40K Friday - Pre-10th Edition Roundup

 

The updates keep coming:

• Faction Rules
• Leaders are joining units again
• Vehicle rules are a little different
• Weapons have some changes

I have to say so far I remain cautiously optimistic. It does feel like concerns about the 8th/9th edition rules have been heard and are being addressed. I'm sure it won't be perfect but it feels like a move in the right direction. Shooting out of a rhino is a real throwback as is moving back to characters in units. People are worried about the faction rules eliminating a lot of flavor but I suspect many of the bigger subfactions will become separate factions on their own. 

Looking forward to the edition change I decided to focus in on a few of my armies. I say this because one of my long-term issues is that I tend to jump around between them picking up a unit here and a unit there, something for Orks one week then something for Marines the next and then something for Chaos after that and then a lot of it sits around half done for years. So I have unit X, and it's probably built so it's technically playable, but it's at best primed or basecoated. Over time I will build up a sizable group of mostly-painted or "almost done" units for a given army and it's damned annoying even though I'm doing it to myself. This can happen even when I pick up a model that is technically painted because I usually need to do some touch ups and work on the bases to make them fit into my existing army.

I'm sure there's room in there for another landspeeder and another predator ... and maybe another redemptor ...

I go through bursts of finishing up these half-completed units every so often and right now I'm working through my Crimson Fists backlog of "blue but not yet completed" miniatures which has a lot of things that were built and basecoated in a prior decade but never finished. This week I managed to close out a Gravis Captain (the fat one from Dark Imperium), a land speeder I originally got in the 3rd edition starter set (yes, it took me around 25 years to get it from "on sprue" to "done" and no that is not a record for me), and a squadron of 5 bikes which I have wanted to do for a long time but had not. 

With those actually finished I now have some Fast Attack options to choose from which has always been a back burner kind of thing in my marine armies. I did something similar a few years back with Elites when I added a couple of Terminator squads and a bunch of dreadnoughts to expand my choices there. A trio of attack bikes is in progress now along with a third landspeeder to finish out the speed options. I'm also close to completing an old MKII Predator to complete my Predator trio for this army. 

It feels like I'm making real progress on reducing the pile of shame here so naturally I had to go and complicate things by deciding it was time to add in some real primaris options too. Right now there are intercessors, assault intercessors, heavy intercessors, aggressors, another captain and a pair of lieutenants either newly arrived or on the way and I already had a repulsor, some inceptors, some hellblasters, and a captain and a chaplain waiting for an opportunity to join up so that's going to be a significant project for the next month. I originally chose the Fists because they were a much simpler paint scheme to do after doing Howling Griffons for my old RT/2E army. I'm going to force myself to remember that and burn through some intercessor squads now instead of letting them gather dust on the to-do pile. More to come on that. 

Of course I'm not just focusing on one army - that would be too easy. I've picked up a few Death Guard units recently and I'm slowly working on making them into a real army and not just a collection of interesting parts. I've finally added some of the newer plastic plague marines to the force after resisting the temptation as I want to build some melee squads and they have a lot of options there. I'm also getting the terminators and vehicles sorted out and figuring out how I want to paint them all in hopes of looking like a somewhat cohesive force. 

I also added some options to my Grey Knights force - like an actual metal Draigo! - but the main focus there has been painting up the rhinos/razorbacks/land raider/dreadnoughts to get their vehicles sorted out as well. Not as big of a project but still important to "finish" the force.

Not mine but "Goals"

Finally the other focus area is my Black Templars. I've had a lot of built and basecoated stuff for them for a few years now, enough to play some games, but not much is really "done". I really like their updated crusader squad sprues and some of the other chapter-specific bling that's available for them so I picked up some more of those sets as well and have plans for a couple of big footslogger squads to try something different. 

Anyway there's a Friday brain dump on the 40K situation. Lots of power armor to paint - more next week!