The Lead Cotillion

Heavy Flames of War Gear (with apologies to Norwood for biting his style)

2012-02-04T22:55:00.001-05:00

Got in a game of Flames of War this past Wednesday, and semi-demoed a game of Heavy Gear on Thursday for Rory, with the cooperation of Justin, who's already started playing.

FoW: long story short, got my CiC killed and pushed below the company morale threshold before turn 7, which was how long I needed to hold my two objectives. I had fun, and my opponent, Mike, was very patient and helpful with me since I hadn't played FoW in about 8 months or something now and had half-forgotten a lot of stuff. Unfortunately this first game in the local Firestorm: Bagration campaign might be my last, as due to space issues all future games will be on Thursday, which already belongs to my current fave minis game...

HG: Rory was willing to give it a try, although he'd said earlier while watching the end of Brandon and my last game that he wasn't sure it would be his cup of tea (SPOILER ALERT: by the end of the night he was figuring out which faction he wanted to buy). Our local Pod Squad rep, Dale, had mentioned the possibility of me joining the Pod Squad as well, since I live an hour west of him and can conceivably cover demos in places like Greensboro, Southern Pines, etc. In that spirit, and with the arrival of another newer (although not newbie) player Justin, Dale suggested I run the demo as a trial by fire.

MISSION SETUP

OBJECTIVES:

more-or-less successfully teach the basics of Heavy Gear: 2VP
don't make an ass of yourself: 2VP

Here, Rory is not sleeping, as the casual observer might think - he is checking line of sight for an attack! Presumably one of those damnable metabananas is in the way AGAIN. (nb: work on house rules for using 'Junglemower' VHACs to clear sight lines)

Here, a MILICIA Sidewinder and 'Knifey McGee,' the Jäger whose off-hand I glued a Vibroblade to before realizing he was already carrying a sheathed one, menace a freshly-painted MAC-armed Norlight Hunter.

Near the end of their second demo game, Justin is pointing at one of his Hunters, presumably because it's about to do something. At the top left of the field you can see two MILICIA gears that were recently killed by the combination of a phenomenally well-thrown hand grenade and (if memory serves) judiciously sprayed LRP fire. Everyone is clustered around the central mesa (the one with the ripe, red metabanana plants, naturally) as for this second game we instituted a simple goal of 'most gears at light or better within 4" of the hill.' Unfortunately for Justin, his Hunter near the bottom edge of the board will wind up being about an inch short of contesting the hill after its move, and the game will be a bloody draw.

All in all, I think my first attempt to demo the game went fairly well. There were a few things I still need to drum into my head (like how shifting speed bands and movement modes has a few limits more complex than 'one step either direction'), but mostly this simplified version went off OK. This coming Thursday Rory wants to play a full game, so I'm coming up with two 500TV lists, to introduce stuff like Command Points, multi-action models, reaction fire - all the stuff that really makes HG shine. Meanwhile Rory is already thinking up paint schemes for what seems like it might be an Eastern Suns Emirate Guard army....

PS - I think I got 3VP. Maybe just 2.

User feedback solicited

2012-01-29T15:57:00.001-05:00

I see that a few (around 10%) of my pageviews are coming from iPhones - anybody out there reading this thing on a mobile device willing to tell me if they like the new mobile template I activated yesterday? It looks good on mine, and is a lot easier to navigate. But feedback is important!

Similarly, how's the font working for you all? I liked a lot when I originally selected it on my desktop PC, but on my netbook there's a noticeable lag while it upconverts from Courier or whatever the default is, and some of the characters (capital Hs come to mind) don't render that well at this resolution. Any one with font-knowledge out there have any suggestions?

Desultory catch-up grab-bag extravaganza

2012-01-29T04:43:00.001-05:00

So astute readers might recall a nearly three-and-a-half month lack of batreps between the Battletech game of October 14, 2011, and last week's Heavy Gear game (January 27, 2012). Sorry! Here's a quick recap of stuff I played during that hiatus; I suggest you cue up "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor while reading this post for the full montage effect.

A game of full-rules Classic Battletech, run by Brandon, where Tyler and I fought it out. Vague memories include one of my mechs getting headshot and one of Tyler's falling down and me swarming it with Protomechs.

Another Heavy Gear matchup between my SRA 35th Combined Arms Regiment ("Les Somnambules") and Britt's WFPA (or Northern Guard?) force. One of my bazooka-toting Jägers has had a bad afternoon. His surviving comrade is holding up a big knife to warn people to leave him alone.

The four player Battletech Quick-Strike game I ran at MACE last year. My first real con, and the first time I tried to host a wargame 'in the wild.' All four players seemed to enjoy themselves, and I'm planning to do it again soon. The scenario was a battle from the Ronin War.

A similar but much smaller setup of roughly the same scenario at our FLGS, Hypermind. New member Rory, from Mebane, North Carolina (by way of South Africa) uses the trusty Mark One Eyeball to check line of sight.

A somewhat ill-fated attempt to play 2v2 Heavy Gear - Britt (WFPA) and Tyler (Black Talons) versus Brandon (CEF) and me (SRA). Britt and I basically air-slapped at each other ineffectually while Brandon and Tyler rained hell on each other.

Another HG matchup between Britt and me, in his gaming room. By now the astute viewer will note that the metabanana plant is endemic to every setting where I push lead around. My apologies. I will endeavor to make sure they aren't at Borodino with Napoleon this fall.

Keith and I have been playing lots of Space Hulk this winter. Here we see a before and after shot, showing what one motivated Space Marine and his assault cannon can do.

Britt and I playing Heavy Gear again; here we rolled up an encirclement-type scenario, which I failed miserably at.

Mutiny! My dark, DARK grey SRA unit, the 'Sleepwalkers,' is fighting Dale's (our Friendly Neighborhood Pod Squad Rep) green SRA unit. Someone probably got caught misappropriating equipment, or was found to be ideologically unsound, or they stole the last toaster strudel in the mess tent. Out of sight in the woods at the top left is Dale's Naga, making life miserable for me (the small brown disk visible on the edge of the woods is its recon drone). Out of sight behind the camera is me making quite rude gestures towards the Naga.

Back at Britt's, facing off against his new Aller tank with the very scary railgun. The wisp of greasy smoke in the foreground used to be one of my Hun light tanks.

And that pretty much catches us up. Hopefully another of these penance/make-up work posts will not be necessary in the new year. Sleepwalker Actual, out.

The return of Heavy Gear and the departure of Whooping Cough

2012-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00

Yes, I think I had whooping cough, since I was around my cousin's kids and their school had a recent outbreak and I certainly felt miserable enough (complete with paroxysmal cough) to think maybe I got it? In any event, finally feeling good enough to make the trip to Knightdale and play some Heavy Gear again! I was getting a bit tired of my omnipresent SRA 'Les Somnambules' (35th SRA Combined Arms Regiment) so I broke out the good ol' WFPA 44th CAR, 'the Skyfallers' and faced off against Brandon's PAK list.

As always, it's been exactly long enough for me to get sort of rusty on the rules, and based on it being WFPA versus the PAK I haven't figured out exactly where our fight would fit in the fictional future history of Terra Nova, so no cutesy AAR this time, just a few pics:

I figured this Strike Cheetah was dead, but the PAK HC-3 Recon Hovercar dashed past him to spot my infantry in the backfield!

This is what two Anti-Tank Missiles can do to a totally unscathed Hardy Aller (meanwhile, the Aller's low-tech unguided VHFG round utterly missed its target the turn before - 280 TV well spent!)

This terrible blurry shot shows that Strike Cheetah from before, finally out of luck. Of course by now he'd recce'd both PAK hovertanks, so he died a hero of the WFPA!

This was near the end of the game, and one of the GRELs (a sort of vat-grown hypnotrained combat bioroid - think Roy Batty, but purple) in Brandon's light hovertanks failed their instability roll, and was compelled to show off by moving at utter top speed for the turn. Brandon tried to make the best of it by ramming one of my few surviving gears (the Army Commander shown here) but the dice came through for me and he missed me.

The other neat thing I didn't get pics of was my crappy infantry finally whittling down one of his HC-3 hovercars. I frankly felt like I stole the win by running my two last gears up into the face of his two unscathed large hovertanks. If we'd played one more turn they'd have been slag, but by the rules of the 'Seize' objective Brandon was working on, I'd successfully 'contested' control of the tank blind from him, denying him the VPs for that objective and giving me a very 'gamey' one VP win. Still, we both had fun, and playing against his PAK/CEF makes me want to get to work on mine. Love those hover vehicles!

Whoops I Forgot I Have a Blog (and a magnetized Naga by way of apology)

2012-01-02T23:28:00.002-05:00

Sorry folks. Will try to do a big bonanza catch-up post later this week. I've done a lot of gaming since my last substantive post, and I'll try to get caught back up, or at least throw some pics up here. Mea culpa.

Anyway, just got done magnetizing a Naga for my upcoming HAPF army for Heavy Gear. This is the first significant magnetization project I've ever tried, and it went fairly well. You can see the misalignment problems when I convert it to the Long Fang variant (the one with the long-barreled guns), but I'm happy with it for a first try. We'll see if it goes ok when I throw togethere my Fire Dragon mini tomorrow...

Standard Naga with chin-mounted Medium Autocannon

Standard Naga with chin-mounted Heavy Flamer

Command Naga; swaps one ATM/AGM pod for an advanced ECM/ECCM suite and Satellite Uplink

Long Fang Naga; swaps both missile pods for twin Light Field Guns

The magnetizing was pretty straightforward, which was a pleasant surprise. I bought 3/32" magnets, and was fortunate enough to have a 3/32" drill bit available for my pin vise. I took the advice of a fellow HG player (hi Dale!) and seated the magnets in their holes before applying the glue, to (mostly) avoid problems with the glue hydraulically locking the magnet outside its desired position. We'll see how the Fire Dragon (and possibly my Hetairoi hovertanks) do, since they're resin.

Putting the 'Funk' in 'Perfunctory'

2011-11-07T10:13:00.000-05:00

Got kind of slammed in the run-up to vacation, and the blog suffered for it. Didn't get an intended post done about my last HG game against Britt, or about playing a bit of Space Hulk with Keith and some full-rules Battletech with Brandon and Tyler. I'll get those pics up later this week. In the meantime, here's some photo recon from a "Sleepwalker" (35th SRA Combined Arms Regiment) Command Jager on detached duty:

standing in front of some kind of HAPF hypnotraining center

nervously awaiting exfiltration from the Western Frontierland Protectorate

this bizarre CEF mock-up of a place called 'Canada' feels strangely like home

Battletech Quick-Strike: the Andurien Secession, Planet Drozan, 3030

2011-10-14T17:15:00.000-04:00

Drozan is one of the Capellan Confederation's vital agricultural worlds. Its large arable plains produce enough crops to provide 5% of the entire Confederation's needs. The farms are managed by large automated cultivation and processing plants that run continuously. It is this high degree of automation that makes Drozan so bountiful. These farms are supplemented by large aquaculture installations which provide more foodstuffs for the Confederation.

Given its importance and agricultural output, it's no surprise that the Confederation has established research centers devoted to food synthesis on the world. Prior to the Fourth Succession War the Strategios also stationed a battalion of Warrior House troops on the world, rotating the unit so enemy intelligence agencies couldn't get a good view of the defenders. In addition, Drozan features a large base that houses motorized and jump infantry units.
-Planetary data courtesy Sarna.net

Drozan was one of the first worlds the Magistracy of Canopus attempted to seize from the Capellan Confederation during the Andurien Secession, with the task of taking the world falling to the First Canopian Light Horse. Although the initial landing went virtually unopposed, one of the first signs of serious Capellan resistance was when units of Warrior House Dai Da Chi ambushed two lances of the Canopian invaders in the middle of one of the planet's ubiquitous automated grain processing plants.

