Which Army?

I've been really eager to get back into Warhammer since 8th edition came out so starting a new Warhammer army seemed the appropriate way to start applying this new philosophy.

So which army? I struggled for a few months deciding which army to collect. I'm not quite so into the fluff of Warhammer as I am 40k so no army instantly jumps out at me. I did develop a number of criteria though while I was making up my mind. The first was I didn't want a horde army. As much as I like the back ground to Skaven, for example, the idea of painting a couple of hundred models to get a reasonable army was too daunting and I figured I would probably doom myself to failure as far as painting them goes just by the shear mountain I'd have to climb.

A similar logic went into discounting Vampires. This was the last army I played for Warhammer and to be honest I didn't get on with them. I like the fluff of Undead but I didn't enjoy playing Vampires, I'm not entirely sure why, maybe I just wasn't very good with them. I did consider them under 8^th but figured I'd have to buy 2-3 times as many basic troops for the army to get it working under 8^th (my old army was very character heavy) so again the whole horde thing put me off again. I quite fancy Tomb Kings at some point, but I discounted them at the time for having such an out of date army book.

So basically I was looking for a small elite army. I considered high elves, what with all the new models coming out, but what with the army becoming so common after the Island of Blood came out I decided against them. I like the idea of Wood Elves, I've always quite fancied a shooty army, but from my research it appeared shooty armies suffered a lot under this edition, plus again Wood Elves is a very old army book with a play style not designed for 8^th. While I still want to give them a go at some point I'm treating myself as a beginner for this army and I wouldn't call Wood Elves a beginners army.

The final choice in my mind came down to Dwarfs or Lizardmen. Both are tough armies with good leadership so I figured they could be quite forgiving. I've already got a Dwarf battalion so this made them a very tempting choice. What swung it for the Lizards though was magic, basically I wanted to give it a go, and as a beginners choice Lizardmen are good because they can compete in every phase of the game which in my mind is the best way for learning the rules.

So it was that I got the Battalion at Christmas, although it was probably about mid to late January that I started building and painting the army. This was also around the time I should have started this blog and thus I wouldn't be doing so much back tracking, but like I said previously I was getting so much painting done that I didn't want to disrupt my flow. It took me about 6-7 weeks to get painted the Battalion and 2 Characters giving me a 1200pt army here's a pic of the first unit I got painted:

Camera work isn't the best, its something I need to work on and I'll try and get pictures up of the rest of my army soon. I've gone with the GW style of painting Lizardmen, and part of me thinks I'm being boring by doing that, but hell I like the colour scheme. Not so sure I'll paint the other creatures such as Salamanders and Steggadons as GW have, or Chameleon Skinks either but that's a thought for another time.

So far I've played 9 Games with these. My next post will be a brief run down of these games, I may go into more detail about the two most recent as they are fresh in my mind. The main thing I'll focus on is what I've learnt through these games and how they've shaped my thinking on where to take the army next.