Martok has been thinking over the cost of building an army and what can be done to lower the barrier to entry for new players.
Recently I had an old friend get in touch and ask whether I would teach him 40k. I was more than happy to help so I took him to the FLGS and ran him through a 500 point mirror match. He picked this up pretty quickly and was soon asking my opinion on what he should buy first. With Dark Vengeance on the shelf next to him it seemed pretty obvious what the first buy should be as the set would give him the rules and enough models to play around with.

With his new models in hand his next question was how should he build them... I then invited him to my place  so I could show him how I work on my models etc. Now my advice to him was to build them all pretty much as is and then either convert them as he decides what army he wants etc. As we continued working on the models I started pulling out stuff from my bots box and realised that we could build the whole army as Fallen Dark Angels!! This would mean he did not need to do any conversion; at most some kitbashing to get the units he needed. Within a few hours we had built a Tactical Squad that he can run as CSM (I shall be making a conversion from Plasma Cannon guy to Autocannon though) and I used the assault cannons from my bits box to replace the Terminator Storm Bolters and he immediately had 4 Obliterators.

Now the point of this rambling story is that with a little bit of thought and a generous bits box Dark Vengeance can be a great way into the hobby. As I will explain below this box set can give someone a 1000pt army for about £60.. that is a bargain!

Dark Apostle - 105

Sorceror Level 2 - 85

10 Chaos Marines with Plasma, Autocannon - 165

20 Cultists - 90

Helbrute - 100

3 Bikers, Plasma - 85

2 Obliterators - 140

2 Obliterators - 140

As you can see above with a few extra pieces of wargear etc this force will definitely have reached 1000pts and then either another Dark Vengeance set or a few extra units (Heldrake or Forge Fiend come to mind) you could easily reach 2000pts. Also remember the above does not include the Chosen etc but if he wants to use them then that is another 200 odd points right there!

So with any luck he shall have this lsit ready for war soon and with any luck he will let me take some pictures to show what can be done to pull all of the models in the Dark Vengeance set together as one army.

Some food for thought there with armies costing so much these days especiall when you add the cost of third party bits etc there are ways to get a new player up and running for under £100!