Every other army in this hobby punishes you for rushing. This one does not. A green horde is the single most forgiving thing you will ever paint, and once you stop treating it like power armour, it becomes the fastest army on your shelf to finish.

The problem most people have with a horde is not skill, it is arithmetic. Thirty bodies at fifteen minutes each is seven and a half hours before you have touched a single detail. Nobody finishes that army. They finish six models, run out of patience, and the rest sit in a box forever. This guide is not about painting one model beautifully. It is about painting thirty of them to a good standard, on purpose, in a weekend.

Three things make a green horde the odd one out, and all three work in your favour.

Chips and rough edges are the aesthetic. These are not disciplined, drilled troops in pristine plate. They are scrap, muscle and bad temper held together with rivets and spite. A visible brush stroke, an uneven highlight, a smear of grime in the wrong place: on power armour that is a mistake. Here it is Tuesday. This single fact removes almost all of the pressure that makes painting slow.

Skin does the job armour does elsewhere. There is no smooth, hard-edged plate to shade carefully around. Skin and muscle are lumpy and forgiving, which means your ink can be sloppier, your highlight can be rougher, and the model still reads correctly from three feet away, which is the only distance that matters on a tabletop.

The army rewards batching more than any other in the hobby. Because the standard per model is lower, you can genuinely run twenty or thirty bodies through the same four steps at once without the fatigue that kills batch-painting other armies. This guide is built around that.

1. 1 Undercoat the whole unit black, in one sitting. Every model, same session, same can or brush. Do not undercoat five today and five tomorrow; the whole point of a horde is treating it as one job, not thirty small ones.
2. 2 Base the skin across every model before moving on. One coat of green over black. Do not worry about neatness at the edges of armour plates or straps at this stage, you will cover most of it later and the rest gets sunk in ink. Speed over precision here; precision costs you nothing later.
3. 3 Ink the whole unit in one pass. A thinned green ink brushed liberally over the skin, allowed to pool into every fold of muscle and every recess. This is the step that does the most work for the least effort. Do not go back and tidy it. The unevenness is what makes thirty identical bodies look like individuals.
4. 4 Highlight the muscle ridges, fast and loose. A drybrush or a heavy-handed edge highlight across the raised muscle on every model. This is not the delicate two-stage highlight you would use on armour. One pass, done quickly, reads perfectly at tabletop distance.
5. 5 Metal and grime, whole unit, one sitting. Silver on every blade, then a rust ink dragged across the metal and into a few joints on every model. Do not plan where the rust goes. Random is correct. Real rust does not follow a pattern and neither should yours.
6. 6 One accent colour, picked per model, not per unit. Leather, teeth, a scrap of cloth, a lucky red daub. This is the only step where individual models should differ from each other, and it should take seconds per model, not minutes. This is what stops thirty identical bodies looking like thirty identical bodies.

• One step, every model, before the next step. This is the entire trick. Never finish one model before starting the next. The moment you paint one model start to finish, you have committed to doing that thirty times.
• Group similar poses together. If ten models hold the same weapon, base and highlight that weapon across all ten in one motion. Your hand does not need to relearn the shape each time.
• Decant, do not dip. Pour a working puddle of each colour before you start a step. Reopening a bottle thirty times costs more time than the painting itself.
• Set a limit per step, not per model. Give the ink pass across the whole unit forty minutes and stop when the time is up, imperfections and all. A horde does not need the model that took the longest, it needs thirty models that took the same amount of time each.
• Do the accent step last, always. It is the only slow step and the only one worth spending real attention on, since it is what a viewer's eye actually lands on.

• Treating it like power armour. A two-stage highlight and a careful edge on thirty models is a different hobby. Save that technique for a single showcase model, not the horde.
• Painting models one at a time. The single biggest time cost in this hobby. Batch every step.
• Correcting the ink. If it pools somewhere odd, leave it. Fixing it costs ten times what leaving it costs, and it usually looks better left alone than corrected.
• Planning the grime. Rust and dirt that looks planned looks fake. Drag the ink where your brush happens to go.
• Skipping the accent step to save time. This is the one step that is actually worth the minute per model. It is the only thing separating your unit from a box of identical models painted the same colour.

Thirty models, split across two sessions. Saturday: undercoat the unit, base the skin, ink the unit. That is three steps across thirty models in an afternoon, because none of the three requires much precision. Sunday: highlight, metal and grime, then the accent colour last, model by model, with a podcast on. By Sunday evening the unit is done, and every model in it looks like it belongs to the same army without looking like a photocopy of the model next to it.

Compare that to painting a single power-armoured trooper to a high standard, which can easily take an evening on its own. The horde is not lower effort per hour spent. It is the same effort spread across a method built for volume instead of a method built for one.