EFD's "Night on Grey Mountain" [BATG2023]

Hobby Ideas & Advice BATG
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Introduction, 4 December 2022

Are you ready for a night, or even a whole year on… GREY MOUNTAIN?!

Cue “Night on Bald Mountain” by Mussorgsky

I’ve been in the wargaming hobby since about 1997, and like most of us I’ve accumulated a great big pile of models that I mean to paint, but somehow it grows faster than we can keep up. 2023 will be my second year of scaling the grey mountain, after my efforts in 2022.

As of the time of writing, 2022 has been my most productive painting year ever, with 243 models completed - but I’ve still added more to the pile than removed.

I’ll edit this section if I somehow manage to come out in the positives for 2022, but I don’t really think that’s likely!

[EDIT: I did not. Instead, I have added some goals to help guide me through the year!]

Here’s to 2023, and seeing if I can keep my ambitions in line with my capacity.

2023 Progress

Current BATG Score: -10 :white_check_mark:

Link to scorekeeping

Paint & Purchase Updates:

Click through the links to see models

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Scorekeeping

Last year, like a madman, I used three different scorekeeping methods. That proved quite time-consuming and tricky to maintain, since I did most of my posting on mobile. This year, I’ll just be doing the pure BATG count, although I’ll track anything sold or given away, and make a note of models that were gifts, and take them into account in the final reckoning as a separate score.

  • Any new models will be added when they arrive in my possession - so anything that’s in transit as of New Year’s Day will count as 2023 purchases when they arrive.
  • If I buy a model and sell it in the same year, it will be removed from the “Models added” count.

BATG Score

Per the official Battle Against the Grey thread, one model added to collection is +1, one model painted is -1. Low scores are good.

  • :arrow_up: Models added: 199
  • :arrow_down: Models painted: 209

:arrow_right: Total BATG score: -10
Here is a link to the 2023 BATG spreadsheet

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Shame Golf bonuses and penalties

In Dana Howl’s “Miniature Shame Golf” you get additional bonuses for completed units and for selling or giving away models, while you get penalties for buying new releases (within a month of release). I’ll be tracking those here, and tallying them at the end of the year. These bonuses & penalties are on top of normal paint/purchase scoring.

Bonuses

:arrow_down: -1 per model sold or given away :asterisk:
:arrow_down: -1 per completed unit of 5 or more models
:arrow_down: -5 per completed faction starter box
:arrow_down: -20 per completed 2-player starter box

New Release Penalties :eight_spoked_asterisk:

:arrow_up: +5 per box of 1-10 figures
:arrow_up: +20 per faction starter box (up to 30 figures)
:arrow_up: +50 per 2-player starter box (30+ figures)

:asterisk: Models bought and sold in the same year will get removed from the main count
:eight_spoked_asterisk: Models count as a “New Release” if purchased less than a calendar month after release

Updates of a Shameful Nature

10 Jan - Unit completion bonus: 10-man Imperial Guard infantry squad (-1)
18 Jan - Sold/given away: Sayl the Faithless and Nightmaw (-2)
30 Jan - New release penalty: preordered a Rogal Dorn battle tank (+5)
26 Mar - Unit completion bonus: 6-model Tyranid Kill Team (-1)
8 Jun - Sold/given away: 52 Chaos Cultists (-52)
26 Jun - Unit completion bonus: 10-man Mordian Iron Guard squad (-1)
4 Jul - Unit completion bonus: 10-man Mordian Iron Guard squad (-1)
9 Jul: Unit completion bonus: 5-model Command Squad (-1)
9 Jul: Completed faction starter bonus: Cadia Stands/Astra Militarum Combat Patrol (-5)
6 Aug: Unit completion bonus: 5-model Justaerin Terminator squad (-1)
16 Sep: Unit completion bonus: 5-model Ratling Sniper squad (-1)
17 Sep: Unit completion bonus: 5-model Ratling Sniper squad (-1)
22 Sep: Unit completion bonus: 10-model Imperial Guard squad (-1)
9 Nov: Unit completion bonus: 10-model Imperial Guard squad (-1)
14 Nov: Unit completion bonus: 10-model Ogryn squad (-1)

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Hobby Goals

GOAL NUMBER 1

Paint more than I buy!