As the one portion of the Light Horse moved past the grain fermenting bunkers, they made contact with the Liao defenders moving out from a large, forested hill. Meanwhile, the other Light Horse elements took cover on a ridgeline and among the power generators and control facilities for the processing plant.

The two forces quickly came to grips, with unexpectedly bloody results among the lighter scout mechs (NB: this is because until round three we forgot to apply the defense mods for mech speed, durr), with casualties mounting quickly on both sides of the skirmish.

Here, a badly damaged Spider of Warrior House Dai Da Chi uses its great speed to escape the growing furball on the eastern flank, planning to ambush one of the invaders as the fight continues.

Across the plant, and on the very doorstep of the administration complex, a Canopian Cicada and a Liao Jenner take each other down with a short-range fusillade.

Back on the eastern side, the two sides are trading fire. The Canopian Hunchback, despite suffering two Fire Control hits, is still a significant threat, landing several hits. The pair of Liao Vindicators are trading fire with their Canopian counterpart, while one of the three Liao Jenners has found a perfect sniper's nest in the wooded hilltop. The Canopian Trebuchet, dubbed "Trash-bucket" by the Liao commander, is lining up on that Jenner with its back to the meters-thick duracrete of Grain Digester #5.

Near the admin/power complex, a second Liao Jenner has been lost, reducing the combatants to a basically unhurt Liao Hunchback variant, a Canopian JagerMech in good shape, and a badly battered Canopian Hermes II hiding behind a tokomak reactor. (NB: this particular reactor also holds our turn marker!)

The Canopian Hermes, unwisely falling back to the fermentation bunkers, is ambushed by the lurking Liao Spider, who in turn gets finished off by a point-blank autocannon salvo from the heavily damaged Hunchback. At the same time, the Canopian Vindicator has flushed the final Liao Jenner out of its blind, where the "Trash-bucket" finishes it off.

One of the twin Liao Vindicators is destroyed, and things look bad for the defenders of Drozan, with only two mechs remaining. But the invaders have been badly hammered, and are losing momentum. Despite surrounding the lone Vindicator, the Canopians are unable to bring it to heel:

and the Liao Vindy manages to finally down the Canopian Hunch. At the same time, the Liao Hunch has won its running battle with the JagerMech and is advancing on the weakened and overheating Light Horse.

At this point, engine hits and a poor understanding of heat managment have led the Canopian Vindy to decide to cool off before suffering a mandatory shutdown; however, the imminent shutdown would probably have been a better fate than the easy shot his decision gave to the Liao Vindy who gunned down the motionless invader. The sole Canopian survivor, the "Trash-bucket," missed its shot on the Liao Hunch and took severe armor damage from return fire.

The "Trash-bucket" tried to fall back towards friendly lines, but it was too late; the two surviving Liao mechs were not going to let one of the invaders retreat unpunished.

This portion of Drozan was safe from the invaders, for now.

So how was it? Quick-strike is faster than the normal Battletech rules, to be sure. But Keith (my opponent) and I both miss the decisions that you get in the regular rules that are abstracted out by Quick-Strike - things like running out of ammo, or the decision to move all out for the defense bonus but losing weapon accuracy by doing so (or the flip side, moving slow to increase your chances of hitting, but being easier to hit yourself). I think the glory of Quick-Strike is in introducing new players, or running a big convention game in a non-ridiculous amount of time. I'm actually biting off more than I can chew and have offered to run a large Quick-Strike game at MACE, the local game convention coming up in November, and I think for something like that it'll be perfect. But Keith and I both discussed it, and for our own gaming, we both would prefer the detail of Classic Battletech.

EDIT TO ADD: as mentioned in the comments below, here's some better-quality pics from my good friend (for [REDACTED] years now) Chris Norwood, of GamerChris.com fame! WARNING: these are taken with a much better camera than my cellphone, so the brutal details of my crappy paintjob will come through if you view them full-size. You have been warned, etc

Heavy Gear: Esperance Front, TN 30 Summer 1950

2011-10-11T03:36:00.003-04:00

The early hours of the second CEF invasion of Terra Nova saw a hundred tiny unnamed battles, as forward elements of the invasion forces encountered the scattered defenders, frantically converging towards the CEF drop sites. One such encounter took place as CEF Korps V and VI pushed from their initial drop zones towards Port Oasis, capital of the Southern Republic. The SRA deployed all available forces to meet this thrust while awaiting landfleet reinforcements.

Typical of the units thrown at this threat was the 35th SRA Combined Arms Regiment, "Les Somnambules" (The Sleepwalkers), a mixed unit of infantry, light gears and tanks. The first CEF forces the Sleepwalkers faced were a scouting element, composed of fast HC-3 hover cars and the mysterious new FLAIL infantry units. SRA command wanted intel on these units, and getting that info back to Port Oasis was a priority - Recon (FLAILs) and Survive (GP Cadre) objectives for me. The CEF, on the other hand, primarily wanted to smash the faster elements of their opponent's force and push forward with their hover vehicles to blaze the trail to Port Oasis - Survive (HC-3s) and Wipe them out (GP Cadre) objectives for Brandon.

Despite early reports of the speed of the new CEF hover vehicles, the command tank of the Sleepwalkers was, appropriately enough, caught napping. Concentrating their laser cannon on the tank, the Earthers made short work of the Hun, leaving the SRA without a leader until the Sous-sergent of the GP Cadre stepped into the breach.

Meanwhile, as one of the hovercars fell back towards the southern end of the valley (taking a few parting shots from the laser cannon of the surviving Hun), the Sleepwalker gear cadre was tentatively coming to grips with the strange new infantry units. Field gun fire called in by the Iguana gear seconded to the tank cadre was effective against them, fairly quickly wiping out two of the four squads in the field. Unfortunately, this only marked the field gun battery as a priority target for the remaining hovercar...

The two FLAIL squads that were still active moved forward to the large ziggurat in the center of the valley, exchanging fire with the GP cadre. While the SRA's gear pilots were phenomemally lucky in avoiding their fire (NB: there was a period here where I was only rolling sixes on the few occasions where I didn't roll boxcars, which count as a seven in HG), unfortunately it was virtually impossible for the generalist gears to damage the FLAILs. All the Sleepwalkers could do was to continue getting as much sensor data on these strange new infantry units as possible, scanning each squad at least once.

By this time, the hovercar that had just silenced the Field Gun Battery (NB: which like an idiot I forgot to get pics of) had used its ELINT suite to determine which Gear was now acting leader, and proceeded to light it up with laser fire. Having done this, it traded shots with another Jager gear, damaging it heavily, before speeding out of harm's way.

Leaderless, the SRA began to flounder, and the 'Sidewinder' heavy trooper gear of the cadre unwisely attempted to engage the FLAILs rather than retreating to buy time. The outcome was inevitable:

At the end of the engagment, both sides had accomplished part of what they had set out to do - the CEF's hover scouts continued in their push for Port Oasis (Survive, 2VPs for Brandon) but failed to eliminate their chosen targets (Wipe Them Out, 0VPs). Meanwhile, the 35th had secured some of the first useable data on the new FLAIL walkers (Recon, 2VPs for me) but had sustained unsupportable casualties in doing so (Survive, 0VPs for me). As we were both PL3, this meant a true tie, although I think the clear moral victory has to go to Brandon, for killing my Army Commander on turn 2 as well as hammering half my GP Cadre into slag, only for the cost of a few brain-in-a-jar FLAILs.

EDIT: today Brandon actually reminded me that it was a 3-3 tie, as he got one point for killing/critically damaging half or more of my GP cadre, and that I got one point for keeping at least one of them alive! A strange quirk that arises when you and your opponent's randomly determined squads for counterpoint goals like Survive and Wipe Them Out align like that!

I'm continuing to love Heavy Gear. The mission selection matrix is very simple (although we did discuss how nice a pre-game setup worksheet would be, mostly to cut down on page-flipping) and yet gives you some very interesting goals to accomplish, which can interact with the goals of the opponent in neat ways that make for, in my opinion, much more compelling gaming than simply smashing your toy soldiers into your buddy's toy soldiers making 'pew pew' noises. It was a lot of fun getting to see Brandon's list in action, which taught me a new respect both for the tough FLAILs as well as for my own Field Guns!

WFPA Training Exercise: 100km west of Fort James, TN1943

2011-10-02T01:12:00.000-04:00

27 Spring 1943
The marauding Rovers in the Eastern Desert begin to
move North, into the WFP. Still rattled from severe
losses during the war, the WFPA has difficulty protecting
the League’s far-flung rural homesteads, and many are
sacked or forced to fend for themselves.
-timeline entry from Return to Cat's Eye

In response to these encroachments, WFPA command initiated a series of training exercises, set to rotate through several areas thought to be especially prone to future raids. The hope was that these maneuvers would fulfill multiple goals simultaneously - reassuring nervous homesteaders, sabre-rattling to cow the Rovers, and familiarizing WFPA units with terrain they might be fighting over before too long.

One such exercise is presented here. Designated OPERATION: BARLEYCORN, near dusk on 14 Summer 1943 an aggressor unit from [REDACTED] simulated a raid on a small irrigation/hydroelectricity center west of Fort James. A mixed Gear/infantry detachment of the 44th Western Combined Arms Regiment ("Skyfallers") (me) was assigned to represent the kind of rapid-reaction force that might be deployed in response to such a raid. While the Skyfallers approached from the east, simulating deployment from the Gamma maglev line, [REDACTED] (Britt) units were tasked with maneuvering past them back into the open, as WFPA General Staff thought this would be the typical post-raid posture for a Rover band ('Escape' objective for Britt).

Here we see the 'Jump' Dragoon element of the Skyfallers, who deployed on the ground instead of airdropping, in order to secure the southernmost mesa ('Hold' objective for me). Black and Yellow teams of [REDACTED] are moving forward to scout the second mesa, believing the rapid reaction forces are organizing their assault from this area ('Scout' objective for Britt). Already, members of the Dragoon squad are moving forward, trying to get solid ELINT on the black unit, a task meant to simulate the need to positively identify Rover band affiliation for accurate future reprisals ('Recon' objective for me).

Next we can see [REDACTED] taking a defensive posture behind several of the pump houses and generator buildings in the hydroelectric plant, while two Skyfaller Strike Cheetahs move up along the canal to begin their ELINT collection, covered by a Jaguar gear carrying a Snub Cannon with the Block 40 upgrades of the Dedicated Tankhunter Initiative. Unbeknownst to the Skyfallers, the Hunters of [REDACTED] Yellow approaching them are also carrying Snub Cannons, although theirs are the older, unaccurized models expected to be seen in a lower-tech force like Badlands Rovers (they are also heavily field armored, another feature of some Rover bands).

At this point, the Skyfallers infantry platoon parachuted onto the battlefield. Unfortunately, erratic evasive maneuvers programmed for their VTOL to represent dodging AA fire (I rolled THREE SETS OF SNAKE-EYES in four scatter rolls for their deployment) led to a very bad drop pattern for the infantry, exposing them to withering simulated rocket fire in the next several minutes. Squads One and Two were ruled utterly dead after the initial exchange, and Three and Four also suffered heavy casualties (losing one and two fireteams each), mitigated only by the sparse cover of the canalside metabanana groves. One Gear from Aggressor Black has been hit by the Skyfaller Jaguar's Snub Cannon, but the legendary resilience of the Hunter gave a simulated result of only light damage (note the yellow chip near the black gear).

