Hi Folks!
Just a friendly reminder to those who haven't yet had the time to please send along your top three selections for Challengers' Choice. I've extended the deadline to midnight Friday (2nd).
Next Sunday I'll put up a gallery of nominations along with a voting poll. The announcements will go up on the 18th.
Thanks!
- Curt
But it wasn't all white tunics and shield transfers, by jove no. I managed a bit of fun and games along the way. I had great fun in the top Chamber of the Dungeon with my Bradford City Collection. Sadly I didn't make it to level two as I was focusing on my main personal Challenge of the Legion.
Imagine my surprise when with a few days to go I found myself with one complete Legion only to find I was 18 points short of my target. I quickly grabbed the first thing to hand that was primed and as if by magic a Wars of the Roses unit and Command Base appeared.
Another great challenge done, thanks again Curt for organising and being such a great host. I am sure I will see you all on the tinterwebnet over the coming months somewhere.
Hi folks,
End of challenge wrap-up post from me, just to prove I didn't just paint four 15mm Cromwells and keep showing the same pictures over and over again!
This challenge I completed a rather paltry twenty-one 15mm vehicles, four 28mm infantry and twelve 10mm cavalry.
I knew before I started, however, that time and concentration were always going to be a difficult for me to find for a range of reasons, hence starting with a target of only 100 points. Thankfully, baby arrived safe and sound in early January (after a very anxious 9 months), and my wife still made allowances for some painting time once we had all settled into a routine.
I finished on 210 points, and almost fully completed my planned 1 to 1 scale 15mm Polish Cromwell squadron. That's a win for me! One week past the end of the challenge and the final 3 tanks have been completed as well (not shown in the picture).
Finally a rather unflattering picture of me and my muse - who was also fed up hearing about Cromwells:
Cheers to Curt, Lady Sarah and all the minions for all the hard work! And thanks to everyone who took the time to comment on my few posts - apologies for lack of many comments from me, but I did enjoy seeing what everyone else was posting!
It's that time of year again when your minds are well and truly blown from another blast of mathamagical wonderment. Buckle up baby, things are about to get statistically significant.
Those of you with refined and more delicate constitutions may want to look away or skip to end of this post where some soothing charts are included to help everyone come down from the statistically induced state of euphoria this post is sure to induce. Well, I'm pretty sure it will induce some type of reaction but that may vary by person. Better put a bucket next to you, you know, just in case.
Challenge XI has been in the books a little over a week - and like a fine wine, it does take a few days to settle down and ripen before being reviewed. I'm also sure you are aware that the arcane process we have to go through to review the data is both cumbersome and not for the squeamish - a lot of kittens gave their all for this review (literally - gears don't grease themselves) don't let their sacrifices be in vane by skipping to the end and looking at the EVA stats.
Challenge XI saw 84 intrepid pigment warriors embark upon the usual mission to paint away the winter months. This challenge was even more important for all of us as it was a welcome distraction from some of the darkest days of the pandemic as December wore into January. Hopefully all of our respective geographies are beginning to see the corner turned but I suspect COVID-19 has one or two more surprises in store for us. Never-the-less we will persevere. I'd like to thank all of you for creating a wonderful community that really was important to me during those difficult days. Now back to battering you about the head with numbers.
We few, we happy few of 84 pigment warriors generated a total of 82,619 points which was just shy of the overall top Challenge total of 83,200 from Challenge VII (which had a whopping 96 participants). That's a huge tally and one all of you should be proud of. Even more spectacular and statistically improbable Challenge XI saw not just a tie but a threeway tie for total points from painting titans Martin C, Noel W and the village idiot. Astounding, supremely improbable and TOTALLY COINCIDENTAL. What are the odds such a breathtakingly remote event like that could occur - well the mathematical machines are still grinding away at the exact probability but I think we all can be sure that it's greater than zero. You know it's legit because the final score is a prime number.
Lets take a look at How Challenge XI compares to Challenge X:
First of all - we crushed our respective target points, exceeding it by a whopping 122%. Even more impressive is that fact that 65 out 84 participants exceeded their personal targets. One of the Hallmarks of Challenge XI was the points generation and participation levels where shared much more broadly across the participants rather than concentrated in a handful of painting over achievers. To me, that's one of the most heartening statistics about both the hobby and the Challenge itself - from a community perspective, I think it's very, very strong.
Challenge XI also saw a record breaking total number of submissions - we usually average plus or minus 1,000 entries but this year saw a whopping 1,261 - in part fueled by the very engaging room challenge. Still when compared to last year (which had the similar "Challenge Island" aspect, the average number of submissions still increase from 14 in X to 15 over the course of XI.
Interestingly, while the absolute number of special challenge submissions increase from 437 to 518 from X to XI, the share of total submissions decreased and Island submission where 47% of all Challenge X entries while during Challenge 9, the challenge room submissions were just 41%. Please note the data was adjusted to separate out those submissions that combined multiple rooms.
So what did we paint? 28mm reclaimed its majority control of the Democratic Republic of Miniatures at 52.95% of Challenge XI points were directly related to 29mm subjects. We painted a total of 6,765 28mm Infantry figures, 798 Cavalry and Guns and 97 Vehicles. Thats a lot!
Even though we painted more 15 and 6mm figures in absolute numbers during Challenge XI, their total share of points declined. The biggest drop offs when compared to Challenge X where in 10mm scale and terrain. (Editors note: I did my best to keep the terrain scores up). One project I will undertake in the future is to re-sort the entries by topic/eras (WW2, Napoleonics, ACW, 40k , etc) and compare that to the data from the WSS surveys to see if there are any interesting trends - don't worry Jasper and Guy, you'll get first dibs on any findings).
Let's dont we take a closer look at Challenge XI? Sadly, for this review I will now need to resort to the use of graphs and charts. I apologize for garish introduction of color and clarity in this statistical review.
The chart above shows points per day. Like past challenges, Challenge XI had its mad dash of points in the end (I'm looking at you Guy "last day points avalanche" Bowers). In all past challenges, the points progression was "U" shaped with a large dip in productivity during the second month, which scholars refer to as the "AHPC February Doldrums". That did not happen during Challenge XI, where production barely dropped from month 1 to month 2 as seen below:
