group so I can have the red and blue cleanups pull double duty.  While the rate of painted models will slow the total number of models, painted plus based, should remain about the same, if not pick up a bit due to less area being covered with each group.  I haven't crunched the numbers to see if this new approach will work out or if I'll end up with more of one group than the other, but I think it should come out close enough since I'll be basing two models for every one painted.

Appealing on multiple levels.

Now for the title.  There's been a lot of chatter about Infinity at the various FLGSs lately and games are starting to break out.  EV has a couple factions and has extolled its virtues before, but that's kinda his thing (trying on as many different games as possible).  I'm close to the other extreme (digging deep into a small number of games) so I've put Infinity in the same bin as Malifaux, Song of Blades and Heroes, Hordes of the Things, and all the other games that EV dabbles while I'm slogging through my painting backlog.  We have an understanding that it takes a special something for me to buy in on a new system as I'm very wary of investing in a game only to have it follow in the footsteps of Uncharted Seas and Dust Warfare, both of which I enjoy but have fallen out of favor locally.  The heavy anime styling doesn't help Infinity stand out from the pack as I ODed on anime years ago.  Every now and again I'd look through the models, all of which are very nice models that just don't appeal much to me, to see if anything struck a chord.  There are some knights that would catch my eye (plus two versions of Joan of Arc) and tickle my previously discussed Thing for Paladins.  In the end I'd cover too much ground, get sick of the anime aesthetic, and head back to my usual corners of the internet.  

All that said, I'm giving Infinity another look for a couple of reasons, foremost being low model count.  I got into Warmahordes in part because I thought it was a small-scale game.  Since then I've found out that while a Warmahordes army has less models than a comparable 40k army (to say nothing of WFB army that has more models in a single unit than in an entire Warmahordes force) it isn't really a skirmish game.  It looks like Infinity is actually a skirmish game with about a dozen models per side in a tournament-sized force (judging by Nova Open standards).  Less models means less investment, both in time and money.  I'm hesitant to get into new games because I can't justify spending (typically) hundreds of dollars on a game I may only play a couple times.  Equally as galling as (in my admittedly tight-fisted view) wasted money is wasted time.  Approximately all my armies are not completely painted, so picking up another project just pushes completion of the other existing projects further down the road.  If a typical game of Infinity has about a dozen models then I'd probably end up with about 25 to allow for variety and impulse buys.  That's not an intimidating number, being around the size of a Warmahordes force, and with reasonable prices ($10-15 for a very nice model) the initial investment of time and money is reasonable.  I could really take my time with each model and still get a painted force together in a reasonable time frame.  Of course time painting Infinity would be time not painting Empire.  Or Khador.  Or Legion, Deathwing, Blood Angels, Axis, Iron Dwarves...

So now I'm contemplating a new diversion before finishing the one I'm in the middle of.  This is a recipe for disaster, but it does look tasty.  I'll play the waiting game for a while, see how it fares with my locals, push on towards 800 points of Empire glory, and reassess when I hit that particular finish line.