Meanwhile, Aggressor Yellow began rolling forward, preparing to slip around the northern ridgeline while punishing the exposed members of the Skyfaller force; as seen here, despite their older model Snub Cannons, the forward element of Aggressor Yellow has managed to hit the Skyfaller Jaguar, and it takes light damage itself (again, the yellow chip, this time on the brown gear). Also, as the engagement has continued, several members of Aggressor Black have been electronically interrogated; the other two Skyfaller Jaguars have used this info to indirectly fire their rockets at the ID'd Gears, but with little to no results.

Further exchanges of fire between the dueling snub cannons do slight damage to an up-armored Aggressor Yellow Hunter, but soon thereafter its return fire is ruled to have totally destroyed the Skyfaller Jag. Also, a simulated artillery strike has damaged one of the Strike Cheetahs, which tries to retreat behind the line of mesas. Infantry Squad Four has finally been ruled dead as well, having accomplished nothing with a few desultory anti-gear rifle shots. Squad Three has been similarly toothless, landing a few hits with their simunitions, but nothing the umpires ruled effective.

The umpire staff called a halt to the exercise at this point; while the [REDACTED] Aggressor units did much more damage - neutralizing a platoon of paratroop infantry as well as getting a simulated kill on an elite Jaguar gear, they were unable to maneuver past the Skyfallers or successfully scout their assigned point. Meanwhile, the Dragoons held their assigned point and managed to gather ELINT on all members of Aggressor Black. Staff ruled the rapid-reaction force concept provisionally successful, although there have been serious discussions at the regimental level about the efficacy of airdropped infantry when armed as lightly as the Skyfaller elements were in this exercise. [REDACTED]'s commander has been invited to comment on their participation in this exercise as well.

This was my second game against Britt with Heavy Gear's new 'Field Manual' rules updates, and while I got the win I feel like I kind of snaked him on my choices of objectives. We also played on a longer table than recommended, and I'm still not sure we're using enough terrain. Still, both of us had a blast, and I feel a lot more comfortable with the rules themselves. Britt and I also got a real feeling for how much the objective system changes the nature of the game; in particular, Britt said he has a totally different concept about how his planned army will actually work on the table now.

Meanwhile, although I started as a Southern player, I gotta admit I really like the Northern gears more and more every time I get them on the table, and I've developed a real soft spot in my heart for my little WFPA dudes. Now to finish up the other 500TV of the planned list, a Northern analog of the Southern MP cadres, my Fort ~~Somewhere-or-other~~ Piper Polizei.

Candy!

2011-09-30T15:12:00.001-04:00

Sweet delicious candy!

Here's hoping some detail work and a good wash will make them look a little less like the world's most depressing children's vitamins.

Humidity be damned: primerfest 2011

2011-09-27T17:09:00.001-04:00

Not sure it was the best idea, but when the humidity dipped down to 60% here this afternoon (positively arid for central NC in fall) I sprang into action.

Army Painter Dragon Red
(Battletech, Kuritan 2nd Sword of Light; OGRE, 1st Polish Lancers):

Army Painter Demon Yellow
(Heavy Gear, Eastern Sun Emirates Honor Guard and Footmen; OGRE, Vatican Guard

Battlefront/Flames of War War Paint British Armour
(Heavy Gear, ESE-aligned Badlander clan; OGRE, undetermined Combine unit)

Army Painter Ultramarine Blue

(OGRE, Royal Navy)

So it worked out fairly well, all things considered. Bullet points (bet you a dollar I can't actually get this into a bullet-pointed list):

War Paint, as usual, is freaking fantastic. I am redoing army paint schemes in my head in a frantic effort to use these as much as possible.
Army Painter is good, but the brighter colors I guess make it a bit trickier?
the red went on surprisingly well, the real champ of the day (not counting War Paint)
the yellow had a few problems; some weird strings of paint I had to knock down with a fingernail, a bit of a bumpy finish in places, problems getting into very tight spaces on the Heavy Gear minis but worked like a charm on the flatter surfaces of the Ogres
the only real disappointment is the Army Painter Ultramarine Blue. I've used it already as the color primer on my Heavy Gear MILICIA MP Cadre, and I had similar problems today - powdery coverage that rubs off at a touch.

Here's a few close-ups of the problems with the yellow:

Still, here's hoping a bit of touch-up paint and an eventual wash knocks these problem spots down.

PS: hey! I think the bullet-points worked!

EDIT: well, the close-up pics of the yellow guys were so underexposed and blurry that the problems don't show up. Maybe I just need to bring a dry ice machine every time I plan on fielding them....

Screw you, humidity

2011-09-26T17:09:00.003-04:00

Blogging/Modelling/Painting/Gaming pledge

Very simple: each week I will do something minis-related - either building, painting, or actually getting to the table - that's blog-worthy. Then I'll write it up. I'm tired of these big lacunae in my minis production and in this worthless blog. It stops now.

Last week, in the same burst of productivity that brought my last three updates, I wrote this, planning to publish it this week and follow it up immediately with glorious primed minis, ready for more brushwork.

Unfortunately since then it's either rained, threatened to rain, or been (as it is today) around 70% humidity, none of which are conducive to spray priming.

Right now I have three colors of stuff in the bullpen, raring to go: the two halves of my ESE/Merc army for Heavy Gear (yellow for the Emirate Guard, WWII British Armor for the mercs), a unit of the Kuritan 2nd Sword of Light for BattleTech (Dragon Red, of course) and two of my three-Ogre detachments for Exercise K (Vatican Guard in yellow, 1st Polish Lancers in red). I actually went outside with them this afternoon, but I didn't want to gamble on the same muggy conditions that left my Chaos Dwarf Blood Bowl team from last season covered with crappy, powdery and 'orange-peel' primer.

So to keep my momentum up, tonight I will base and assemble 1500 points of Mid-war Germans for Flames of War, for the Ostfront scenario Britt and I have been discussing for the past two years. The sole holdup has been my lack of progress; I've been sitting on these minis for at least a year and a half now. Tonight I glue together halftracks! Spread artist's pumice to base up infantry! Dust off those two Tigers!

There's supposed to be a break in the weather towards the end of this week; I'm hoping for one good afternoon of breakneck priming, as well as racking my brain to figure out what else I might need to haul ass on assembling in order to be ready for the shrinking number of good priming days offered by a typical North Cacalacky fall.

Napoleonics and Performance Anxiety

2011-09-18T17:45:00.007-04:00

So here's a picture from a Napoleonics game I played in at the end of the summer (exactly a month ago, August 18*) up at The Game Connection. These figs are Ron's - the owner of the store. When I sometimes refer to a game at Ron's, this is where I'm talking about. In any event, I love playing Napoleonics - I love the history, I love the decisions, I love the spectacle.

And this is what makes me bottlenck on actually doing anything with them myself. For some reason, when you say 'wargaming' to me Napoleonics is probably what I always thought of first, despite the fact that I only even saw my first game of them played two or three years ago. It's where a lot of the 'grognard' geek-lengendry seems to come from - as far as I know, while Saint Gary came from a medieval wargaming background, Dave Arneson was a Napoleonics wargamer before they went off and invented D&D. And frankly, it makes me nervous every time I start to seriously think about doing something with it myself. Even list-writing, which people like my old friend Chris Norwood (of blogging fame) can tell you is a throwback to the endless stacks of RPG characters I used to make with no real expectation of them hitting the table, seems intimidating to me. For example, my primary wargaming buddy Britt and I have discussed doing some Napoleonics ourselves a few times, and I even proposed we both build forces for Gorodetshcna, using the OoBs from Napoleon's Battles v3, which we both own. Cool, all the work is done already, off to buy minis, right?

Wrong.

I picked Gorodetschna since Britt is working up some Russians, and I wanted to do not-France. The probelm is that I cannot figure out which of the myriad units fielded by the gloriously heterogenous Austrian Empire are supposed to have been at Gorodetschna. Are my Austrian line units German or Hungarian? Is my light cav made up of Dragoons, Hussars, or Uhlans?

There's a stereotype about Naps gamers that they're universally detail-obsessed, that fistfights and bitter recriminations will arise over incorrect regimental facing colors, or improper bricole usage. Now I'm not going to get to that level (God willing), and none of the people I've gamed Naps with seem to have those tendencies either - but it would be nice to have the RIGHT DAMN NATIONALITY represented by my minis. So, off to the stacks to do some research. In the goofy sci-fi and fantasy make-em-ups I have previously played, this hasn't been a problem, and those of you who know me know that an enforced trip to the library to pore over some dusty-ass history books is a B'rer Rabbit in the briar patch moment. But still, it's one more step between intention and actuality, and with higher stakes (or at least real historical verisimilitude) than whether or not my Space Elfs are the right colors.

And while we're on the topic of minis and colors - I'm a very, very new painter. So far my best success has been with Heavy Gear minis, roughly-28mm tall mecha suits. This means I can basecoat them with colored primers, hit a few items with gunmetal, a few more with a dot of color or two, and call it a day. MAYBE hitting it with a wash or ink if I get really ambitious.

This will not cut it for Napoleonics, I think. And even at our chosen scale (15mm), there can be a startling amount of detail on each individual mini - uniform, harness, weapon, flesh, plus stuff like uniform facings and frogging and buttons and oh god the bees in my head make them stop. Seriously, I am honestly afraid of putting brush to mini with this scale.

And yet I keep checking 15mm minis websites, making up shopping lists, fiddling around with the handful of Napoleonic history books I have (80% of which are written or edited by David Chandler, which is something I never knew before being bitten by the Naps gaming bug). Clearly it's a sickness. Because I'm already thinking of bagging the Gorodetschna plan and talking to Britt about trying to build up to playing the Battle of Borodino next year, just in time for its bicentennial....

^NB: I wrote this, as well as the previous two entries, all on the 18th, but I've spaced them out for publishing them since I didn't want to push my first new content in a month off the front page within an hour.

What's in the box? 22,000 tons of nuclear fury

2011-09-18T01:35:00.007-04:00

Six Combine Mk IIIs, Six Paneuropean Legionnaires.

OGRES.

Glued these guys up today (Sept 18). I have had them for OVER A DECADE which makes me feel super old. Planning on running Exercise K with them at MACE when I go for the first time this November. Still have to paint them and source a map somehow. Squads will be:

PANEUROPEAN:
Red - 1st Polish Lancers
Yellow - Vatican Guard

COMBINE:
Green - 1st Armored Divison (Old Ironsides)
Blue - Royal Navy

Dumb/thematic names solicited. Right now I have some bad ideas for the Vatican Guard Ogres, as well as some good ones for the RN (fictional British naval captains!) but I'll take any suggestions.

As for the actual assembly, they are really clean sculpts and other than a bit of flash on some of the treads and gun barrels, they went together effortlessly - although I do wonder about how that wasp-waist is going to hold with just CYA glue. I've got some JB Weld on hold if they prove fragile in service. Here's hoping the periodic rumors about SJGames looking for a new caster to start making these things again is true.

And by 'next Friday' I meant 'a month later'

2011-09-18T00:05:00.007-04:00

I've played a fair amount of Heavy Gear lately, and made some actual progress on my painting as earlier mentioned. Britt and I played a refresher/learner game (since he hadn't played with the new Field Manual rules yet, and I'd only played one game with them myself). We had a good time, although in retrospect we both think that we stocked the table with too much 'area' terrain, which Heavy Gear doesn't seem to recommend or handle too well. We realized this when we found out that we could only actually hit each other with grenades. Sometime in the next week or two we're going to try it again, with more discrete units of terrain, maybe we'll actually be able to shoot each other like God and the good folks at Dream Pod 9 intended.

