Down With Optimisation in Wargaming!

Paint the perfect tiny face in only twelve hours! Paint a hundred miniatures to tabletop standard in a day using this simple trick! Hone your tournament build by avoiding these underpowered units!

Actually I'm fine, thanks.

Online discourse has a tendency to cater to extremes, and I find this to be a common presence even with hobby content. Things are frequently either about getting the best possible result, or the fastest possible result, but here's the thing: neither of those approaches are actually fun. Unless you're a competition painter, optimising for extreme detail means dying of old age before you finish your army, and optimising for extreme speed will usually produce an army that you don't feel quite so satisfied with. The overwhelming majority of wargamers spend more time building and painting their miniatures than actually gaming with them on the tabletop, so it's pretty important to find what makes you enjoy the ride the most.

I suppose partly it comes down to the essential way the internet works: when content is written, it is made to be found by someone conducting a search, and people won't usually search for "the medium-est paint job please." So naturally, people (including us) tend to bear this in mind when setting out our stall online.

And yet the medium is where I keep finding my happy place. My most detailed army scheme, my beloved Cobalt Scions, are more effort than is usually practical for a whole army but about five times faster to paint than an 'Eavy Metal paint job (so a mere 5-6 hours per marine, luxury). Plenty of people paint Space Marines better than I do. Conversely the Tyranids I'm painting with Harvey could be painted a little more quickly, but at the expense of us liking how they look. They're still extremely quick by my standards, with a gaunt taking about half an hour to paint, possibly less when allowing for batch efficiency. That's a pretty broad spectrum of time and quality, but what unifies them? I think it's finding the maximum effort one is willing to invest, and not going making myself go above it. If I couldn't get the results on the Tyranids this quickly, I don't know if I'd be painting them. If I put less effort into my Cobalt Scions, I'd be less proud of them. But whenever I finish a unit from either army, I am pleased rather than exhausted or disappointed.

But that isn't the whole of what makes it enjoyable to paint something, and this brings me onto the cause of my talking about all this: I have just finished painting a sub-optimal piece of terrain that I happen to find very charming. It's the Generatorum Hub from Kill Team: Nightmare (what a title). In game terms it's essentially a hill, albeit a mechanical one. It's not the most practical piece of terrain ever created (more on that later) and it's not my best ever paint job, but there came a point towards the end of painting it when I had absolutely done enough to put it on the table, and yet I kept going. An optimiser would call this madness: I could be moving onto the next project, maximising hobby progress. And the methodology I was using would never win a painting award, so why make it more detailed?

Because I was adding rusty streaks coming from some of the bigger rivets and panels, and it looked cool, and I was enjoying myself, that's why.

The reason painting a model is fun, to me, is that you take a piece of plastic and make it come to life. Those rusty streaks made this thing look like it was used to getting rained on. They added a whole lot of depth and atmosphere, and there's something childishly satisfying about blobbing some paint on loosely and then smudging it with your thumb to get the perfect fade. Did I follow this process on every single rivet? Nope. I applied the maximum amount of effort I found enjoyable, knowing I could stop at any time as I'd already hit a table-ready standard.

OK we're a fair way into the post and I haven't flashed the goods yet, so here we are:

Strong Star Wars energy, no? I can see this thing being used as an outpost's power plant, a city's shield generator, and all sorts. I've painted it in the same colour scheme as my Sector Fronteris/Nachmund terrain, since the sculpting's in the same style.

Just as the paint job is not optimised, neither is the terrain itself. It doesn't exactly offer a great defensible position, and I've killed a lot of the available horizontal space by gluing that Sector Mechanicus dome on (although TBF just like the vent fans, the original electro-gubbins on that section of the mini did not look like something you'd want to stand on). This doesn't bother me; as ever, I just want to build cool-looking battlefields. For once we've got an objective where you can understand why someone would want to try and hold it even though it's a somewhat exposed position. Whether one wants to treat models standing on it as being in cover is probably something to discuss when setting up the table.

For science, I decided to see how many troops could fit on it at different base sizes. You can fit 10 minis with 28mm bases with no trouble.

32mm bases mean you really need to use most of the available horizontal space.

It's when you hit 40mm bases that you start running into real constraints. These are too wide to fit up the stairs, and there aren't that many spots where you can fit 40mm bases that look immersive, meaning that you effectively cap out at three minis and a ton of wasted space (or space in which to have memorable showdowns with your enemies while the vent fans make everyone's cloaks flap pleasingly).

To round out the photos I thought I'd show how this terrain piece looks hooked up to other structures using the Imperium's most efficient pipes:

So, yes, I painted a big grey techno-hill. But the most important thing was that I was enjoying myself while I did so, all the more for sacking off the concept of doing anything perfectly or efficiently. Because as long as I'm enjoying myself, I'll come back to the paint station that much more regularly. In short: the only thing worth optimising in your hobby is satisfaction.