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Hobby Progress 15/04 and a few observations

The Lower torso and interior is done, hooray!! I really enjoyed this part of the project even though most of it is unlikely to be seen most of the time with the armor plates sitting on top.

Warhound titan lower torso

Warhound titan lower torso - Eye of horus on snout

Warhound titan lower torso - internal door

Warhound titan lower torso magnetised to legs

Warhound titan lower torso - cockpit

Also on a related note the new Tau forces have just been released, and for this release after speaking to a number of people on twitter I decided to look around at third-party online sellers of Games Workshop stuff. Sorry if this next section descends a little into a rant, I had looked before but most of the time I wasn’t really looking for any large volumes of items and with games workshops website giving free postage on items over £10 (about 4 pots of paint) the savings I would make 10% then adding shipping, it didn’t really make sense.

This month however I caught the Tau bug and ordered a few things, but this time I shopped around and found some great deals what even with shipping making the only reason you would order direct would be to get it quicker (and even that’s not a guarantee). This Tau release seems to have caused all the third-party sellers issues with meeting the demand, which is not surprising considering some of the companies are offering 30% off, if you order a riptide you will end up having £15 more in your pocket than if you ordered direct.

I was looking around and came across these websites, Their biggest issue seems to be the lack of certain items, things which you may have to go direct to get (I’m looking at you Shadowsun) there are many other obvious options as well I have not included like eBay which can get you a good deal if you don’t mind the models already assembled and painted, and amazon which is usually cheaper than GW but can vary depending on the model.

• Total Wargamer – had 30% off all GW stuff until yesterday 15/04, now 15% off
• Wayland Games – had 30% off on all Tau stuff up until the release day and now offering 10-20% off on various GW items.
• Element Games – Still offering 20% off all new Tau stuff and around 15% off other items. I like these guys because they offer free shipping for all orders over £80, which is handy if you are starting a new army.
• Gifts for Geeks – Their discount again depends on the items but you are looking at around 10-20%, some items such as tau were at 25% off during the pre-release period.

Rant section
As unlikely as it is that GW will read this, there really are only 2 things that annoyed me that they could do better that would make not look around.

1. The One-Click bundles – This was my main gripe, “Click here once to select 2 items at once with no discount”, I didn’t even look at other sites until I saw this rubbish. Come on, if you even offered a 5% discount to order all the items as 1, like the battleforce (The items in the space marine battleforce add up to £97 and it costs £80 which means you get a 17.4% saving).
2. Limited Edition Codex – The premise is really good for this, get an awesome book for a little more than the usual codex.

   Where this fall short is how much better it is. The ordinary Chaos Codex is £30 and the Limited Edition is £60. OK I’m fine with that if the codex is offering £30 of extra value, the problem is in my opinion it does not. I think it looks cool and the dust cover and internal art are cool but if they added an extra 10 pages of fluff, use a heavier grade of paper (nothing says quality like good quality paper, see the Collector’s Edition 40k rulebook), and better cover art, make it more than just a piece of artwork in the middle of a black background, make it tactile and interesting and it will sail off the shelves (in fairness the Tau limited edition cover was nice, which bodes well for the future).

   There is an opportunity here to create something outstanding product that people will claw tooth and nail to get, see the black library’s Aurelian book, for about a week their site was so swamped with orders that the site was practically unusable, everyone wanted one and they weren’t disappointed when it arrived, I certainly wasn’t.

   If these improvements were there I would have bought it instead of the ordinary edition, not only that I would probably have bought more stuff at the same time. Luckily there is still time, the Eldar, Space Marine, and Orks codices, among many others are still to be released, maybe, just maybe they could make these codices worth taking.

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