I was looking for something good to strip some old metal models, and one suggestion I found on Youtube was cellulose thinners. Unfortunately, I've dunked and scrubbed these old Battle Fortresses twice, and some of the paint is stubbornly resisting. I guess I'll have to find something better.

On a more successful note, I had to fill in a little gap on this Epic Ork Warboss on boar, where I'd glued the two models together. Once that was done, all it needed was some paint.

Lots of other painting has been going on the last couple of months, and I've been going back and forth between my Epic Orks and Epic Tyranids, as these are the first two armies of the four I'm hoping to finish this year.

I'm pretty happy with my progress so far, even though I doubt I'm going fast enough to paint 4 armies. I might have to switch to an easier-to-paint army like my Epic Eldar or Androids.

I'm especially happy with how the Gargants have turned out, though I'm having more fun with the Nidz. It definitely helps to fight the boredom when every unit is a different colour. With some of the Nidz, I'm leaving them the colours I painted them way back in the 90s, but just re-doing them much better.

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Ages ago now I started work on all of my Epic buildings from the old 1st and 2nd edition box sets, as they were in a right state. I separated all of the card walls from the plastic roof sections. Said plastic parts then got a good scrub to get them clean before I undercoated them, along with a few models that I was planning to work on at the time.

It was at this point I decided to go no further. I just think it will make much more sense to get a 3D printer to make new walls rather than try to use the old card walls again. And to me it will make more sense just to paint the entire buildings when they are all assembled.

There's nothing stopping me from painting the ruins from the Epic 40,000 box though. Yeah, maybe I should get to that...

These pictures here show the progress of the Epic ruins I was building last year. They've pretty much stalled at this point as I wait for better weather in which to spray them.

But I'm really happy with how they look so far.

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My heavier, metal Epic models got a couple of little upgrades. Firstly, I finally decided to put them in a proper carry case, as they have always just been lying in the bottom of a box up to this point.

And one of my Andrayada Titans got a new base, as its old one was twice as big as it needed to be.

That other base will instead go to the Hierophant Titan, when I eventually manage to paint it.

I don't think that will be too long now though, looking at how few Epic Nidz I've got left to do.

Can't wait.

A couple of months back I was absolutely flying along in my attempts to make new terrain. Since then, a couple of other things have claimed my attention, as well as work kicking my ass as usual.

So though I've got nothing new finished, I thought it time to put a bit of an update here, almost as a form of motivation to make me get these things done.

First, I've been working on maybe the most ambitious piece of terrain I've ever done. It says a lot about how simple my other bits of terrain are if this is the most ambitious, but at least I'm pushing myself a little bit.

What triggered it was finding an old He-Man toy in the loft, which was part of the old Castle Greyskull set. I've kept this thing in storage all this time, because it looked like something wargamey could be made out of it. And nearly 30 years later, its time has finally come.

Though the opening was a window for the old MOTU toys, it always looked to me like it would be a good cave entrance for smaller wargaming miniatures. So I set out to make something of that type. However unlike my old tomb entrance, I wanted this to be a functional cave, that models could enter.

Cue lots of cutting up wood and XPS sheets to build up the cave. I completely made it up as I went, with no planning whatsoever, and that is why the sides of the terrain piece all have completely different styles. Not something I'm particularly happy with, but it is what it is. I'm sure as hell not spending all those hours again to redo bits of it.

There was a big hold up while I tried to find a little bit of time at work to cut out a roof section. But now that's done I can start trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to complete this thing, and what kind of final look I'm going to try and go for.

And it doesn't look like much of that old toy will even be visible when I'm done, but I guess it's done its job as more of a motivational piece.

I've been working on other terrain pieces, such as bringing the old 2nd edition Epic Space Marine buildings up to scratch at last. I've only owned them since 1992!

But together with the Scoobster, we put an order in for some more MDF terrain. As I'd got lots of Imperial-type terrain, I decided this time to mostly go with more Eldar inspired pieces. I was also mindful of trying to pick things that can be used in 6mm as well as 28mm.

I've only put one pack together yet, so this is yet another thing I've got to get back to.

Scoob decided to go very 40K heavy on his MDF terrain, with a bunch of new stuff for his Orks. He's already put them all together, and I got to see them last week. They look cool with a bunch of his Orks lined up inside. A proper Orky paint job will finish them off real good.