Here's some shots from our game - my guys are MILICIA - the blue MP cadre and the grey war-criminal cadre; Britt's guys are Northern Guard in dunkelgelb and black (very slimming):

See that grey dude on his ass in the last pic? That's a bad outcome for the grey dude. Not pictured: my blue dude who got blown to smithereens by an errant grenade from his former squadmate...

Then a little bit after that, there was a one-day mini-campaign-tournament thingy at The Game Connection, and I took my freshly (mostly) painted WFPA 'Jump' Dragoons and a platoon of also-airborne infantry. Problem was that I didn't realize that due to the format, I wouldn't have enough Support Points to actually airdrop either unit more than once. So I said screw it and put the SPs into CPs, which is all that let me hang on as long as I did. I was able to put a real hurting on William's MILICIA guys (which hurts, as the MILICIA are my first and favorite HG faction), but I wasn't able to push him off the gasworks objective in time, giving him the win. This put me on the defensive against Tyler's Black Talon force for the next two games, and it was a walkover for him. Skill 4, two actions, jump jets, AGMs and light railguns - I did what I could, but there was no real way I could keep him from destroying his three objectives in game two, and in game three I couldn't even get anyone off the board (not even my Hardy Aller tank, which came on and got roadblocking Claw-series gears airdropped in behind it before I conceded). Losing meant you didn't get a chance to repair 'dead' gears, and infantry were never eligible for resupply, so all in all I'm not sure I took the best force for the setup.

Here we see two surviving infantry squads standing up to a Vulture gear. It went better than I could have ever hoped, in that Tyler's Vulture didn't murder them before jumping past them to fire on the hovercraft they were guarding.

Still, it's a great game, with great minis, and I've finally broken my painting phobia. My paintjobs aren't great by any means, but they look fine on the tabletop, and I can already tell that my WFPA guys look better than the MILICIA who hit the paint table before them. Unfortunately now we are heading into a typical NC fall, which means my days of good weather for priming are going to be few and far between. Over the next few weeks I have a bunch of projects I need to get glued up so that when one of those nice days pops up I can take advantage of it by getting all messed up on paint propellant in the backyard.

Well, that went sideways on me again

2011-08-16T15:05:00.005-04:00

Anyway. Heavy Gear. First army assembled, primed. Assembling opfor now. While I'm sure this is stunningly boring for you all it keeps this info in an easily accessible spot for me. Plus I promise pics by Friday! Pinky swear!

New Roster (WFPA, Western Frontier Protectorate Army). 1000 TV, PL 2, 4 SPs, 5 CPs
Ruleset: Post 1940 armies - All published rules, Extensions: Gear Up 1 Defense modifiers, Gear Up 2 Weapon ranges, Gear Up 3 Overkill values
Veteran Dragoon Squad (Core) [Army Command Group] 400TV
Tankhunters

Jaguar [3/3/1/3] MAC,LRP/32,APGL,HG,VB CGL, ArmyCmdr 85TV (Rabid Grizzly->Jaguar -30 TV)
+1 Ld for ArmyCmdr (WFPA) +10 TV
Att and Def to 3 +10 TV

Strike Cheetah [3/3/1/0] RFB,DPG,VB 75TV (Cheetah->Strike Cheetah +0 TV)
Att and Def to 3 +10 TV

Strike Cheetah [3/3/1/0] RFB,DPG,VB 75TV (Cheetah->Strike Cheetah +0 TV)
Att and Def to 3 +10 TV

Jaguar [3/3/1/0] HPZF,HMG,SC,APGL,HG,VB 90TV (Hunter->Jaguar +20 TV)
Att and Def to 3 +10 TV
*AC and LRP for SC +5 TV
Tankhunter SC Upgrade (3) +10 TV
Add HMG and HPZFs +5 TV

Jaguar [3/3/1/0] HHG,FGC,LRP/32,APGL,VB 75TV (Hunter->Jaguar +20 TV)
Att and Def to 3 +10 TV
*AC,HGs for FGC,3 HHGs +5 TV

Infantry Platoon (Core) 100TV

Infantry Squad Leader [2/2/2/2] Anti-Gear Rifle,Assault Rifle CGL 25TV
Paratroopers +5 TV
Anti-Gear Rifle +5 TV

Infantry Squad [2/2/2/2] Anti-Gear Rifle,Assault Rifle 25TV
Paratroopers +5 TV
Anti-Gear Rifle +5 TV

Infantry Squad [2/2/2/2] Anti-Gear Rifle,Assault Rifle 25TV
Paratroopers +5 TV
Anti-Gear Rifle +5 TV

Infantry Squad [2/2/2/2] Anti-Gear Rifle,Assault Rifle 25TV
Paratroopers +5 TV
Anti-Gear Rifle +5 TV

Veteran Dragoon Squad (Core) 420TV

Jaguar [3/3/1/3] HPZF,HMG,HHG,FGC,APGL,VB CGL 100TV (Rabid Grizzly->Jaguar -30 TV)
Att and Def to 3 +10 TV
Field Armor +10 TV
*AC,HGs for FGC,3 HHGs +5 TV
Swap LRP for HMG and HPZFs +0 TV
Increase Ld to 3 +10 TV

Cheetah [3/3/1/0] HPZF,HMG,HHG,FGC,VB 95TV
Att and Def to 3 +10 TV
Field Armor +10 TV
Swap DPG for LAC +5 TV
*AC,HGs for FGC,3 HHGs +5 TV
Swap LRP for HMG and HPZFs +0 TV

Cheetah [3/3/1/0] HPZF,HMG,HHG,FGC,VB 95TV
Att and Def to 3 +10 TV
Field Armor +10 TV
Swap DPG for LAC +5 TV
*AC,HGs for FGC,3 HHGs +5 TV
Swap LRP for HMG and HPZFs +0 TV

Hunter [3/3/1/0] HPZF,HMG,HHG,FGC,APGL,VB 65TV
Att and Def to 3 +10 TV
Field Armor +10 TV
*AC,HGs for FGC,3 HHGs +5 TV
Swap LRP for HMG and HPZFs +0 TV

Hunter [3/3/1/0] HPZF,HMG,HHG,FGC,APGL,VB 65TV
Att and Def to 3 +10 TV
Field Armor +10 TV
*AC,HGs for FGC,3 HHGs +5 TV
Swap LRP for HMG and HPZFs +0 TV

Infantry Platoon (Core) 80TV

Infantry Squad Leader [2/2/2/2] Anti-Gear Rifle,Assault Rifle CGL 20TV
Anti-Gear Rifle +5 TV

Infantry Squad [2/2/2/2] Anti-Gear Rifle,Assault Rifle 20TV
Anti-Gear Rifle +5 TV

Infantry Squad [2/2/2/2] Anti-Gear Rifle,Assault Rifle 20TV
Anti-Gear Rifle +5 TV

Infantry Squad [2/2/2/2] Anti-Gear Rifle,Assault Rifle 20TV
Anti-Gear Rifle +5 TV

Generated by Gear Garage V0.42 - Is this the Answer?

Hey dummy, over here

2011-06-07T16:29:00.002-04:00

Purely for my own benefit as I spent 20 minutes looking for these damn year-old lists this afternoon:

List #1 - SS 1943 Schwere Panzerkompanie 1500pts
HQ: Tiger 1 E x1, Sd Kfz 9 (18t) recovery vehicle - 450

Combat Platoons:
1943 Schwere Panzer Platoon #1: Tiger 1 E x1 - 435
1943 Schwere Panzer Platoon #2: Tiger 1 E x1 - 435

Weapons Platoon:
Panzer Scout Platoon: HQ section w/ 3 Scout squads - 180

List #2 - SS Gepanzerte Panzergrenadierkompanie - 1500pts
HQ: Company HQ - 120
-CC SMG team, 2iC SMG team, Anti-tank Rifle team, 3x Sd Kfz 251/1C

Combat Platoons:
Gepanzerte Panzergrenadier Platoon #1 HQ w/ 2x Panzergrenadier squads - 200
-Command MG team w/ Sd Kfz 251/10C, 2x squads of 2 MG teams + Sd Kfz 251/1C

Gepanzerte Panzergrenadier Platoon #2 HQ w/ 2x Panzergrenadier squads - 200
-Command MG team w/ Sd Kfz 251/10C, 2x squads of 2 MG teams + Sd Kfz 251/1C

Weapons Platoon:
Gepanzerte Infantry Gun Platoon - HQ section w/ 2 guns, added 3x Sd
Kfz 251/1C halftracks - 110

Divisional Support Platoons:
1943 Schwere Panzer Platoon - 2x Tiger 1 E - 870

Hey remember being tired of this recursive crap already?

2011-05-27T14:47:00.005-04:00

So as I've been reading more of Ungvary's The Siege of Budapest it's becoming clearer and clearer to me that I should have made a Hungarian Assault Artillery list, as they are all over his account of the fighting in Budapest. Still, I'm happy with my tanker list, as the Turan II from Battlefront is a great looking little model (and as I don't think I could actually fit an assault gun list in under the restrictions of the first stages of the Escalation League)!

But I did feel like I wanted to change my Hetzers in the 1750 iteration of the list for the native-grown Zrinyi II assault guns. It was a hard call, because the Hetzers are one of the things I was liking the most about the old list. But I'm sure I can find them a home someplace else, and the Zrinyi really deserves some table time. This swap saves me 30 points, which neatly buys me a Supply Truck for my engineers, so hopefully this is the final iteration of my Hungarians:

1750pts Hungarian Harckoscsizo Szazad (Tank Company) (1750)
Company HQ - 2 Turan II tanks (125)

Combat Platoon #1 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #2 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #3 - Harckocsizo Platoon - 3x Panzer IV H (285)

Weapons Platoon #1 - Motorized Pioneer Platoon - HQ Section w/ 2 Pioneer squads (180)
-add Command 'panzerknacker' SMG team (5)
-add 3-ton trucks (5)
-add Pioneer Supply Truck (25)

Regimental Support Platoon #1 - Self-propelled AA Platoon - 2x Nimrod AA guns (115)

Divisonal Support Platoon #1 - Motorized Rifle Platoon - HQ section w/ 4 Rifle squads (175)
-add Botond trucks (5)
-replace Command Rifle/MG squad with Command 'panzerfaust' SMG team (10)

Divisional Support Platoon #2 - Motorized Artillery Battery - HQ w/ 4x 105mm 37M howitzers (210)
-trucks (5)

Divisional Support Platoon #3 - Rohamagyus Platoon - 3x Zrinyi II assault guns (225)

I'll also be pulling the recovery vehicle that I added at the 1500pt step in favor of the Command team upgrade for the Pioneers, as I've read plenty of stuff about brave antitank work in Ungvary's book and none about recovery vehicles.

Another BattleTech Quick Strike starter game

2011-05-25T16:44:00.005-04:00

My old friend Steve is going to be in our mini-campaign this summer (next month!) and last night at the FLGS we set up a little lance-on-lance demo game for him. He took to it like a duck to water, but more importantly it showcased a few more rules issues that I need to go through the absurdly large Strategic Ops PDF and either print out or collate into a new set of tables, or something. I'm waiting on my plastic hex bases to arrive from Chessex, so we had another 'shirts vs skins' game with red rubber bands acting as shirts. No real commentary, as with us just activating our whole lances at a time there wasn't too much you could do tactically. If anything I think that you really need to have at least two units, even if it means breaking a lance up into two demi-lances, otherwise the person who 'wins' initiative gets the big prize of never getting any kind of reaction to the other player's movement. Pix follow:

The electrical gang or workboxes for terrain is an idea I'd seen done before, but forgotten about until Dale (who is the driving force behind the Heavy Gear gaming at The Game Connection) brought some of his to the last HG night I was able to attend. For under $20 I have got a tableful of buildings, including several small bunker-ish looking buildings, two round power plants, a large industrial building and one (if I can cut the sides out neatly enough) mech assembly bay. Good times, hopefully the Krylon Fusion spray paint I bought will indeed do the job and stick to this material...

