Friday, January 01, 2016

2015 Wrap Up and 2016 Resolutions

[Disclaimer: This post contains fluffy, introspective nonsense... Just like last year's did.]

2015 was generally a solid year for hobby time. There was a pretty solid block where family stress smashed my motivation though and I fell into a Diablo3 pit for probably 4 months. If it hadn't been for that, this would have been a banner year for playing.

Last year's goals:
1) Get my Cygnar force up to 100 painted models - Success! Easily beat this goal.
2) Get caught up on all new Legion releases - Fail! But oh so close. I'm missing Blightblades. Otherwise I'm caught up on new things. I'm still behind on older units as well, specifically Archers, Swordsmen, and Grotesques.
3) Play 52 games of Warmachine - Fail! There was a solid block of 3 months where I barely played anything. If I add in my DZC games, I'd actually be closer, but still a ways off. Probably 44 games total.
4) Attend 1 convention - Success! Lock & Load for 3 years straight now! Not only that, but I played Unbound there AND got to play a game with Jason Soles which was hands down the highlight.
5) Not delude myself on other factions - Success! Other than the foray into DZC, I stayed very focused this year as my painting tally shows. Speaking of which...

Models painted last year:
Cygnar: 66
Legion: 16
Mercs: 7
DZC: 41
Looking at it from a size perspective (excluding DZC):
Small based: 63
Medium based: 10
Large based: 14
Huge based: 2

So this year I painted a total of 130 total models (89 of which were 30mm scale) compared to 85 the previous year. This year I was again very focused on what I was painting, with Cygnar being the bulk of it.

Goals for next year:
1) Paint arcs on all my Legion models - I love having arcs painted on my Cygnar. Time to bring my Legion collection up to the same standard.
2) Close out DZC - There's only a few left, but it would be nice to have it completed. I don't anticipate needing to add a whole lot of models to that force.
3) Get my Cygnar collection up to 95% painted - This is just so I don't lose steam and end up with a bunch of unpainted things sitting around.
4) Play 52 games this year - Gonna try this one again. If I can keep pace and not fall into "Murtaugh Mode", then it should be easy. I should note this is not limited to Warmachine.
5) Attend 1 convention - Again. Probably gonna be Lock & Load.
6) Paint a Batman model for my comics fixer - A friend of mine (who doesn't play miniatures games) is my fixer when it comes to comics. He has made amazing recommendations. He's a big Batman fan so I managed to get one of the great Knight Models versions of Batman and I want to paint it for him to premium quality as a way of saying thanks. 7) Play tighter games - More about this below.
8) Pack away old models - I don't want to get rid of anything, but there's lots of models I simply don't play anymore, and they are taking up precious case space. I think it's time to put them in long term storage.
9) Archive selected models - I've got a bunch of models I'm just never going to paint. For my own sanity, I owe it to myself to just pack them away in long term storage or find new homes for them.
10) Read another book about painting - I've already got a great book sitting on the shelf about the history of pigment that I'm very keen to read. I just needed some motivation.

Whew! That's a lot of goals. Some of those are pretty small though. I am a little concerned though because there's 3 big "distractions" from these goals that I can already foresee:
1) Diablo3 2.4.0 patch - Whenever it hits, it will definitely distract us with a big rash of playing.
2) Malifaux - The new campaign rules have us very intrigued, so I suspect that we'll play a bunch of that and I'll want to paint a new crew for it.
3) Unbound at Lock and Load - If they have it again, I will most definitely want to play in it and I already have a scheme in mind for it. But I'll save that for a future post.

On the topic of playing tighter games, there are 3 specific things I want to start doing in every game this year. First is use a tray to roll my dice to eliminate confusion and cocked dice. I think this is just a good practice in general and avoids lots of problems with hitting models as well.
The second is to not do any more rewinding of model moves. This is something that I've grown to dislike a lot. positioning is really important in this game, and as soon as a model is picked up and moved at all, it can completely skew things. Whenever people back things up, it always becomes a "I think it was about here and had a line to this" sort of thing, which usually benefits the person doing the moving. I'm going to start treating it more like chess where once it's picked up, it's committed.
The third is simply to play to a death clock in every Warmachine game, even if I don't enforce it on my opponent. I want to play faster and get used to making sharper decisions quickly. I find that mistakes breed better future choices better than spending lots of time mulling over options.

And that's it. Here's to a great 2015 and hopes for a great 2016. Cheers to all!

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