Happy new year and 2013 Resolutions

Happy new year dear Readers... 

2012 is over and it was a really uneventful year for me in terms of blogging and painting. While I played some games, bought and sold a bunch of miniatures, I didn't spend much time painting stuff or taking the necessary pictures for some battle reports.

I hope a lot of this will change this year, so here are my resolutions for 2013.


Painting:

1. Paint at least once or twice a week. Given the amount of models sitting on my bench, this will still take me ages to work through, but once or twice is week a least beats once or twice a month and seeing painted stuff on the table should boost my motivation quite a bit.  
2. Do try to finish some stuff, before buying tons of new models. This will be easy, "thanks" to limited funds and a big schedule of other (non-TTG related) stuff I need to buy this year anyway.  
3. Don't scrap paint-schemes halfway through the painting process. That's one of the big reasons why I didn't finish anything in 2012. I had all the basic colors on my Dystopian Wars "Republic of France" models, before I decided to switch from the stock scheme that pretty much everyone uses to one of my own. Bad idea... esp. since nobody besides me plays them around here, so it's not that I would have run into tons of similar painted armies. Jeez! 
4. Don't over-complicate things, keep it simple. I should be more honest with myself. Right now I'm a mediocre painter, so the top priority should be to paint more and not to go for some untried and time-consuming techniques. 
5. Paint a single army list for each game, instead of trying to grind through all the stuff from one system. This should not only help keeping my motivation high, it is also rewarding to the people I play against. 

Warmachine/Hordes:

1. Concentrate on playing one, maybe two warlocks, for at least a couple of game in a row. Last year I more often than not didn't play the same lock twice in a row, which didn't helped upping my game. 
2. Switch between Circle and Legion every 2-3 months (unless people request a training game).    Now that I own two Hordes faction, swapping once in a while should keep both my and the interest of my small meta for WM/H high, without feeling burned out.  
3. Only play with the SR 2013 package, except for BB demo games. In 2012 I played less than a third of my games using the SR 2012 package, with most of my games being played against new players or people, who didn't want to go through all the hassle with the SR 2012 package and opted for a simple "meet in the middle" slug-fest after a long working week. 
4. Try to start attending local tournaments. I spend 6 month on a internship, that only left me the weekends (8h shift + 4h commuting) for leisure, which didn't include tournaments. While I don't think that I will attend at every single tournament within reasonable traveling distance, I do expect to play at least one every 2-3 months. More if we manage to rekindle the small WM/H tournaments at our local store this year.  
5. Take a look at my stock once or twice a year. I'm waiting for the Gargantuan release, to see if it changes my view on the two factions I own. While my Circle collection is relatively small, my LoE army includes a bunch of models I bought on a whim or for sheer looks, who either haven't seen the table in more than a year or not really fit my play style. 

On top of that I still need to finish the single Dystopian Wars fleet I kept, after selling both my Prussians and Japanese in 2012. I also started SAGA (Breton "all cavalry" and some footslogging Norse Gael) and I'm looking forward for the small campaign a local guy will start next month. Which gives me ~30 days to paint the Breton models I need for it, since having everything painted is required. SAGA is a game that's very easy to learn and a blast to play. Esp. since you don't need to paint rows and rows of miniatures (like in most historical TTGs) and the models are not some finicky 15 mm, you can expect to see some paint in progress pictures and small battle reports popping up on my blog this spring. 

And should I really mention the Relic Knight Kickstarter? Two fellow club members and I pooled money for the triple savior pledge, so somewhere late spring/early summer I'm going to be the proud owner of some Cerci Speed Circuit and Star Nebula Corsair models. The other guys picked Corsairs, Circuit, Doctrine and Paladins. Nobody went for the Noh Empire or the Black Diamonds, but we hope to kindle enough local interest in the game with the Kickstarter models, so that someone else will pick up those factions. Haven't given the rules more than a short glimpse, but as a former Anime&Mecha nerd it wasn't hard to sell me on that game.    

Cheers, 

Karnstein