No more excuses

2011-05-23T18:39:00.002-04:00

Hey, remember rememblahblah more FoW Hungarian lists

2011-05-16T00:53:00.002-04:00

Ok, I needed arty more than I needed 4 light tanks:

1200pts Hungarian Harckoscsizo Szazad (Tank Company)
Company HQ - 2 Turan II tanks (125)

Combat Platoon #1 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #2 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Weapons Platoon #1 - Motorized Pioneer Platoon - HQ Section w/ 2 Pioneer squads (180)
-add 3-ton trucks (5)

Regimental Support Platoon #1 - Self-propelled AA Platoon - 2x Nimrod AA guns (115)

Divisonal Support Platoon #1 - Motorized Rifle Platoon - HQ section w/ 4 Rifle squads (175)
-add Botond trucks (5)

Divisional Support Platoon #2 - Motorized Artillery Battery - HQ w/ 4x 105mm 37M howitzers (210)
-trucks (5)

1500pts Hungarian Harckoscsizo Szazad (Tank Company) (1495)
Company HQ - 2 Turan II tanks (125)
-SdKfz 9(18t) (Famo) recovery vehicle (5)

Combat Platoon #1 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #2 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #3 - Harckocsizo Platoon - 3x Panzer IV H (285)

Weapons Platoon #1 - Motorized Pioneer Platoon - HQ Section w/ 2 Pioneer squads (180)
-add 3-ton trucks (5)

Regimental Support Platoon #1 - Self-propelled AA Platoon - 2x Nimrod AA guns (115)

Divisonal Support Platoon #1 - Motorized Rifle Platoon - HQ section w/ 4 Rifle squads (175)
-add Botond trucks (5)
-replace Command Rifle/MG squad with Command 'panzerknacker' SMG team (5)

Divisional Support Platoon #2 - Motorized Artillery Battery - HQ w/ 4x 105mm 37M howitzers (210)
-trucks (5)

1750pts Hungarian Harckoscsizo Szazad (Tank Company) (1750)
Company HQ - 2 Turan II tanks (125)
-SdKfz 9(18t) (Famo) recovery vehicle (5)

Combat Platoon #1 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #2 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #3 - Harckocsizo Platoon - 3x Panzer IV H (285)

Weapons Platoon #1 - Motorized Pioneer Platoon - HQ Section w/ 2 Pioneer squads (180)
-add 3-ton trucks (5)

Regimental Support Platoon #1 - Self-propelled AA Platoon - 2x Nimrod AA guns (115)

Divisonal Support Platoon #1 - Motorized Rifle Platoon - HQ section w/ 4 Rifle squads (175)
-add Botond trucks (5)
-replace Command Rifle/MG squad with Command 'panzerknacker' SMG team (5)

Divisional Support Platoon #2 - Motorized Artillery Battery - HQ w/ 4x 105mm 37M howitzers (210)
-trucks (5)

Divisional Support Platoon #3 - Rohamagyus Platoon - 3x Hetzer assault guns (255)

Hey, remember remembering Flames of War like two days ago?

2011-05-15T16:20:00.011-04:00

So do I, because it was just two days ago! In the comments on that blog post, my friend and primary wargaming buddy (and possibly only current blog reader) Britt pointed out that there's an escalation league starting up at a game store in Cary that I've heard of but never been to, called Gamer's Armory.

I love the whole 'escalation' league format, whatever it's called and whatever the actual wargame. They're a great way to bring new players in to a game, or let old players start a new list they're interested in. I'm in a Warhammer Fantasy escalation league right now (and supposedly in a 40k one, but I've stalled out on that one a bit), and I think they're just great. This one in particular, for Late War-era Flames of War, has me interested because I'm just picking up a really fascinating book called The Siege of Budapest by Krisztian Ungvary (and apologies for the lack of correct diacritical markings).

Here's my first 'checkpoint' list, for 600pts, with some interesting Hungarian tanks that fit neatly under the league restrictions for these games (front armor no higher than 7, Anti-tank rating no higher than 11), the Turan II medium tanks.

600pts Hungarian Harckoscsizo Szazad (Tank Company)
Company HQ - 2 Turan II tanks (125)

Combat Platoon #1 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #2 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Motorized Rifle Platoon - HQ section w/ 2 Rifle squads (95)

For the next step, 800pts, I can just add 2 more rifle squads and trucks to the Motorized Rifle Platoon (net gain of 85) and a platoon of Nimrod Self-propelled AA guns (115), or a Light Harckoscsizo Platoon of five Toldi II light tanks (195), or add a 2-squad Motorized Pioneer Platoon with trucks and Command SMG team (195) and the aforementioned trucks for the Rifle Platoon (5). Just all sorts of fun stuff you can do in this little format!

EDIT TO ADD: on looking further, the next several steps are all 200-point chunks, so based on the above it looks like I'm set for 800, 1000, and 1200! Now just to figure out a 300pt chunk for the jump to 1500 and a final 250 for the 1750 endpoint! First thoughts: a platoon of three Panzer IV H's (285) and then topping it off with an Assault Gun platoon of three Hetzers (255) to come in at 10 points under budget. Still thinking on that one though.

EDIT mk II: let's go ahead and do this thing at all points levels:

800pts Hungarian Harckoscsizo Szazad (Tank Company)
Company HQ - 2 Turan II tanks (125)

Combat Platoon #1 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #2 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Regimental Support Platoon #1 - Self-propelled AA Platoon - 2x Nimrod AA guns (115)

Divisonal Support Platoon #1 - Motorized Rifle Platoon - HQ section w/ 4 Rifle squads (175)
-add trucks (5)

1000pts Hungarian Harckoscsizo Szazad (Tank Company) (total 995)
Company HQ - 2 Turan II tanks (125)

Combat Platoon #1 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #2 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Weapons Platoon #1 - Motorized Pioneer Platoon - HQ Section w/ 2 Pioneer squads (180)
-replace Command Rifle/MG team with Command Panzerfaust SMG team (10)
-add 3-ton trucks (5)

Regimental Support Platoon #1 - Self-propelled AA Platoon - 2x Nimrod AA guns (115)

Divisonal Support Platoon #1 - Motorized Rifle Platoon - HQ section w/ 4 Rifle squads (175)
-add Botond trucks (5)

1200pts Hungarian Harckoscsizo Szazad (Tank Company)
Company HQ - 2 Turan II tanks (125)

Combat Platoon #1 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #2 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Weapons Platoon #1 - Motorized Pioneer Platoon - HQ Section w/ 2 Pioneer squads (180)
-replace Command Rifle/MG team with Command Panzerfaust SMG team (10)
-add 3-ton trucks (5)

Weapons Platoon #2 - Light Harckocsizo Platoon - 4x Toldi IIa tanks (195)

Regimental Support Platoon #1 - Self-propelled AA Platoon - 2x Nimrod AA guns (115)

Divisonal Support Platoon #1 - Motorized Rifle Platoon - HQ section w/ 4 Rifle squads (175)
-add Botond trucks (5)
-replace Command Rifle/MG team with Command Panzerfaust SMG team (10)

1500pts Hungarian Harckoscsizo Szazad (Tank Company) (1490)
Company HQ - 2 Turan II tanks (125)
-SdKfz 9(18t) (Famo) recovery vehicle (5)

Combat Platoon #1 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #2 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #3 - Harckocsizo Platoon - 3x Panzer IV H (285)

Weapons Platoon #1 - Motorized Pioneer Platoon - HQ Section w/ 2 Pioneer squads (180)
-replace Command Rifle/MG team with Command Panzerfaust SMG team (10)
-add 3-ton trucks (5)

Weapons Platoon #2 - Light Harckocsizo Platoon - 4x Toldi IIa tanks (195)

Regimental Support Platoon #1 - Self-propelled AA Platoon - 2x Nimrod AA guns (115)

Divisonal Support Platoon #1 - Motorized Rifle Platoon - HQ section w/ 4 Rifle squads (175)
-add Botond trucks (5)
-replace Command Rifle/MG team with Command Panzerfaust SMG team (10)

1750pts Hungarian Harckoscsizo Szazad (Tank Company) (1745)
Company HQ - 2 Turan II tanks (125)
-SdKfz 9(18t) (Famo) recovery vehicle (5)

Combat Platoon #1 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #2 - Harckocsizo Platoon: 3x Turan II tanks (190)

Combat Platoon #3 - Harckocsizo Platoon - 3x Panzer IV H (285)

Weapons Platoon #1 - Motorized Pioneer Platoon - HQ Section w/ 2 Pioneer squads (180)
-replace Command Rifle/MG team with Command Panzerfaust SMG team (10)
-add 3-ton trucks (5)

Weapons Platoon #2 - Light Harckocsizo Platoon - 4x Toldi IIa tanks (195)

Regimental Support Platoon #1 - Self-propelled AA Platoon - 2x Nimrod AA guns (115)

Divisonal Support Platoon #1 - Motorized Rifle Platoon - HQ section w/ 4 Rifle squads (175)
-add Botond trucks (5)
-replace Command Rifle/MG team with Command Panzerfaust SMG team (10)

Divisional Support Platoon #2 - Rohamagyus Platoon - 3x Hetzer assault guns (255)

Hey, remember Flames of War?

2011-05-13T15:06:00.006-04:00

I do! I also remember that there's lots of people playing it at The Game Connection in Knightdale, and that I've got an Eastern Front SS list about one-quarter built, and also that last spring my good friend Norton said he'd be interested in playing if I ever got around to showing him how. So, for my benefit as much as anything else, I dug out the two 600pt 'starter' lists I'd come up with and actually ordered last year. Last night a few of the German armored cars got assembled! This is a thing that his happening this year!

600pt Panzerspahkompanie (Tunisia) 600pts
HQ: SdKfz 223 (30)

CP#1: Light Panzerspah Platoon: 1 Patrol: 3x SdKfz 223 (110)

CP#2: Light Panzerspah Platoon: 1 Patrol: 3x SdKfz 223 (110)

DSP#1: Assault Gun Platoon: 2x StuG G (340)
-Schurzen for both StuG Gs (10)

600pt US Rifle Company (Tunisia) 600

HQ: Company HQ (20)

CP#1: Rifle Platoon: HQ Section w/ 3 Rifle Squads (90)
-Bazooka Team (20)

CP#1: Rifle Platoon: HQ Section w/ 3 Rifle Squads (90)
-Bazooka Team (20)

DSP#1: Tank Platoon: 3x M4 Shermans (345)

DSP#2: Truck Section: 2x Truck Squads (15)

The only bad part is I don't have any German infantry for Nortonwood to learn the infantry-on-infantry assault rules on. I might need to see if I can quickly snag the stuff to drop the StuG Gs (which I want so we can demo the tank-on-tank stuff) and run this list:

Panzerspahkompanie (Tunisia)
HQ: SdKfz 223 (30)

CP#1: Light Panzerspah Platoon: 1 Patrol: 3x SdKfz 222/223 (110)

CP#2: Light Panzerspah Platoon: 1 Patrol: 3x SdKfz 222/223 (110)

CP#3: Half-Tracked Panzerspah Platoon: 1 Patrol: Command SdKfz 250, 2x SdKfz 250/9 (120)

WP#1: Gepanzerte Aufklarungs Platoon: HQ section with 3 Aufklarungs Squads (225)
-replace Command HMG team w/ Command SMG Panzerknacker team (5)

This would require me to buy 2 bags of SdKfz250s and 1 bag of the SdKfz250/9 with 2cm gun, along with a bag of Afrika Korps infantry (all by Old Glory). This would be fairly cheap, and also go a long way towards fielding a full-sized 1500pts worth of Afrika Korps in the future, so I am in fact going to do this.