While I never hit net zero on a month-by-month basis last year, I actually think I was doing alright for most of it. HeroQuest added over 100 models to the total, which ultimately probably shouldn’t have counted since I’ve decided not to paint them after all - but I decided to leave them in the count because they’d been such great motivation. Then Horus Heresy happened, and I fell in that hole hard, and I decided I needed to fill out my Imperial Guard army before the new Codex came out, and it all fell apart.

This year I must stand strong!

GOAL NUMBER 2

Paint more big stuff!

As I outlined in my conclusions from last year, I’m pretty okay at painting infantry. The vast majority of the models painted in 2022 were small-based models, which I guess is a natural consequence of collecting Astra Militarum and Gloomspite Gitz!

That being said, I have a pretty big backlog of larger models: tanks, monsters and terrain.

So, this year will be Year of the Tank (and monster) and I will strive to paint more of these larger models that have been collecting dust for far too long!

GOAL NUMBER 3

Paint more Chaos Dwarfs!

This is a Chaos Dwarf fan site, after all. If I’m not painting dwarfs, is it a bit weird to stick around? Honestly, it’s a great community and I enjoy hanging out here, and it’s not like I don’t love my little angry guys. So, here’s me stating that I want to add some more of my green-armoured, bearded lads to the “done” pile this year!

GOAL NUMBER 4

Don’t let the collection grow faster than storage allows.

This is just a reminder to myself to buy more figure cases, really. I was on track for a while but when I moved house last year there were a few models that had to be carried in the car. Never again!

GOAL NUMBER 5

Finish more projects!

There are multiple projects I barely touched last year, or had an initial flurry of activity and then abandoned. This year, I need to try to tame my hobby ADHD and EITHER limit the number of projects I work on at a given time, OR make them smaller with a finite end goal at the start. I guess I need to start thinking “a couple of units” rather than “a thousand points”!

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Links to collection threads

I won’t be tracking collections in the same way as last year - it’s too much bookkeeping to do on a mobile phone!

Instead, any collections which merit it will get their own separate threads. Here they are:

My Chaos Dwarfs - EvilFuzzyDoom’s Devoted of Hashut

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Figure Case

I’ve been using the “Figure Case” app by Warganizer since late 2020. It’s an iPhone-only app (sorry, Android users!) that has a customisable workflow for tracking models’ status in detail, and allows you to track “effort” to accommodate larger or more-complex models.

I’ll update this at the end of the year to see what happened to my collection as a whole.

Starting position, 1 Jan 2023

Models Effort
Unassembled 411 582
Assembled 723 1071
Primed 178 283
Finished 593 828
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Reserved Post 4

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Reserved Post 5

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Let the Year of the Tank commence!

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My first hobby work of the year is building a pair of Leman Russ: a Vanquisher and an Executioner.

I decided against giving them sponsons, since I’m toying with running them in Horus Heresy, and I can swap the hulls around if I need to, anyway.

Nothing painted yet, most of my tanks need undercoating and the weather is too feral for it just at the moment - Aussie summers are too hot & humid for spray cans, and my garage is too full of Christmas cardboard for me to bring out the airbrush.

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First model of the year!

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I painted an Imperial Guard Basilisk, that I’ve had undercoated for a while and been a little timid to tackle. I had a very slow day of working from home today so I decided I’d just attack it without thinking too much.

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It came out a bit brighter than I’d like, but at this point I’m not in the mood to fight with Agrax Earthshade, I just want things painted!

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The tracks were the fiddliest part, of course. For some reason weathered metal just takes me forever to get right!

Now, did I mention “year of the tank”? Because there’s a few more to go:

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BATG score: -1 :white_check_mark:

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That’s a lot of tanks. Good choice of blue on that blast shield, reminds me a bit of how tanks looked like in the 2nd edition codex. Which regiment do you collect?

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Thanks Anzu! I’m not confident yet with my tank painting so I appreciate the compliment!

I have a homebrew planet called “Rythnia” that my Imperial guard hail from. Most of the collection is just standard Cadians, but I have some slightly converted ones with Victoria Miniatures heads and backpacks as well. They have blue flak armour.

Speaking of which, I’ve painted eight more of them:

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And here is the completed unit of 10 with an extra lasgun and a melta:

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Which brings me now to 95 painted Cadian-style guardsmen (!!!) in this scheme. I will probably make an Astra Militarum blog at some point to show them all off.

