Titan Maniple

After having shown already all the Titans and Knights I wanted to show a group picture. Those are Titans from Legio Mortis and Knights from Ærthegn House already shown before. Here are the posts: Warhounds, Reaver, Warlord, Questoris and Lancers.

Warlord Titan

Here it is! The biggest and meanest of them all! The Warlord Titan.

This is the last Titan I have for my Army and with it I am crossing off the first objective of the year.

I painted it also from the Legio Mortis and with the same techniques mentioned before, with oils for weathering and proper treatment of decals.

This was a blast but I am tired of painting big robots... time to change game! I still have to paint a few vehicles for Legions Imperialis but I need to use the airbrush for the base layer, and I can only do that with good weather, therefore it needs to wait...

Lots of photos and details below.

Reaver Titan

First miniature of the year! It took a while but here is the first of the two remaining Titans.

This is a Reaver Titan from the Legio Mortis. I have followed the same techniques as for the Warhounds but a little bit more refined. It is also the very first time I have used oils for weathering and I must say that I love the results. Much easier to use and control than what I was expecting! For this figure I used only one colour, Sepia, from Abteilung 502, because it was a test, but since then I have bought Burnt Siena as well to have different effects. Might add a few more in the future.

I am particularly proud of how well the decals fit with the model, it is a time consuming technique because of the multiple layers, but overall the results are amazing! I tried to tune down the weathering compared to the Warhounds because this one stays much further away from close combat. The couple of figures added to the base are just for fun to show the scale, because in "reality" the marines should not be so close to the feet.

I hope you like it as much as I do.

Project Wood Elves: First miniatures

So the first miniatures arrived! I have again a deja vu with the Skaven project as I also posted first the sketch of the army list and then when the first ones arrived.

This is what this post is about according to Grok

As outlined in the first post I wanted to test the army lists a few times before buying and building stuff... but somehow I ended doing something completely different!

First miniatures

Since there a few things that I need regardless of the list I end playing, like Glade Guard and Glade Riders, when I found a relatively good second hand deal I thought it would be good to have them already. So I went ahead and bought them, that was 28 Glade Guards and 13 Glade Riders in total. Sadly, they were in pretty bad shape, especially the Riders, and needed to undergo several baths of alcohol to rub all the layers of paint they had, a few models did not survive though!

Big Ones

After having these and once I started to clean them I thought: wouldn't it be nice if I could have something "new" and big to pair with these tiny flimsy elves? So I thought about buying a Dragon and/or a Treeman... I tried searching for a Dragon but finding one that was complete turned out to be a real challenge! I could not find one for a reasonable price, so I turned my eyes to the Treeman... after talking it over with my brother, I ended up buying Treebeard on a hunch! I always liked the miniature and suddenly I had an idea regarding my Treeman, I would use a proper Ent for it and the chosen one could not be any other than Treebeard, so here it is!

While I was doing that, I asked a good friend of mine that owns a 3D Printer for advice regarding printing my own Dragon, since it was proving to be quite difficult to find. We ended up hunting STL files in the depths of Telegram and figuring out what would be the best to use and so on. Only problem was that he lives in the US so printing something for me would not be an option! (more on that later)

Other stuff

As one of the key ideas for the Army was that it should be easy to transport and store, I went ahead and bought a bunch of bases of the right size (since I needed to rebase all the second hand elves I had already), magnets and a GSW Army case. The project was barely starting and I had already spent more than 100 euros on material 😅😅

The big surprise

For work related reasons I ended up traveling to the US, and that left the door open to get my Dragon printed from my dear friend. But that "Dragon" turned out to be a whole Army that he ended up printing and shipping!

I received a package in my hotel that I ended up opening once I got back home. It was filled to the brim with miniatures! You can see below a picture of all of them still on their supports! There is much more than a Dragon there, there is even an amazing Boba Fett inside! Sadly I lost a few pieces of the Dragon rider (I blame the jetlag for that) that my friend needed to print again...

All in all there is 1 Dragon, 3 Treemen, 5 Wild Riders, 2 Wizards on horse, 5 Sisters of the Thorn, 1 Wizard on foot, 1 Battle Standard Bearer, 8 Scouts, 8 Waywatchers and 2 Eagles!!!

This clearly sent my whole plan of slowly building up the Army to the trash but I could not be more happy!

Assembling the Army

Having all of these miniatures I sat down and started to clean, stripe and assemble everything so I could get it "battle ready" even if they were not painted.

It took me quite some time to strip all the paint and restore/repair some miniatures and to carefully remove the supports. After that I rebased everything and glued magnets on the bases, then assembled the Army case and stored everything inside!

Here you can see a few pictures of the whole Army. I am super happy with how easy it is to store and transport, even though I am not yet done with all the preparation.