Say, lets take a look at a putative 1500 Panzerspah list based on these purchases! Fun!

1500 Panzerspahkompanie (Tunisia) 1495

HQ: SdKfz 250 (35)

CP#1: Light Panzerspah Platoon: 2 Patrols: 6x SdKfz 222/223 (220)

CP#2: Light Panzerspah Platoon: 1 Patrol: 3x SdKfz 222/223 (110)

CP#3: Half-Tracked Panzerspah Platoon: 1 Patrol: Command SdKfz 250, 2x SdKfz 250/9 (120)

WP#1: Gepanzerte Aufklarungs Platoon: HQ section with 3 Aufklarungs Squads (225)
-replace Command HMG team w/ Command SMG Panzerknacker team (5)

WP#2: 7.5cm Armoured Car Platoon: 3x SdKfz 233(7.5cm) (170)

DSP#1: Assault Gun Platoon: 2x StuG G (340)
-Schurzen for both StuG Gs (10)

DSP#2: Heavy AA Gun Platoon: HQ section w/ 2x 8.8cm FlaK36 (235)
-add Kfz 15 field car, SdKfz7(8t) Halftracks (5), eight crew per gun for RoF 3 (20)

OR pull the 7.5 AC platoon and take Priority Air Support for a flight of Stukas - 175pts, 1500 on the nose.

First games of Warhammer Fantasy

2011-05-10T15:50:00.002-04:00

So I finally got some of my WFB Slaaneshi Chaos guys assembled, and headed up to All Fun and Games in Apex to play my first two games. I guess technically they weren't my first two games, since my old friend Steve got me to play a game or two before, but that was several years and nearly as many editions of the rules ago, so practically these were two newbie games.

My opponent was a tremendously nice (and patient) guy named Andrew, who went out of his way both to be helpful with my numerous rules questions, but who also lent me five of the Brettonian knights he was using to proxy for his Dark Elf Cold One Knights so that I could proxy my Chaos Knights, who I'd wisely left in a separate box on the countertop when I left.

I didn't really take any notes, or even more than this one picture, but I have to say that I think I'm going to like WFB a lot, and I'm fairly certain I like it (rules-wise at least) more than 40k. Mechanically it seems less fussy, and yet there are more interesting options and things to consider. I also think the mission selection portion of the WFB system is way better than 40k's is. Don't get me wrong, I still like 40k and want to give it a shot again in the near future as well, but WFB really knocked one out of the park in my opinion. I really need to buckle down and get these Chaos guys assembled and painted so I can start on my Dwarfs for the mini-campaign Steve, Britt, and I discussed last fall!

Family Photo: 800+TV of Heavy Gear MILICIA

2011-05-05T01:36:00.009-04:00

Everyone for a planned 1000TV list except for two convict GP cadres (or maybe one convict GP cadre and two platoons of convict infantry, I'm still trying to decide). They're not primed yet obviously, so I'm putting these pics up for one main reason: to force myself to locate my little point&shoot digital camera which I have misplaced somewhere in the house after my last vacation. The iPhone pics are just brutal. Having to look at them will (hopefully) make me get off my butt and find the little digicam, or maybe even invest in a decent camera and a book on how to do less sucky minis photos. My theme for this army is lots of the crappy old gears the MILICIA gets stuck with, and a hard core of half-tame war criminals and disposable convicts barely held in check by the MP cadre. Typical Southern dirty tricks/deniable ops/'kick murder' group. I love 'em.

My Fire Support Cadre - the firepower of the list. A Command Jager with Medium Rifle upgrade, a Silverscale spotter/FO gear, two Spitting Cobras (normal and Support variants), and a Python. The Support Cobra might be my favorite single mini in the HG universe, toting that "Junglemower" Very Heavy Autocannon. If you didn't love "Ol' Painless" in Predator you'll never understand.

The MP Cadre - the first box of HG minis I ever bought. If the Spit is my fave single, these guys are my favorite album. Giant shotguns and riot shields? Yes please. I'm trying to decide if there's any way I can cleanly paint "OBEY" on their shields instead of the more traditional "MP" label. The Black Mamba MP is the army commander, and two of the Iguana MPs have light autocannon and grenades instead of the traditional street howitzer. The one thing I found out at the recent refresher game was that this unit is emphatically NOT good at tankhunting.

And my war-crimey GP squad. My concept was that while the MILICIA had a place for convict cannon fodder, there was also a place for more motivated offenders in a unit like this. A Silverscale for a second FO gear, two Flammjagers for burning stuff, and a brace of Dartjagers, one with a light bazooka and the other with a 'paratroop gun' (a light autocannon with an underslung light grenade launcher). When you need people to do the kind of stuff you can't get the admittedly fairly amoral regular MILICIA to do, these are the guys you call. Kind of a 'Dirty Dozen' thing, except these guys are all like the Telly Savalas character....

EDIT TO ADD: the smaller of the two convict GP cadres is built now. Just waiting to get in 4 Stripped-Down Jagers for the last one. Pix to follow.

BattleTech Quick Strike Rules, o how I love thee

2011-04-25T13:00:00.019-04:00

Seriously, what a great ruleset. I cannot understand why there's not a separate, perfect-bound $20-or-so book with just what you need to run a Quick-Strike game; instead you have the 450-page Strategic Ops book, either in PDF or in the dog-killingly-big hardback. Even the PDF is less convenient than it should be, as the QS rules are scattered throughout the dang book. The ten or so pages of the actual rules have multiple call-outs to multiple tables and subsidiary rules interlaced through the rest of the 450-page tome.

And yet if they could cram all that stuff into one easy-to-use place, I think it would sell like gangbusters, because a big percentage of gamers today don't have the time or the energy for a fetishistically detailed system like Classic BattleTech. But if you told them "hey, you can run a two or three lance (eg, 8-12 mech) game in two hours or less with these rules" I really do think they'd be a big hit. There's sort of a hex-based version of the rules in the starter box, which is a step in the right direction, but I'd be happy to buy a stand-alone product with these rules laid out in a neat, logical fashion.

So the reason I'm talking about this, is that my friend Britt is organizing a sort of campaign/league hybrid thing this summer, with six of us sort of loosely running the War of 3039, a canonical conflict just before the Clans showed up and ruined the storyline. Two of us, namely Darren and myself, met up at Hypermind in Burlington to play a little mindless 'kill em all' skirmish with the rules to get familiar with them. I'd played them once a few months ago at a demo game and immediately fell in love, despite my really atrocious job of running the recon lance I got assigned. Darren is an old BattleTech hand, most recently having played a lot of the MechWarrior clicky iteration of the game. Both of us threw together 100 Build Value (which QS uses instead of the classic tonnage system) 2-lance forces and lined 'em up on a 3'x3' mini-table (due to the Saturday crowding at the store from all die Kartenspeiler).

There's really not much to say in terms of an after-action report; with no objectives other than KILL and only a smattering of terrain, we did what you'd expect and formed several of BattleTech's trademark "Conga Lines of Death*" through the eight turns of the game. We found a few things we need to check into (like how a critical hit on Weapons is supposed to interact with the mechs that have some of their weapons broken out into separate entries, rather than the consolidated rating for most other mechs), and we also found out that ammo explosion and headshot crits are still a Bad Thing. We also did some playing with the melee rules, particularly charges and the fan favorite Death From Above. Some of these worked better than others, and frustratingly they both referred to a table in some portion of the book about 200 pages away from the Quick Strike rules. Gaaahh....

I also found out that my iPhone has a really astoundingly wide range of picture quality; at some point I need to find my little point-and-shoot and start carrying it to these things because while the pics look ok on the small iPhone screen they look like trash on the monitor here. Rather than try to salvage them I'll just append them all to the end of this post for the truly dedicated reader (and later I may even go through and shop in some tags or at least colored circles to distinguish the two forces, since we were both running the classic urban camo pattern of 'not painted yet').

* the "Conga Line of Death" is when one mech can get in the rear 60 degrees of another for bonus damage; frequently once one mech does this, an opponent can then do so to them, and then someone can do it to that mech, etc.

Turn 2. Offscreen to the left, around the back of the low hill whose edge is just visible, is my 'recon' lance. In this turn both of our Grasshoppers will absorb the majority of each others' successful fire.

Turn 3. Conga lines already forming; also notice our two biggest mechs (my Atlas and Darren's BattleMaster) are bumping chests in the middle of the right-hand scrum. Our Grasshoppers (we both fielded them) have enterprisingly jumped in behind each other's big bruisers for some backstabbery fun.

Round 4. By this point I'd gotten a very lucky ammo explosion result on Darren's BattleMaster. Our biggest Conga Line is formed here. Notice the yellow rubber bands used to differentiate my Dragon and Grasshopper from Darren's. A recurring question from onlookers (particularly onlookers under the age of 12) was 'how can you tell your robots apart?' O the shame of an unpainted army.

Turn 5, I think? Maybe 6? The big Conga Line has dissolved, with both of us losing our Grasshoppers as well as some other stuff if memory serves. Notice that my Cicada, which we last saw getting mugged by Darren's Reseen Shadow Hawk at the corner of the hab-block, is now downscreen left on the low hill helping my Zeus pin his Griffin. I think I fell in love with that speedy little bastard at this point.

By this time most of Darren's mechs were pretty beat up. I'd been fortunate in my dicing, and he was less so. He'd scrubbed all the armor off my Atlas by now, so I was moving at 3" per turn, shooting at -2 to damage, and was just waiting for another crit to finish the poor thing off. I'd also had a minor brain hemorrhage at this point apparently, and not only did I give him a key shot at the back of my Banshee, I'd also left it with no targets whatsoever, which is really dumb since by this time I'd realized it was better as a melee attacker than using its weapons. Dumb.

The valiant end of Darren's lone surviving Shadow Hawk, who died with appropriately Kuritan honor by killing my one-point-of-structure-left Atlas just as the Hawk fell under the Atlas's mighty fist. Worse was that I'd forgotten that due to multiple 'Weapons Hit' criticals Darren's Hawk could only attack in melee, so handing him my 19BV Atlas was another genius move on my part. Clear moral victory for Darren, if you ask me.

Games Workshop: phasing out metal minis?

2011-04-10T12:39:00.003-04:00

I cannot imagine that this blog will provide a source of late-breaking hobby news for anyone, but I learnd something interesting yesterday when I went to pick up my order at All Fun and Games. Apparently Games Workshop (the 800-pound gorilla in the minis wargaming room, for those of you who don't know) are moving away from at least part of their metal minis production. The stuff in the distribution chain right now is what's left, basically, and at some point in May they're apparently going to announce what exactly their plans are for replacing them.

Obviously GW has been moving to more and more plastic kits instead of the old metal minis, and I mostly have been happy with this. However, they still tend to cast 'leader'-type minis, as well as other, more specialized units, in metal. Current rumormongering is that they'll move these kinds of lower-production run single/small group minis to some kind of resin or new-ish plastic that can be spin-cast in the same old molds used for the current metal versions. However, in the meantime, once they're out of something (say, Dark Eldar Archons, which only came out a few months ago anyway) they're not casting any more.

