Honestly, I wasn't impressed by the first round of speed paints because they had a tendency to smear and reactivate. This second round though, I'm very happy with. The 2.0 formula completely fixed the reactivation and slow drying issue, but ad a result, the paint dries extremely fast. For 15mm, since your using much less paint, this does mean that you get little working time and have to be generous with your amount of paint, but very careful in application (so pooling goes where you want it to go).

Compared to contrast paints, which have been my go-to, its hard to pick one over the other. I really like the consistency of the AP 2.0 paints. They flow well, and more importantly, all the paints I've tried flow the same as one another. The paints also dry more consistently, and streak much less. Citadel contrast paints, however, probably have better, well, contrast, and some colors, like skeleton hode, create much more unique color shifts from recesses to highlights; AP2.0 pallid bone or bony matter, for instance, feel more translucent and the colour shift more one-tone.

In general AP2.0 is more translucent though, and it takes multiple coats mucn better. As a result, their paints also doesn't separate nearly as bad as Citadel contrast paints, which have a habit of completely separating in only a few days of being unused.

Altogether, I prefer some handful of colors from Citadel, and I prefer a lot of usability of AP2.0, not to mention the lower cost and color selection. If someone told me to pick only one to suggest to a newcomer, I'd probably recommend the AP2.0 mega or complete set, but my real recommendation is to experiment with one or two of the AP2.0 and see if your painting style fits the worktime and scale limitations, and if you're a more advanced painter, you'd likely want to use Citadel contrast and more "normal" paints because of how limiting AP2.0 can be, even if the results out of the box are very, very good.

My biggest bother is that the resin base the model has built-in resists sticking to green-stuff, so the seams between the two are fairly large. I'd like to mask it with some flocking of some kind, but I also do generally like clean bases and I tend to paint to a "tabletop ready" standard rather than anything fancy. Or maybe the seams aren't that bad, who knows!

Most miniature painters I know usually go without, at least with 28mm miniatures. I've usually stuck with that scale due to accessibility, it's just way more common, but I've fallen in love with the cost and space savings of 15mm, and the board feels much bigger when you play to boot.

With this scale, and 10mm, I always use a set of magnifying glasses with a light and flip-up lenses. They came with both headband and glasses-like adapters but as I wear glasses, I stick with the headband. They've been honestly one of my best purchases for painting and I even find myself using them with 28mm work as well!

Thank you! I'm still debating how I'd like to base these guys since they're a bit "built up", and they definitely need a dry brushing, but good paints do heavy lifting!

I'm a big Tabletop Simulator / Tabletop Playground guy myself, and it tends to be the easiest way to get a bunch of real-life friends together when we can't actually be together. I tend to like longer form slower paced games that can be played passively, like 4X games; it's just a more fun environment when you just want to chill and chat/play.

For fun competitive games where chatting is secondary to the competitive experience, probably Age of Empires 2!

And I just purchased a domain from them. GoDaddy is not great and while Squarespace is a fine company, no worse than Google at least, more consolidation of domain providers doesn't seem like a good thing.

This is just another side effects of the proliferation of AI generated text that is difficult to distinguish from human generated text. Obviously, SEO optimization has always been a challenge, but more now than ever, distinguishing the fluff and nonsense from the valid is a significant challenge. I can only imagine small businesses are going to find it even more difficult to stand out when pumping SEO optimized sites requires only a few clicks. How can you compete when the tools are ubiquitous, easy to use, and available to all and the game values the results of these tools rather than the product or company themselves?

That's a sleepy kitten!

Hey, I recently opened tabletop.place as a go-to non-generalized instance for communities dedicated to stuff like that. There is currently a 3D printed minis community there that may begin to be what you're looking for.