Plagued by Value

It's been a difficult few weeks for my goal of painting more models than I acquire in 2017.

The problem has been Dropzone Commander. It's a great game, but for some time I've struggled to do well at it. Because I'm an excellent workman, the issue has obviously been my tools, specifically the lack of a solid core to base my army around.

This nagging feeling that I could do better at the game if I just spent more money left me very receptive to a series of surprisingly good offers on Shaltari models. I'm not sure why these all came at the same time from different sellers, but the upshot is I've added 41 models to the pile. On top of that, I ended up with 3 freebie models at Partizan, so all told my "acquired" total has increased by 44. This isn't exactly what I had planned.

Fortunately, I had a creative solution, made available by Hawk Wargames' other offering. As you can't miss if you've read my blog at all recently, I've been building up my Dropfleet Commander fleet, so first of all I added another 3 frigates, to round out a couple of groups:

3. That's a start

These are pretty small, but I thought I could go smaller. So I took things down a level with some bombers...

3 + 12 = 15. Getting better

This both improved my numbers, and guaranteed that people would complain that these "don't count" as models. I found both to be pleasing, but I thought I could go further with both, so I went to the fighters:

3 + 12 + 15 = 30. That'll do!

These can't sensibly be described as anything other than Very Small. Their diminutive nature allowed me to rattle through them very quickly, and I suffered only temporary blindness as a result, which was nice.

So, what's the end result of all that on my numbers?

Painted: 147
Acquired: 162

Certainly not the direction I'd have liked it to take, but I'm only 15 models away from evening things up again. I have some of the Dropzone bits on the go now, so hopefully it won't take me too long to close the gap. On the other hand, recently an excess of real life has limited my available painting time, so there's still a reasonable chance that I run out of year before I get things back on track.

Oooh, it's tense!