I have assembled the following list that is enough to field all three variants of the Army I have come up with so far:

• Dragon
• 2 Eagles
• 3 Treeman (can be used as Treekin)
• 1 Treebeard (he is twice as tall than any other Treeman)
• 5 Sisters of the Thorn
• 20 Glade Guard
• 8 Scouts
• 8 Waywatchers
• 1 Wizards on foot
• 1 Battle Standard Bearer
• 6 Wild Riders
• 2 Wizards on horse
• 12 Glade Riders

Next steps

You might think that the Army is done and ready to be primed but you would be wrong 😆

Almost all Glade Guards are missing torsos, arms and heads that I have set aside for proper cleaning. I still need to assemble those.

All the Riders (Glade, Wild and Sisters) need to be assembled, as only the horses are ready.

Lots of green stuff is needed in many miniatures that have gaps and require minor damage control and repairs.

Gravel and some minor details need to be added to the bases.

Finally, get everything primed and ready to be painted!

There is still a lot of work to do but I can already field the Army in a game without proxies! That is definitively something I was not expecting to be able to do so early in the project!

Project Wood Elves: army list testing

After having presenting the Stillmania project, here are some further thoughts on it!

I wrote down a few ideas first:

• small army with few miniatures (ideally less than 60)
• focus on shooting
• include some stuff because rule of cool
• easy to transport and to magnetize!
• include Tree stuff (Treeman or Treekin or both)
• must have a Dragon!

After that I drafted a few lists with slightly different styles:

LIST 1

• Characters
• Glade Lord on Forest Dragon
• Spellweaver on horse lvl4 with Battle Magic and Ruby Ring of Ruin
• Spellsinger on horse lvl2 with Battle Magic and Lore Familiar
• Core
• 3x5 Glade Guard with Hagbane Tips
• 2x5 Deepwood Scouts with Hagbane Tips
• 2x5 Glade Riders with Reserve Move and Hagbane Tips
• Special
• 1x5 Sisters of the Thorn
• 1x5 Deepwood Scouts with Hagbane Tips
• Rare
• Treeman
• Great Eagle

LIST 2 

• Characters
• Glade Lord on Forest Dragon
• Spellweaver on foot lvl4 with Elementalism
• Shadowdancer with Spear of Loec
• Glade Captain as BSB
• Core
• 1x12 Glade Guard with Banner of Midsummer's Eve
• 1x6 Deepwood scouts with Hagbane Tips
• 2x5 Glade Riders with Reserve Move and Hagbane Tips
• Special
• 1x5 Sisters of the Thorn
• 1x5 Wardancers
• 1x3 Tree Kin
• 1x5 Wild Riders
• Rare
• Great Eagle

LIST 3

• Characters
• Glade Lord on Great Stag
• Spellweaver on horse lvl4
• Waystalker on foot
• Waystalker on foot
• Core
• 2x8 Deepwood Scouts with Hagbane Tips
• 1x5 Glade Guard with Trueflight Arrows
• 1x9 Glade Riders with Reserve Move and Hagbane Tips
• Special
• 1x6 Wild Riders
• Rare
• Great Eagle
• Treeman
• 2x6 Waywatchers with Arcane Bodkins

Some testing

The first list was tested vs Khemri and vs Chaos undivided.

In the first case it was a victory for the Elves but mostly because of very good dice rolling, and that with poison is not a clear indication on how it would usually play on the field.

The Treeman was useless by itself so clearly I need to use it differently or field a different unit. In addition, against an army with high armour save, poison might not be as effective, so another type of Tip might need to be tested.

Also, the first list has so much shooting and avoidance that it might end up being boring so I might need to mix in some Wild Riders to have some combat ready units. 

The second test game was completely different. The poison was mostly ineffective and overall the shooting bounced back on the armour save of the Chaos warriors that managed to get to combat and smashed to pieces the whole Army. It was a super clear defeat for the Elves.

After that game I draft a new variant of the list with more riders and slightly different approach to shooting, that you can see in list 3. I have planned now a couple more games with the different lists to see which one feels better.

New project for The Old World

I have a new and exciting project that I want to share here as first post of the year!

A bit of context

At my local Club (ITGC Berlin) we are quite hyped with The Old World.

We have been playing quite intensively since November more or less. I personally have played roughly 1-2 times a week for most of the last 2 months, excluding the xmas season. We also attended a Tournament at the beginning of the year.

I have played all of these games with my trusty skavens. But I am starting to be tired of them because of mostly two reasons, (1) they are super difficult to transport, because they are not magnetized and use "old" bases with adapters, which means I spend at least 20 minutes each game setting it up and (2) they are a legacy army and will not have further development.

