With me having started playing Armada less than a year before or got discontinued but still being in love with it, I now try to get my hands on those ships I missed because they were already out of print or just because I couldn't spend a fortune at once. With ships now also increasingly being simply unavailable even on second hand markets and even more so in my language, I thought I'd look for some 3d printed models to fill the gap.

Those are so expensive, it's not really a viable alternative. E.g. I'm looking for gladiators and venators. Most are shipped from the US, but with a little luck I found someone printing in the UK. Gladiators 16 bucks, Venators 22. Doesn't sound too bad. Except it's pounds, so in euros it's 18/25. Still okayish. Then you need to add shipping and tariffs because of fucking brexit, so it's about 25/36. Then there are no bases included, so to be able to properly put them somewhere, it's suddenly about 35/52. And while the printed bases at least include the shield wheels, they obviously come without the ship cards or base tokens (not even mentioning all the other tokens or the command wheels).

To get an unassembled, unpainted, unlicensed, hobby-grade, incomplete game token, you currently pay about as much as you did for the original boxed retail version. More if you came across a decent discount for the ships. This just kind of kills the hobby for me, especially as it's rather hard to find decent cards and tokens that are not just the English ones.

How do you guys do this? Should I just get my own 3d printer? Still, part of what made Armada attractive for me was the low entry barrier of having prepainted ships... This seems to turn into a time sink.