Hello and welcome back to week 8 of the first quarter of Hammer the Backlog, where we get all nostalgic about old models and then ruin that by talking about productivity and processes. Speaking of processes, let’s take a look at this week’s scorecard!
SCORECARD
Another week of pure green! I’m starting to feel a bit like an Orc here! A little Warhammer joke for you there, for free. The only real thing of note on the scorecard this week is that I gave myself 5 Hammer the Backlog points for the mounted battle standard bearer instead of just 3. There really was a lot of work in him and he could and should count as a mounted character.
Most of the To Do’s this week revolve around the fact that I have run out of nice models for Throwback Thursdays on Instagram and my Bretonnians are now officially too big for my photography set up. I have some work to do to get all of this in order for next week! And I have a wedding to attend! I’m getting the sweats already.
THIS WEEK’S MODELS
Oh gang, this has been a close one! This is the first week of Hammer the Backlog where the deadline really pushed me! I even stayed up late one night and that was with three days of furious lunchtime painting. This banner really should have counted as another figure.
Once again, without distance from the act of painting, I don’t love this guy as much as I thought I would. Don’t get me wrong, he looks great with his big flowing banner, especially in a full unit of knights, but there is something about the colour scheme that doesn’t quite sing to me. I think the issue is that red green and yellow together don’t look particularly heraldic? Perhaps I should have leant on black more than green, or even have included some white to make it stand out?
The second knight is in the colours of Connaught, the province of Ireland considered by Cromwell to be marginally better than hell. Originally I was going to copy the heraldry exactly, including redoing the shield to be split down the middle with a bird and a sword arm. Time, however, got the better of me and I had to go for the simpler option! I quite like him to be honest, the contrasting colour scheme looks nice. It nearly made me move back towards blue and white for the next unit of peasants, but black and yellow won out in the end.
As an interesting (to me anyway, I know all of this is relative) sidenote, I noticed that I have painted all of my Knights of the Realm with three colours in their heraldry. Take a look at this gang, each one has two main colours and one spot colour, not including leather, horses and metals.
Having done this without any real plan to speak of, I think I would carry it across to any future knights if I ever developed this army further. Knights of the realm would have three colours, knights errant (the lowest rank of knight) would have two, questing knights would have 4, adding one extra spot colour in the form of the fluer de lys. Grail knights would have five, probably by having split heraldry on each one. A nice little bit of serendipity.
COMPLETING THE ARMY?
As we are heading into week nine of the first quarter, I am really starting to feel the love for these 5th edition Bretonnian miniatures. They were my introduction to Warhammer, obviously, so they will always have a place in my heart, but the internet loves them too! Part of me would love to abandon the entire concept of Hammer the Backlog and just switch to being a Bretonnian army collecting blog with an unusual (and ill fitting!) name.
If I were to do that (which I won’t), the first thing I would do would be to collect and paint the army below. This army is the sample 1000 point army from the 5th edition battle book that came with the starter set in 1996. It was designed to be the ‘next step’ after getting your starter box built and painted and a decent force to play full, ‘real’ games of Warhammer Fantasy Battles with. Is it a good army? Jaysus, I don’t know! I’ve never played Warhammer!
With what I have painted so far, I am tantalisingly close to this. If I count this week’s banner bearer as the battle standard bearer from the list and the red and white checked knight as a hero, all I would need to complete this army would be a general on horse, one more knight of the realm (who could be a banner bearer, unit leader or normal knight) and two archer command groups. Eight models in total! Fourteen Hammer the Backlog points! What do you think, dear readers?
SOCIAL MEDIA
It has been a very interesting week on social media for Hammer the Backlog. We flew past 300 followers last week, easily hitting 400 by Sunday this week. At the time of writing we are in the high 400’s. Maybe in a week or two we’ll be going up by 200 a week? Considering the target when we started was 100 followers, not bad!
Even more surprising than that, we are getting what seems like incredible numbers of likes on our knight pictures. According to the internet, the average poster gets about 5 likes on a post per 100 followers. They call this the engagement rate. 5% is normal. Anything over 10% is considered ‘viral’. Our last post about the knights of the realm got 544 likes and comments with 460 followers. That is an engagement rate of nearly 120%, which apparently is very rare! I am scientifically minded enough to realise that my sample sizes are too small to really be worth anything, but it is exciting nonetheless. What does this mean for the blog? Nothing, as far as I can tell!
Will pivoting to Lizardmen in a few weeks hurt the blog’s following? Will the Bretonnian fans come along with me? What about in a few months when we move to Blackstone Fortress? Will we lose both the retro fans and the Warhammer Fantasy fans? Who knows? No really, who knows? Can you ask them?
Thanks for reading this far, see you next Thursday for the last knight and two more peasants.
Cheers, you’re good eggs.
Hammer the Backlog 
Leave a Reply