Because of that, after the tournament, I decided to build a new Army as 2025 project, despite having vowed before to never ever collect another 28mm Army 😅😆 and also regardless of the fact that this will most likely make me fail the 2025 goals, because instead of painting Kill Team I will be painting The Old World... Anyway, that's life 😬

After much thought on the topic I had a couple of goals:

1. it should not be a legacy faction
2. it should not be something that I have played before*
3. it should not focus on combat but on shooting/magic as main source of damage (as opposed to pretty much all other armies I have collected so far)
   
4. the miniatures should look cool and offer a nice hobby project!

After going over the available factions I quickly realized that despite playing Warhammer Fantasy for 20+ years and lots of editions, I have never played Elves! So it was set, I would play Elves, now the question was: Dark, High or Wood? Since my brother has been playing Dark Elves since forever that one was out. I am not a big fan of High Elves so the only logical choice was Wood Elves which incidentally was also the very first Blood Bowl team I bought.

It was set: I would collect a Wood Elves Army!

* the ones I have played before, excluding bands and skirmish, are Skaven, Daemons of Chaos, Chaos, Orcs & Goblins and Dwarfs. I always wanted to play Bretonnia and Undead and those would have been my natural first choices, but I already have an Army of each for Kings of War, which were incidentally built as well in Stillmania fashion...

Club Crazyness

Now, let's look at how does this combines with the hype at my local club!

Since we are quite excited about the game and building up new armies, a bunch of us had been talking about doing something nice as a group about it. In the end, one of the club members decided to start a Stillmania group project!

For those of you that are not familiar with Stillmania, you can see above a summary of it, and if you Google or read old White Dwarfs you will get tons of information about it.

In short, it is a very peculiar way of building and collecting armies. We will of course not follow all the rules stated above (in particular the gloss varnish), but we will follow the spirit of it - mostly by choosing and focusing on a single list. In my case I will target a 2000 points list with 1-2 extra units so I can swap some stuff in/out as required by some games.

So far we have five participants with Empire, Chaos undivided, Dwarfs, Chaos and Wood Elves. We are loosely following these steps:

1. First, we are planning and designing the army. In this step we write and discuss the list, and possibly test it on the table until you get something you are happy with.
2. After that, we look at the hobby aspect of it, selecting models and possibly experimenting with a few paint schemes, basing and so on.
3. Once you are happy with your army list, list of models and paint scheme, just go and build it!

I am currently at step number 1. I have so far played two test games with two list variants. My thoughts on that will come on another post.

This is a very exciting project that fills me with hobby energy and it reminds me of the times when I started the skaven project back in 2015! I just hope that this time around it does not take me almost 3 years to finish the army!

Proyectos para 2025

Revisión anual

Empecé el año con muy pocas expectativas como ya comenté en el post de objetivos para 2024. Hasta Junio prácticamente por temas personales no tuve tiempo de nada. La verdad que al final no ha ido tan mal, he pintado 75 miniaturas, que es más de lo pintado en los anteriores tres años, de hecho una marca similar a lo pintado en los años 2017 ó 2018, por lo que puedo darme por satisfecho. A cambio, he añadido muchas cosas a la montaña de pintado. Termino este 2024 con energías y buenas expectativas de pintar prácticamente todo lo que he acumulado durante 2025 e incluso abrir nuevos proyectos.

Mis objetivos del año pasado fueron:

1. Pintar Maloghurst
2. Pintar todos los marines (infantería y tanques) de Legions Imperialis. Knights y Titanes excluídos.

Aquí está el post de Maloghurst y aquí se pueden ver todos los post de Legions Imperalis. De hecho, incluso he pintado todos los Knights y dos Titanes. Por lo tanto, objetivos conseguidos.

Eso si, termino el año con 77 miniaturas en la montaña pese a que lo empecé con 61, debido a que me he animado y he comprado más cosas para Legions (o me las han regalado), además de The Walking Dead y Kill Team.

Una de las cosas de las que estoy especialmente orgulloso es la cantidad de partidas que he conseguido jugar, a partir de Agosto he jugado prácticamente una partida a la semana de Legions Imperialis o de The Old World y parece que 2025 será similar, empezando el año con un Torneo de TOW en Enero.

Objetivos 2025

Voy a intentar marcarme de nuevo objetivos alcanzables pero que supongan más reto que el año pasado. Creo que a mediados de año tendré poco tiempo para el hobby pero a principios y finales espero tener más.

1. Pintar los Titanes de Legions Imperalis
2. Pintar vehículos de Legions Imperialis
3. Pintar todos los Kill Team

Eso supondría un total de 43 miniaturas, que son pocas, por lo que parece posible que alcance a pintar como stretch las figuras de The Walking Dead para hacer un total de 67, pero añadir esto a los objetivos oficiales parece demasiado ambicioso.

