You served me faithfully for the last 2-3 years of hobbying, your nozzle only blocking every 5 or 6 applications. Even though I’ve already moved on to your replacement, I’m comforted to know your last drops were spent glueing together our largest project yet.
I laid out the rest of the scatter terrain I envisioned, and used some stand-in miniatures to approximate how I wanted the army itself to be displayed. All in all, I’m pretty pleased with how things are looking. Now I’ve just got to finish everything! But at least I have a plan to work to…
I’ve finally filled in the missing corner. Everything has been cut, glued, clamped, and filled… I’ve just got to sand everything down to size.
Last, but not least, the main building feature is 99% complete. I might add a couple more bits of broken columns, and there’ll be some rubble added to the floor on the board, but otherwise its ready for the next stage.
It’s bigger than I realised during assembly, running nearly the full width of the board, even when set at a diagonal. It’s almost amazing how the scale seems to change as soon as it’s placed on the board. Suddenly it becomes this huge, looming, monster towering over the battlefield.
I’ll be adding rubble and scatter terrain to break up the rest of the board, and make it look more “lived in”. Everything will be integrated using texture paint and extra grit and sand for variation. That’s the next task.
44 days to go.
I’ve been slowly chipping away at my Armies on Parade board over the last few days (when I’ve resisted the siren song of Warcraft…). The army itself is another matter, but that’s for another day.
Basic construction of the base has been finished, apart from that one empty corner. I’ve got a couple of ideas of how to fill it, I just haven’t settled on an option yet.
I started off by gluing the section cut from the Realm of Battle board to the plywood, and clamping everything together. Once the glue dried, I covered the sides and holes in the board with a hefty amount of Polyfilla.
After leaving everything overnight to cure, I used an electric sander to smooth everything off and trim off the excess plastic. A new floor for the main building area was created out of textured plasticard.
Time to check everything would fit into the case, and to see how tall I could make the buildings. It turned out I had 11.5 inches in height I could use, which was plenty. The new Sector Imperialis buildings are ~5 inches per level, so I could comfortably fit a two-story building into the case.
Now it’s on to the fun stuff – the buildings! I started by laying out a rough floor-plan, to see how many sections I needed per side. I ended up not using all of the sections on the left side.
With two sides built, things are starting to take shape. I removed the door built into one of the wall sections, to give another “access point” to the building.
Here I’m test fitting the upper floor, to make sure everything is square. As I’d been using a spare floor section to try line-up the wall sections throughout, things were pretty good.
By this point I was starting to think about the walls on the upper floor, but it was time to pack everything away for the night. Shortly after taking this picture, I realised I had to rip the column tops from the right-side wall as I remembered I was going to extend the floor out that way.
This is the mess from just from scraping off mould-lines in one sitting. Time to get the vacuum out…
My plan is to finish construction of the buildings and ruins this evening. Providing I get the missing corner filled with something, I might manage to get the first layers of paint on the board by the start of next week. I really need to get the board finished soon, so I can move on to painting the army. There are only 45 days to go until Parade Day!
I’ve been granted some WoW in-game time as a resolution to an old support ticket, so I’m able to jump onto my higher-level characters again. I’m comparing the experience to the one I had with the new character I started earlier, and… hooo-boy the experience on my 110 Paladin was confusing. I stopped playing pretty early in Legion’s lifecycle, so when I logged in I was prompted to do the Legionfall scenario straight away, then after 1 quest or so, I was immediately whisked off to start Argus. While I’m on my way to Argus, I’m prompted to start the Siege of Lordaeron, leaving me wondering what content is actually worth playing through. Playing the Siege would net me a shiny new weapon, but no way to follow up on that storyline until I drop £40-£53 on Battle for Azeroth.
On top of the questing confusion, all my talents were reset and my abilities changed. These were expected, but it adds to the sense of unfamiliarity. I’m not a fan of the GCD change and how it affects Paladin rotation, but that might just be a symptom of generally feeling lost. Right now I feel like I’m just mashing random buttons whenever I get in combat, in the hope something fires off. On a character I’ve played on-and-off for 11ish years, feeling lost is very uncomfortable and frustrating!
I guess I’m in an odd position in that I’m coming back after a new expansion is released, but I haven’t unlocked the new content yet. In general the experience seems to be that while new characters get guided to where they need to be, returning characters need to figure out for themselves what they’re meant to be playing through, with the implication that you will just drop anything “old” from your Quest Log immediately. But there’s nothing to tell you in-game what is out-dated. In my case, for this character, the path forward is pretty much “buy BFA and forget about anything Legion-related,” but if I’d been returning at some point around the pre-patch, with no clue as to what had been released since I stopped playing, I would have been completely disorientated.
In celebration of turning 50(!), Tony Hawk released a lovely video of him performing 50 skateboard tricks he either invented or helped pioneer.