In the meantime? Like I said, they're not casting any more of stuff as it sells out, and several part codes have apparently been pulled from their distributor/store catalogs. What this means for Your Humble Narrator is hard to see at the moment, since I'm waiting on AF&G to call me on Monday and let me know if they've managed to scrounge up a (currently metal) Dark Eldar Succubus model for me or not. The Warhammer Fantasy Slaaneshi metal champion I ordered DID come in which raises some interesting questions. It's an older model from their collector range, and I wonder if those things will continue to be cast in metal in small runs, or if they're also going to get the plastic/resin treatment. I also wonder what this will mean for GW's 'Specialist' ranges, like Battlefleet Gothic or Blood Bowl, both of which are nearly entirely metal model ranges. Will the Summer of Slaanesh become the Summer of Proxied Slaanesh character minis? Stay tuned...

Summer of Slaanesh: WFB Warriors of Chaos build list

2011-04-05T15:17:00.004-04:00

500 points

Hero: Sorcerer, Mark of Slaanesh, 'Sword of Might' 110

Core:
Marauders x20, Mark of Slaanesh, flails, full command 130

Chaos Warriors x10, Mark of Slaanesh, shields, full command 200

Chaos Warhounds x10 60

750pts

Special:
Chaos Knights x5, Mark of Slaanesh, full command 260

add Marauders x10 50

remove Warhound unit -60
Remove warhounds -60

Summer of Slaanesh: Dark Eldar build list

2011-04-05T14:56:00.002-04:00

500points

HQ Succubus w/ Agoniser, Venom Blade 90

Troops A:
Kabalite Warriors x10 w/ Shredder, Splinter Cannon 105
-Sybarite w/ splinter pistol, power weapon 20
-Raider w/ splinter racks, shock prow 75

Troops B:
Wyches x9 w/ Razorflails x1 100
-Hekatrix w/ blast pistol, Agoniser, phantasm grenade launcher 45
-Raider w/ Disintegrator Cannon, shock prow 65

Summer of Slaanesh: Angels of Ecstasy build list

2011-04-05T12:50:00.003-04:00

first 500 points:

HQ: Chaos Sorcerer w/ Terminator Armor, Mark of Slaanesh, Lash 140

Troops A: Chaos Space Marines x 10 w/ Mark of Slaanesh, Hvy Bolter, Flamer 185
-AspChamp w/ PW, Meltabombs 35
-Rhino 35

Troops B: Chaos Space Marines x 5 w/ Mark of Slaanesh, Meltagun 105

upgrade to 1000

HQ: Chaos Sorcerer w/ Terminator Armor, Mark of Slaanesh, Lash 140

Elites: Chaos Terminators x3, Mark of Slaanesh, HvyFlamer, Combi-flamer, Combi-melta 120

Troops A: Chaos Space Marines x 10 w/ Mark of Slaanesh, Hvy Bolter, Flamer 185
-AspChamp w/ Power Weapon, Meltabombs 35
-Rhino w/ Havoc Launcher 50

Troops B: Chaos Space Marines x 10 w/ Mark of Slaanesh, Meltagun, Plasmagun 195
-AspChamp w/ combi-melta, Power Fist 50
-Rhino w/ Havoc Launcher 50

Fast Attack: Chaos Raptors x5 w/ Mark of Slaanesh, Plasma Pistol, Meltagun 145
-AspChamp w/ Power Weapon 30

Back to the salt mines

2011-04-05T11:58:00.009-04:00

Well, the blog and my minis gaming both took a huge nosedive last May. What's the best way to remedy that this spring/summer? Why, biting off way more than I can chew, of course. Here's the project list in rough priority order:

1) AK-47 Republic, in 6mm (minis by GHQ). Minis are here, waiting on bases. Slightly terrified of trying to paint stuff that small; the infantry is roughly grain-of-rice-sized. On the plus side I won't be painting web gear or belt buckles at this scale...

2) Battletech, using the highly superior Quick Strike rules. I'm still waiting on about half of my mechs, which I bought from an increasingly shady looking eBay dealer. Paint job will be simple as I'm rolling with the Fighting Urukhai this summer. My friend Britt is putting together a campaign setting and six of us will be recreating (precreating?) the 3039 War.

3) Flames of War. I have finally started assembling my filthy Nazi bastids, and am eyeballing a valiant workers' Soviet Lend-Lease army. Emchas! Woo!

4) WWI naval gaming. I've got some incredibly cheap (and incredibly tiny) 1/6000th scale minis on the way in from Strange Cargo games in Marathon, FL (one of the few places in South Florida I don't detest). I grabbed enough stuff to do the German East Asia squadron stuff (Coronel and Falklands) as well as the Goeben's run to Constantinople.

And the biggest, most indigestible thing I'm working on?

The Summer of Slaanesh! Lots of 40k and WFB stuff that has been languishing way too long. Most of what I'll be putting together now that the weather is turning is going to be Slaaneshi-themed, viz:

a) WFB Chaos Warriors, all Slaaneshi-aligned, for the Slow-Grow League at All Fun and Games in Cary. What better way to learn the rules than to play other people who already play? Minis inbound. I've been agonizing over the listbuilding stuff as I have no real idea of how this game actually looks on the tabletop.

b) 40k Dark Eldar for the same league, fluffed as being a renegade Cult of Slaanesh (in memoriam of the great old Cult of Slaanesh list from WFB about 2 or 3 editions ago). What's the one thing guaranteed to irk the jaded Dark Eldar establishment? Worship of She-Who-Thirsts! Bulk of the first 500 points are already here, although I forgot to order any transports.

c) 40k Chaos Space Marines, Angels of Ecstasy. I just want to play some Marines damnit!

d) Mordheim Cult of the Possessed: I think the Mordheim gaming at The Game Connection in Knightdale is on hiatus, but it's only like 6 minis and I'll be using the same color schemes as some or all of the Slaaneshi stuff above. Why not?

e) Blood Bowl Chaos team: I'm not certain of the mechanics of my local BB league this summer, as I haven't discussed it with my benevolent commissioner Da'vesh (or is his brother in charge this year?) lately. But whatever store it winds up at, and even if I only get to play a few exhibition games, what better time for a return of the Libertines than in the Summer of Slaanesh?

f) Battlefleet Gothic: Angels of Ecstasy warfleet. 'Nuff said.

Time to stock up on pink paint.

So anyway, since I have various materials shortages for some of these, the current worktable is slapping together 500pts of Angels of Ecstasy. One CSM unit in a Rhino, and a Terminator Sorcerer with a small retinue (yes, I know the retinue rules are gone. shut up). Pics tomorrow; I should have everything bar the Rhino built by then.

BONUS FALL PREDICTIONS:
A Very British Civil War (Fascist Yanks take the Isle of Wight!)
Martian Empires
Revolt on Antares gaming in 15mm
Heavy Gear
hell freezing over, etc

What's this?

2011-04-05T11:56:00.000-04:00

Looks like someone left a blog lying around here unattended. Shame.

Blood Bowl 2010 season - Hashut's Hammers

2010-05-17T06:30:00.004-04:00

rookie Chaos Dwarf team:
-6 Hobgoblins (240k)
-3 Chaos Dwarf Blockers (210k)
-2 Bull Centaurs (260k)

4x team re-rolls (280k)

Fan Factor: 1 (10k)

Total: 1,000,000 gold pieces, 11 players

EDIT TO ADD:
variant #1:
-6 Hobgoblins (240k)
-3 Chaos Dwarf Blockers (210k)
-2 Bull Centaurs (260k)
-1 Minotaur (150k)

2x team re-rolls (140k)

Fan Factor: 0 (-)

Total: 1,000,000 gold pieces, 12 players

variant #2:
-6 Hobgoblins (240k)
-2 Chaos Dwarf Blockers (140k)
-2 Bull Centaurs (260k)
-1 Minotaur (150k)

3x team re-rolls (210k)

Fan Factor: 0 (-)

Total: 1,000,000 gold pieces, 11 players

I can quit anytime I want: aka Alt-itis, the Hidden Killer

2010-05-16T18:57:00.010-04:00

(EDIT: have fairly radically changed all 3 lists after a bit of browsing at Advanced Tau Tactica)

TAU v1: 400pts
Troops: 12x Fire Warrior Team
-upgrade one to Shas'ui w/ Bonding Knife, EMP Grenades
-Devilfish APC w/ Disruption Pod
223pts

Elites: Stealth Team x5
-upgrade one to Team Leader w/ Fusion Blaster, Bonding Knife, Hardwired: Targeting Lock, Drone Controller, 1x Gun Drone
177pts

TAU v2: 400pts
Troops: 12x Fire Warrior Team
-upgrade one to Shas'ui w/ Bonding Knife, EMP Grenades
-Devilfish APC w/ Disruption Pod
223pts

Troops: 10x Kroot Carnivores
70pts

Elites: Stealth Team x3
-upgrade one to Team Leader w/ Fusion Blaster, Bonding Knife, Hardwired: Targeting Lock
107pts

TAU v3: 400pts
Troops: 12x Fire Warrior Team
-upgrade one to Shas'ui w/ Bonding Knife, EMP Grenades
-Devilfish APC w/ Disruption Pod
223pts

Elites: 3x Crisis Suits
-2x suits w/ TL-Missile Pods/Flamer
-Shas'ui w/ Bonding Knife, Hardwired Multitracker, Hardwired Target Lock
--suit w/ TL-Flamers, Missile Pod
and EITHER:Hardwired Drone Controller, shield drone x1
OR Failsafe Detonator
177pts

The first demo night!

2010-05-13T01:05:00.005-04:00

Lists here - in case I forget/lose them I can look them up on my phone tomorrow:

ORKS REDUX REDUX, 399pts
Troops: Slugga Boyz x 12
-upgrade one boy to Nob
--w/ Bosspole, Power Klaw
-mounted in Trukk
147 pts

Troops: Slugga Boyz x 12
-upgrade one boy to Nob
--w/ Bosspole, Power Klaw
-mounted in Trukk
147pts

Fast Attack: Deffkoptas x 2
-both w/ TL-rokkit launchas
-one with Bigbomm
105pts

vs

Scouting elements of the Recusant 113th, 395pts:

Veteran Squad #1 170pts
-Meltaguns x3, Vox-caster
-mounted in Chimera w/ Dozer Blade

Veteran Squad #2 185pts
-3x Plasma guns, Vox-caster
-mounted in Chimera w/ Dozer Blade

1x Scout Sentinel w/ Autocannon 40pts

War Without End League: the Recusant 113th gets it in the neck

2010-05-11T00:51:00.008-04:00

For a few minutes there I was worried I was going to get tabled, but in the end my Traitor Guard did better than I thought they would have, and held on until the bitter end when Chris Genest's Deathwing list snatched the only objective out of 4 on the board by burning the remnants of one of my Veteran squads off of it with an extreme-range, non-scattering plasma cannon shot from his sleepy Venerable Dreadnought (who almost snoozed through the whole game, only arriving on turn 4).

But lets not put the cart before the horse. We rolled the Seize and Hold mission and the 'Dawn of War' deployment style, and Chris wisely chose to go second and keep his HQ and 2 Troops units (Belial and two squads of Deathwing Terminators) in reserve for a Deathwing Assault in turn 1. So deprived of anything to shoot at, my two Chimeras full of Veterans popped smoke and loitered near my edge of the board, while my command squad went to ground in the second floor of a ruin near my right-hand corner.

Chris then teleported his two squads of Terminators in close to my board edge, using the Assault Cannon-armed squad to hose down that ruined building, killing 3 members of my command squad and wounding my Commander.

