Rat-Dudes are pretty cool!

I'm a Chaos Marines player. Got to find the time to post some pics.

Wish we could PBEM!

I actually have suggestion.
I used a nice way to build up armies for my brothers without having to spend a dime.

Since you must have the basic rulebook, you should have all the soldiers rules for your army and some of the enemies.

Thus you have all you need except miniatures.
So, you get head down into the rulebooks and build on paper an Army you think it's good and you use a small stone or coins or empty base to keep track of where your guys are and try it out.

This way you can see how that army plays out without having to buy hundreds of soldiers or vehicles beforehand.

When you think you nailed down an army of your liking you start buying in small caches.
To avoid getting bored doing too many of the same soldiers, break down the numbers and buy a bit of stuff for each selection.

I mean, if you have to buy 40 space marines buy 10 of them and paint them, then get that tank you wanted and paint it. Get 10 more Space Marines and then those 5 terminator you wanted and so on.

Doing too many of the same will easily bore your son out.

Hope to have made any sense.

Makes sense, komemiute. However, I am getting him to paint the mooks and I'll do the special ones. He's got a squad of 10 Space Marines to paint and about 30 Orks, should be fun for his first go.

I do like your suggestion about trying things out first.... though I would at least need an army codex book for whatever army I want to try out... unless I can borrow one from another player.

I'm only speaking out of my memory, but in older versions of base codex there were quite some army details.

Prolly now they make more money by selling them separately.
But yeah, that's the whole deal. IIRC codex are not so heavy on the money side.
Of course you should know what kind of army you look for.

I've always found better to get an army adjusted to my style of play rather than get something fancy and then sweat to get it right.
Good thing is Space Marines and Chaos ones are kind of jack of all trades, but masters of none.

Then again, specific chapters can get more suited to attack, defence or Melee.
Know thyself and your enemy and thou shall only fear the dice roll.

Ice, for your other army you should try Grey Knights. They have awesome looking models and are pretty powerful on the table. Plus, you don't have to worry about managing and painting lots of models since they are a very "elite" army.

Para_Bellum, those are some really nice Black Templars - I always said if I never played Grey Knights I would play Black Templars

I am doing Blood Angels at the moment and the Grey Knights came out some months after I bought my Space Marine box set for the Blood Angels. While they do look cool, IIRC they were mostly melee... I prefer being able to touch enemies from afar.

Still, this is me speaking with little-to-no gaming experience. I was actually going to start an Ultramarine force simply because that is what they looked like on the boxes so I had a good example to compare to, but I was talked into trying the Blood Angels at that time and they sounded cool rules-wise. I'll have a more solid feel of what my second force would be after I play a couple of games and get to appreciate all the abilities better.

I'm a BattleTech guy myself (considering I'm an active contributer to the BattleTech universe and have been for over 10 years now), but I also like some of the Warhammer 40K universe. I'm following the Horus Heresy series (but damnit, get on with the main plot already!!!!!), and some of Abnett's series (Ghosts and Eisenhorn, didn't like Ravenor).

Hey Ice, I'm still pretty knowledgeable about WH40K armies.

Let me know if I can help.

But if shooting is your "thing" you should consider Tau. They're the most "tactical" army ever.
Check out also Chaos Marines (as they are just like Space marines only... worse! meant as better;) ).

Imperial legion is interesting.
Lots and lots of soldiers, very varied squads with support weapons and tons of vehicle.
I was making WWII German Fallschirmjager with'em. Damn, GOT to find those miniatures...

Pictures as soon as practicable.

Hey Ice, I can't help you with your dilemmas, but I just want to let you know that I feel and understand... :-D

I just returned to mini painting after a 2+ years hyatus. Heck in fact I just bought a hobby paint shaker (!!!!!!) to revive all my half-dead paint pots from the last binge.

Money-wise my opinion is to treat miniatures games the same way as any other addictive behaviour: only abstinence really works...


FT

i was big into d&d, mechwarrior and battltech tabletop back in the day. always been interested in wh40k but never delved into it.

so for a nooby like me, what are the basics and costs for such a thing? (fan of chaos)