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While Scoob's new terrain was all set up, he came up with the idea to have a bit of a muckabout battle using the old 40K 8th rules. This is because we don't have access to 9th yet, and our own rules are a long way off (as we've got to finish the Epic ones first).

We each took charge of our respective Space Marine Chapters, in the Storm Tigers and Bringers Of Death, and set out to kill two Ork characters before our own characters were defeated.

I ended up going for the Ork Warboss while Scoob went after the Big Mek. We both had chances to succeed, but some crappy rolls (especially for my Devastators) saw our bold attacks fail and our characters got taken down by the Orks in short order.

While it was good to get our 40K stuff out for the first time in a while, all it did was reinforce my belief that the official 40K rules are no longer for me. The game is just so stale, bloated, and boring.

It's been a very long time since I last had the chance to do any real dice-chuckin', what with Papa Nurgle spreading his influence around the world. But finally, this last week has seen Scoob and I get down to some proper playtesting of the new Epic rules that I've been cooking up for what seems like an eternity now.

We played a series of games, between 3000 and 7000 points, with Scoob as the Orks and myself controlling the minions of Chaos.

At their core, the rules are dirt-simple, but each game still saw us tweaking and adding, and throwing up different ideas to use in the future.

I'm definitely liking the direction the rules are taking, and though they are not finished I had more fun playing these games than I did playing pretty much any game of 5th or 8th 40K. Shame that we're the ones having to do all the work in order to get a game system up and running that we actually like. Would be much easier to throw a bit of money at a game company, but if they're not supplying what we want, then we don't have any choice.

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Our new Epic rules are not the only new rules we have been testing recently. In amongst all our Epic playtesting, we tried a couple of games of One Page Rules Grimdark Future. This is a free and simple ruleset that lets you play games with 28mm sci-fi models, and very inspired by Warhammer 40K.

Though we only tried two games, we came to the conclusion that One Page Rules definitely does not rule. In both games, my Eldar shuriken weapons tore Scoob's Orks apart in short order, and we couldn't really see any way to change that outcome without making our own modifications to the rules. It just seemed very hard for combat armies to do much.

More testing, and maybe some tinkering, could definitely happen in the future, but right now, we're more focused on our own rules.

The big terrain build I started a while back is continuing, though very slowly. It's been such a slow slog because I've not had a great deal of time for wargaming so far this year, as I've been trying to make it more about computer games.

Yet a few of my planned terrain pieces are now complete.

I had the clever idea at first to try and create some buildings from scratch from some offcuts of wood. I originally wanted them to look like factories, but I think they've come out more looking like hab-units. But oh well.
These took forever, especially the adding of the detail which I did by just cutting out bits of card, so I ended up veering away from these to work on other things, coming back to them every now and then.

I had far more luck and progress with the more natural additions to my terrain collection. These are some new hilly-rock things with steps, as the old steps I made looked a little big for 6mm sized models. These still look huge, but at least it's not as ridiculous to think the little dudes could climb up there.
I used filler for the first time in years on the rock faces of these pieces, and it has come out looking a lot better than how I was doing them before. This has made me decide that all my other hilly-rock-things need a big update. Great, more work.
Also, like with the 40K ruins I did a while back, I had trouble with patches of the green undercoat showing through the grass, which multiple coats didn't seem to fix. So I bought a big bag of flock to glue down first when I next added grass.

As luck would have it, the other buildings I had been working on were some 6mm MDF ruins I found online. I had gotten on so well with the filler on the rocks that I thinned some down and painted it onto the wood to give it more of a concrete texture, which worked surprisingly well. I know how I'm going to do MDF terrain in the future, that's for sure. I only wish I had used it on the other wooden buildings as well, but at this point they were a bit too far along for me to be bothered going back and tinkering.
I also tried my new idea, and flocked the bases of these ruins before adding the grass, and the result, while not perfect, is a marked improvement.

With the rocks and ruins done, it was back to the wooden buildings to finish the painting on those. I think I spoiled them a little, as I used quite a heavy splash of a wash I mixed up myself. I didn't really intend this to be a shade wash, but more of a grime wash. Well, they are certainly grimy looking. A bit too grimy. Still, they are done and usable, so I'm not going to complain too much.
They've ended up quite simple, so maybe I should have added more detail before painting them, but I'd had enough of all that fiddly crap.

All that's left now is to wait for a nice day to varnish/seal them. Meanwhile, I've still got lots of other materials and ideas I am starting to move forward with...