Meanwhile, my first purchase of the year arrived today!

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Ten Genestealer Cult Neophyte Hybrids, who will be converted into some rougher-looking guardsmen to play Horus Heresy with, as either Solar Auxilia or Imperial Militia if that PDF is ever released.

I caught the ”new year, new army” bug over Christmas, while sick in spent most of my spare time staring at Malcadors and converted Heresy-era infantry. That being said, it’s not really a new army if they can all fit into my existing Imperial Guard collection, right?

There’s ten more Neophytes in the mail, so I’ll have to paint quickly if I’m going to avoid the trap I fell into last year - hopefully I can stay strong and paint another unit or two by end of January.

BATG score: +1 :negative_squared_cross_mark:

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The second sprue of 10 Neophyte Hybrids arrived:

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I’m actually quite excited to get started on these guys, so I assembled the first unit:

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For such a satisfying conversion, it’s fairly simple - just clean off the Genestealer icons and clip the back of the helmets until they fit.

The only complication is that there aren’t enough non-Genestealer-y pairs of arms to build a 10-strong loyalist-looking squad from one sprue. I borrowed some arms from the second sprue to fill out the first squad.

I got all the bodies and heads assembled for squad two, but got taken out by a headache before I could really get stuck into the arms. I had planned to use Skitarii radium carbine arms and Ranger heads on the second squad, but that seems like it will be a more fiddly conversion. The cultist torsos are somewhat wider than the Skitarii ones. I might end up ordering some more autogun arms to fill out the rest of the squads.

BATG score: +11 :negative_squared_cross_mark:

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I bit the bullet and put the Skitarii arms on squad two:

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It worked! It turns out the arms I was having trouble with were a mismatched pair anyway, so powering through worked in the end. Also the Vexilla I think looks better (and is simpler) than the banner I did for the other squad.

Also also, I painted a dude:

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I’d failed to decide on a paint scheme for my Devoted of Sigmar so put them aside, but while trying to decide how I’d paint my HH humans I got hit by a bolt of inspiration and painted this dude. So that’s a -1 for today, and I maaay be able to actually start painting this army at some point!

BATG score: +10 :negative_squared_cross_mark:

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For reasons that are mostly to do with undercoating, I’ve painted four more of my Devoted of Sigmar - this time, Crossbowmen (crossbow soldiers? They’ve got several Adepta Sororitas heads so aren’t all men).

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The basecoat is Army Painter Uniform Grey, which serves fine as an undercoat and can be brushed on - which is useful because the weather is still too hot for spray cans and the garage is too overtaken with cardboard boxes for airbrushing!

I’ve almost completed my Nighthaunt, so it looks like this army will be 2023’s simple paint scheme collection for when Inwant some easy wins - only the skin and metals get a highlight, everything else is a single coat and then I let Seraphim Sepia do all the work.

The trouble will come when I need to build more of these guys, since I’ve discovered that Necromunda kits are a huge pain to convert, and I need to do quite a bit of cutting on these guys. That bridge can be crossed when it arrives, though. For now, that’s five models off the grey mountain!

BATG score: +5 :negative_squared_cross_mark:

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Very dynamic blog already! Shaping up to be a Bas 2022 level rollercoaster!

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Little update today:

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The weather today was NOT AWFUL so I popped outside and undercoated two Leman Russ tanks and five Justaerin terminators. I’m still very spooked about using spray can primer due to some bad orange peel incidents, but it looks like this batch got through without any issues.

Hopefully I get a chance to put some paint on them this week!

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I got another model for my Heresy militia force today:

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If you can’t make it out, it’s the Canis Rex upgrade sprue for the 40K Knight Titan, from which I’ll be extracting the pilot on foot:

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I’ll be doing some conversion work to make a leader-y type model of some kind. The rest will be bits.

BATG score: +6 :negative_squared_cross_mark:

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Excellent model! Looking forward to what you can do with it

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Well, ultimately I’ve decided for now that I like the base model too much to really chop him up, instead I’ve just removed his briefcase, given him a replacement pistol from the Skitarii box, and put him in a bigger base so he looks like the boss.

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Also, I sold my old Sayl the Faithless and Nightmaw models that have been kicking around and threatening to break for ages:

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They’re off to a good home. Removed from the grey pile technically but we’re only counting painted models for BATG so no score change today.

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