Me apetece mucho pintar el busto que tengo pendiente desde 2023 y el Cerastus Knight, ambos por motivos diferentes, uno porque es un "concurso" pendiente con mi hermano y el otro por ser un regalo, espero sacar el tiempo suficiente para pintarlos. Si pinto los objetivos y el stretch la montaña volvería a estar por debajo de 10, que es siempre uno de los principales objetivos (evitar acumular sin sentido).

Montaña de pintado

Simplemente observando la gráfica se puede ver que tanto en 2023 como 2024 he comprado muchas más miniaturas que desde el 2019, ya que "me he dejado llevar" un poco. He comprado un ejército entero (Legions), un kickstarter (The Walking Dead) y unos cuantos equipos de Kill Team, eso, sumado al hecho de pintar por debajo de 100 miniaturas los dos últimos años, hace que lo acumulado crezca. Por lo que si quiero empezar nuevos proyectos, como un posible ejército nuevo para The Old World, debo cerrar los proyectos en marcha. Como algo positivo diré que pese a todo y como mínimo, he conseguido pintar más de lo acumulado.

Lista pendiente de pintado

Colección Héroes y Villanos Señor de los Anillos (2)

• Balrog
• Nazgul en bestia alada

30K Hijos de Horus (5)

• Land Raider Spartan ** lo cuento como una miniatura
• Legion Falchion Super Heavy Tank ** lo cuento como una miniatura
• Leviathan Dreadnought
• Cerastus Knight ** lo cuento como una miniatura
• Rhino

Epic 30K Hijos de Horus (8)

• Titanes (2)
• Land Raider Proteus (2)
• Land Raider Spartan (3)
• Storm Eagle

Miniaturas Sueltas (3)

• Sumothay en 54mm
• Nyarlathotep
• Azrakh the Annihilator

The Walking Dead (24)

• 8 Zombies
• 16 Supervivientes

Kill Team Mechanicum (14)

Kill Team Aquilons (11)

Kill Team Krieg (10)

Posibles futuros proyectos

Además de los objetivos mencionados, mantengo una lista de posibles proyectos, por si saco tiempo:

• añadir personalidad a las minis de The Walking Dead, compré hojas, botellas y otros pequeños elementos de resina para poner en las peanas pero nunca tuve tiempo de hacerlo. Espero poder hacer esto a la vez que pinto la nueva remesa.
• comprar y pintar algún Primarca mas (que era el objetivo original de este blog)
• pintar cada uno de los (nuevos) Grandes Demonios del Caos
• revisar mi ejército de Khorne y rebasear una unidad de Desangradores que mi hermano compró para usar con ese ejército pero que nunca fue adaptada. Seguramente cambiar el maletín que uso para almacenar porque la solución actual era temporal (y lleva siendo usada mas de 10 años). He decidido no hacer esto "nunca" y en su lugar comprar otro ejército diferente.
• revisar mi ejército de Caballeros Grises y adaptarlo a las reglas actuales, seguramente para OPR (requiere rebasear todos los marines, además están en peanas con césped y tierra y les quedaría mejor alguna pintura técnica texturizada)
• darle un repaso al ejército de Culto Genestealer añadiendo algo de apoyo pesado y vehículos, repintando alguna miniatura y añadiendo algún Tiránido más como aliado.
• coleccionar un ejército nuevo para The Old World. Me gusta mucho jugar con los Skavens pero son muy complicados de transportar, el ejército de Khorne requiere un rebaseado de todo que no quieor hacer, por lo que si quiero tener una alternativa tiene que ser un ejército nuevo. En el pasado ya tuve un ejército de Orcos y Goblins enorme y un ejército de Enanos, los cuales vendí, por lo que tendría que ser algo diferente. Reflexionando sobre los diferentes ejércitos me di cuenta que en más de 25 años jugando a Warhammer nunca he tenido un ejército elfo propio, por lo que si me compro otro serán elfos. Además, siempre he buscado ejércitos muy centrados en bloques de infantería y combate, por lo que tendría que ser uno con pocas miniaturas y buscando el disparo... la elección es clara: Elfos Silvanos! Además el relanzamiento es en Q4 2025 por lo que me viene perfecto, tengo hasta entonces para "hacer hueco" en la colección para comprar otro ejército que sea de plástico, magnetizarlo y comprar un maletín que permita transportarlo todo de forma sencilla. Tengo incluso alguna lista de ejército ya pensada. La verdad que este proyecto me hace mucha ilusión pero me voy a intentar contener hasta haber pintado todo lo que toca antes.