Finishing stuff feels great. Completed vacuuming is infinitely better than vacuuming-in-progress, and despite the existence of the word 'gooning' (don't Google that at work) I'm not convinced it's something anyone enjoys. The wargaming hobby is built on the joy of finishing stuff. Finish building the thing, finish painting it, finish your kill team, your boarding patrol, your 1,000 point army.
Given the varied nature of the tasks required to bring an army to the tabletop, most of us have some aspects that are joyless chores to be struggled through (for me it's cleaning mould lines) and that struggle makes completion taste all the sweeter . This nudges many of us towards a task list mindset, enjoying the feeling of nearing completion as units get marked green in the progress tracker and we close in on that most classic of numbers: 2,000 points.
So recently, when I felt a random urge to paint some Imperial Guard, I thought: at last! I can finish off the last of my Mechanised Ankrans, the army that saw me through much of 8th Edition. These last dregs are so close:
- 10 guardsmen
- 2 Chimeras
- Primaris Psyker
- 3 Sentinels
- Baneblade
...and that would be all the Cadians I own done and dusted. No backlog. Hell yeah.
Since tanks paint up incredibly quickly, the primary obstacle to this delicious completion was the final infantry squad. I built them as women, since when I started the army I lamented the sausage fest and, beyond a few attempts at headswaps, I couldn't find an effort-efficient way of adding appropriate female sculpts to the army. When at last GW put out an upgrade sprue that included female heads, I grabbed a box, and ordered extra copies of the female heads from eBay to make ten women I could scatter through the army. This had the added benefit of adding more infantry to a tank-heavy list, shifted the army to a quarter female, and meant repainting approximately 40 squad numerals on shoulder pads.
Here's the ten of them:
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| Almost indistinguishable from the dudes, which... is kind of the point, I guess. |
This being a mechanised list, this did admittedly also mean adding more tanks to the army, but APCs don't count, right? I painted one for the new squad, and another for my Kasrkin, who lost Deep Strike in the transition to 10th Edition and as such were footslogging around like wastrels.
After that I got the Primaris Psyker done, and was looking at just the Sentinels and Baneblade to finish it all.
And I ran out of steam.
I took photos of the new squad, and have now sat on them for months, thinking I really ought to finish the whole army then do a big happy retrospective post, never to paint another Ankran again. Finishing: it's good.
Except that I didn't, and had some vague sense of guilt at not knocking something off the task list, even though I have successfully been painting other things and making good progress. I can get so focussed on progress that I feel bad when I'm not making it; a free evening spent not making progress feels like a wasted opportunity. This is particularly true if one is the sort of onanistic soul compelled to produce content for the internet, say maybe a blog. Clears throat.
Look, I'm talking about vague guilt, not all-consuming shame. This isn't a big deal. But it's instructive, in that my hobby should be just that, not something done because it must be finished. I have enough Imperial Guard painted to play a game, so what is the purpose of painting more? To enjoy myself. If I don't need the mini painted, it seems better to wait until I fancy painting a tank, at which point my cairn of opportunity shall provide.
Moreover, once an army is finished, it feels somehow inert to me. Every new unit changes the combinations you can apply to the battlefield, constantly shifting and refreshing your gaming experience. If I "finish" an army, I'm saying it'll never change again, and that makes the army less exciting to me. But now, the next time I feel like painting something green and battered, I can pull a sentinel out of its box and give it a lick of green paint and mud. No obligation to do more if I don't feel like it.
So for now, the Ankrans remain a living army, able to grow, big enough to use.
Long may they remain unfinished.
When I ws building my armies, my rate of purchase and completion were basically 1:1. My old armies 'counts-as a' pile of shame in the sense that I am working through them and updating them.
ReplyDeleteI have never considered having models on sprue to be a bad thing because I can summon them as needed.
I am currently kitbashing a traitor guard commander from command/infantry sprues and bitsboxing, wheras I'd need to tear apart a finished unit if I had forced myself to assemble and paint stuff I didnt need at the time.
Having spares means I can build and sub in heavy weapons teams or special weapons as needed, there is a lot of freedom. Cairn of opportunity indeed
Cobbling things together from one's bitz box is always a delight. Certainly my Librarian was a product of pure bitz box goodness and one or two parts from eBay. Which is to say: hell yeah.
Delete"Finished" is between six months and a year away from "sold." Always been that way. The last project funds the next one, with a couple of exceptions.
ReplyDeleteThat makes total sense from a funding perspective, even though I hold on to all my precious little dudes indefinitely. I suspect I may end up being buried with them.
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