Where to start your Warhammer hobby?

As soon as the Dark Gods of Chaos planted the seeds of wargaming in my mind, I started looking for a (rather) cheap way of starting up my hobby.

Let's face it: wargaming is an expensive hobby. Miniatures are of high quality, and you pay a lot of hard-earned cash for them. However, there are some ways of reducing costs.
My first step was to check out the official Games Workshop web store. The amount and quality of miniatures is dazzling! And the prices are, simply put, appalling.
As there are no official GW gaming stores around, I knew that I don't have to worry about using only official miniatures, so I started looking at forums in search of an alternative solution.
The first step was to look for another retailer of GW miniatures, which led me to Wayland Games. They offer a 20-25% discount on most miniatures and free shipping over 40 pounds.While that's still a lot, it's a much better starting point.
The second step was to look for alternative miniatures. In theory, you could look around until you find another supplier/game line with compatible but cheaper miniatures. I think that Empire players could find a lot of replacement figures (historical miniature lines), as well as Space Marines I guess. It's harder to find appropriate models for more specific armies however. Also, after some research, surprisingly enough, GW's prices don't even seem that high anymore. Another factor is that a lot of companies are US-based, and whatever you win on the miniature itself gets lost on shipping. In the end, I ended up with only one such purchase: Bugharoth (from Hasslefree Miniatures), which I'll run as a daemon prince.
The third step (as suggested on some forums) was to combine my 40k and Fantasy armies. As you may know, one is a fantasy setting, while the other is sci-fi. Not a chance? Ha! Ideas include: running fantasy Orcs as 40k (space) Orks (bows count as shootas) and running Empire gunners as Imperial Guard (just say they're a regiment raised on a backwater feudal world). Then there's the entire army called Chaos Daemons/Daemons of Chaos, which are 100% compatible. The only thing in the way are the bases (round vs square), but that can be solved by magnetizing. (I'll post about that later.) This got me sold completely, and soon enough I got my daemons army up and running.

This was it basically! Here's what I got in my starter order:

Now off to assemble and paint some of that...


P.S. For a crazy site with lots of ideas, visit 1d4chan. While it contains a large amount of coarse language and the occasional NSFW material, it is also a repository of factual advice and ideas about all aspects of the hobby, from assembling an army to tabletop tactics.