I got fairly lucky on my reserve rolls for turn two, getting my Autocannon-armed chicken walkers, my explosive-lance armed Rough Riders, and a Penal Legion unit that I wound up criminally underusing by hiding behind a wall and only firing once in the game (NB: if you're going to have a cheap scoring unit, you need to either score with the damned thing or fling it into combat, not have it sit on its collective thumb all game). At this point I got a real taste for just how ludicrously survivable Terminators can be. Shoot 'em with whatever you want - either they get their 2+ armor save or their 5+ invulnerable save. Plus Chris was running a (wonderfully converted!) Terminator Apothecary, which means one that I could have killed with a lucky autocannon shot got to ignore that wound instead. Also, whatever I should be doing with my Rough Riders, slamming them into a CC-tooled Terminator unit probably isn't it. Maybe throwing them at the shooty squad would have been the better choice. As it was, they all got slashed to bits by Belial and the other Lightning Claw-armed members of termie unit #1. Grr...

Chris's only other unit in reserve, the Dread, failed to arrive this turn. So he made hay instead by pranging one of my Chimeras and killing like half the dudes inside in the resultant explosion (at some point his CC Termies did the same thing to my other Chimera, but I'm a bit uncertain as to whether it was this turn or the next one).

Turn 3, I brought my second HQ - a Primaris Psyker (reskinned as a Chaos Sorcerer in my Traitor Guard theme) and the lovely, lovely Leman Russ. Whatever else I've decided, I think the main thing I've learned is that my next 250 points are going for a 2nd Leman Russ and 55 points of who the hell cares, because the LR is gold. If I'd been smarter and deployed it further off to one side or another I could have really capitalized on it; even so I think it accounted for all but 2 of the 9 Termie kills I got in this game. It did much better than the sorcerer, who promptly rolled boxcars on his Psychic test and ate his own brain rather than dropping some lightning on the shooty Termie squad like I'd hoped. Still, between the lone survivor of my command Lascannon team and the rapidly backpedaling survivors of the plasmagunner Vetsquad, I think I got two Termie kills on the shooter group. Meanwhile, the CC Termies with Belial started soaking up Leman Russ fire. I'm a bit hazy on who died when, but I know that by their assault next phase this unit was down to 3 or 4 men instead of the 6 it started with.

So lets move on to that. In a really smart move, Chris launched this unit into contact with my Sentinels - which meant that since the Sentinels were walkers, he was locked in combat, and therefore untargetable by the thundering guns of my LR. Curse the craftiness of the Deathwing! Plus he was able to aim his charge so one of his Thunder Hammer termies was knocking on the sides of my LR. Fortunately he never got through the armor on the Leman Russ. One of the Sentinels went boom, but who cared. At this point I'd have been happier if he'd killed all 3 immediately, since I'd have had an extra turn to shoot him up.

We were starting to run out of actual real-world gaming time by this point, so I'm a bit hazier on what happened and when. Suffice it to say that my other two Sentinels got Luke Skywalkered to death, the LR pounded his CC Termies down to just one, and Chris ran his shooty Termies towards the midfield objective. His Dread showed up and cranked a shot at my LR that bounced off the armor; this was clearly just a ranging shot however, as the next (and final) turn he wasted 6 of my 7 Veterans off their objective, leaving one guy armed only with a lasgun and harsh language to try and fend off the Master of the Deathwing. That didn't happen, and while his other squad didn't make it to their objective due to a mediocre 'run' roll, Chris's destruction of my Veteran unit was enough to claim the one and only objective anyone held at the (slightly early) game's end.

Scattered highlights from the game for me include the moment when Chris saved against two meltagun hits from the dwindling remnants of my melta-Vet squad, but lost a terminator to their buddy and his lasgun (aka 'flashlight). I also can look back now and see a few things I should have done differently, as well as a few things I just plain old forgot about (ie using any of my Company Commander's 'Orders' to bolster my shooting). Still, it was a fun game all in all; Chris was a friendly and helpful opponent, who was able to put up with my slight unfamiliarity with the rules and helped me to remember stuff that slipped my mind. So a loss, but a good game; and that's what it's all about anyway, right?

"The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera."

2010-04-29T05:26:00.004-04:00

-T.S. Eliot, "Four Quarters: Burnt Norton"

But Chimeras are Imperial Guard vehicles, I hear you say. But Eliot didn't write anything about Rhinos (so far as I know), and this was the only time I could recall that he uses the word 'lament.'

Anyway. Thanks to insomnia, enjoy a few Lamenters Space Marine CP lists, built from the new Blood Angel Codex

No.1: Jump-pack Assault, 400pts ("Let us go then, you and I"))
Troops:
Assault Squad #1: 5-strong (155)
-1x flamer
-sgt has Thunder Hammer, Storm Shield

Assault Squad #2: 10-strong (245)
-1x meltagun, 1x Plasma Pistol
-Sgt has Power Weapon, Inferno Pistol

nb: can split squad #2 with 'Combat Squads' rule for 3 scoring units

No.2: Tacsquad/Jump-pack Assault combo, 400pts ("Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye")
Troops:
Assault Squad #1: 5-strong (155)
-1x flamer
-sgt has Thunder Hammer, Storm Shield

Tac Squad #1: 10-strong (245)
-1x flamer, 1x missile launcher
-sgt has Power Fist
-mounted in Rhino

nb: can split tacsquad with 'Combat Squad' rule for 3 scoring units also

No.3: Razorback Assault ("Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees")
HQ: Sanguinary Priests x2 (100)
-attach one to each Assault Squad

Troops:
Assault Squad Alpha: 5-strong (150)
-1x flamer
-sgt has Power Fist
-swap Jump Packs for Razorback with Twin-Linked Heavy Bolters

Assault Squad Beta: 5-strong (150)
-1x flamer
-sgt has Power Fist
-swap Jump Packs for Razorback with Twin-Linked Heavy Bolters

Lists #1 and #2 are actually kinda tempting, as they share one squad, and the tacsquad from list #2 can be built (almost) entirely out of the raft of starter set marines I have floating around the garage. List #3 would be fun to run, and I'd love to see if the Furious Charge and Feel No Pain from the Sanguinary Priests would make up for the tiny squad sizes. But it would be the most hassle to build, and while I think I could get plenty of use out of the other three component squads that make up lists #1 and #2 at higher point levels, I'm not as sure about any of the stuff for list #3.

Roxanne... you don't have to put on the Red Army

2010-04-23T00:00:00.012-04:00

Soviet midwar lists at 1500; will be editing this post as I add new lists until I fall asleep....

Gvarrdeyski Tyazhelyy Tankovy Polk list #1 (aka the Bad Idea Express), 1485pts
HQ: 1x KV-1s (165)

Combat Companies:
-CC#1: 4x KV-1s (660)
-CC#2: 4x KV-1s (660)

Gvarrdeyski Tyazhelyy Tankovy Polk list #2 (slightly less ludicrous), 1500pts
HQ: 1x KV-1s (165)

Combat Companies:
-CC#1: 3x KV-1s (495)
-CC#2: 3x KV-1s (495)

Corps Support Companies
-CSC#1: Sapper Company, w/ 3x Sapper Platoons, Pioneer Supply horse-drawn wagon (345)

NB: or replace Sappers with:
-Strelkovy Battalion w/ 1 Rifle Platoon, 1 SMG Platoon, Komissar team, 1x Maksim HMG team, 2x Light Mortar teams (345)

Guards Tankovy Batalon, 1495pts
HQ: 1x T-34 obr 1941/42, w/ Tankodesantniki SMG team (110)

Combat Companies:
-CC#1: 5x T-34 obr 1941/42, w/ Tankodesantniki SMG teams on all (560)
-CC#2: 10x M3A1 Stuart (400)

Weapons Companies:
-WC#1: Tank-Rider Company w/ 2 Rifle/MG Platoons, 1 SMG Platoon, Komissar Team, 1x Maksim HMG team (455)

nb: drop the Stuarts to 9 (so I'm not buying an extra bag to only use 1); can add a 2nd Maksim HMG team to the Tank-Riders, pts will be the same

Guards Strelkovy Batalon (Red God of War themed, cheesy), 1500pts
HQ: Battalion HQ, w/ Company Command Rifle Team, 2iC Rifle Team, Battalion Komissar team, Anti-aircraft platoon (3x DShK AA MG on trucks) (95)

Combat Companies:
CC#1: Strelkovy Company w/ 1 Rifle Platoon, Komissar team, 2x Maksim HMG teams (200)
CC#2: Strelkovy Company w/ 1 Rifle Platoon, Komissar team, 2x Maksim HMG teams (200)

Corps Support Companies:
-CSC#1: Strelkovy Artillery Battery w/ 8x 76mm ZIS-3 and 4x 122mm obr 1938, Komissar team, observer rifle team, 2x anti-tank rifle teams, wagons & limbers, tractors (455)
-CSC#2: Reserve Heavy Artillery Battery w/ 8x 152mm obr 1943 hwzrs, observer rifle team, wagon and tractors (550)

Batalon Opocheniya (Militia Battalion, aka how much room do we have on the table anyway), 1480 and just silly
HQ: Battalion HQ, w Company Command Rifle Team, 2iC Rifle Team, Battalion Komissar team (25)

Combat Companies:
CC#1: Opolcheniya Company w/ 3x Rifle platoons, 4x Light Mortars, 3x PTRD anti-tank rifle teams, Komissar team (335)
CC#2: Opolcheniya Company w/ 3x Rifle platoons, 4x Light Mortars, 3x PTRD anti-tank rifle teams, Komissar team (335)
CC#3: Opolcheniya Machine-gun Company w/ 3 MG platoons, extra HMG per platoon, Komissar team (175)
CC#4: Opolcheniya Mortar Company w/ 2 Mortar platoons, Komissar team, observer rifle team (85)

Weapons Companies:
WC#1: Opolcheniya Heavy Mortar Company w/ 2 Mortar platoons, Komissar team, observer rifle team (90)
WC#2: Opolcheniya Anti-Tank Company w/ 6x 45mm obr 1937, Komissar team (110)
WC#3: Opolcheniya Anti-Tank Rifle Company w/ 3x Anti-Tank Rifle Platoons, Komissar team (160)
WC#4: Opolcheniya Artillery Battalion w/ 4x 76mm ZIS-3, 4x 76mm obr 1927, Komissar team, Observer Rifle team, horse-drawn wagons/limbers (165)

Hypermind 40k League - not dead yet

2010-04-20T00:25:00.005-04:00

Actually a tiny little flurry of activity and renewed player interest this week/weekend, which was nice. At the same time, I need to get off my ass and do a lot of wargaming-related stuff:

1) finish assembling and start on painting the Recusant 113th, or at least the first 1000pts or so of them. I've been coming up with all sorts of keen stuff to paint on the sides of their tanks, which would of course necessitate getting said tanks, you know, built and painted.

2) get some primer on Hashut's Hammers, my Chaos Dwarf Blood Bowl team for this year's Bloodlust Football League, as mentioned on my buddy Britt's blog.

3) paint up my Sorylians for Firestorm: Armada

4) ditto my Ork and Chaos fleets for BFG, since that's ever so slowly moving forward at Hypermind as well

So what did I spend my free time doing tonight? Making up lists for the army I'm wanting to field in the Hypermind league, of course. Hooray for the Angels of Ecstasy. Now I just need a good recipe for a nice creepy pink paintjob....

War Without End League: lists for the Recusant 113th

2010-03-28T01:12:00.007-04:00

Well, while the attempt to build up a 40k league at Hypermind in Burlington is stalling out, apparently The Game Connection in Knightdale has a very healthy 40k league scene. While I still want to build something up at Hypermind, I'm starting to think it's a good idea to get some more experience under my belt, both simply playing 40k and seeing how a thriving league gets run. So for a change of pace I'm about 90% sure I'll field a (Chaos-tainted) Imperial Guard list up there. Here's some tentative lists at the stated point values for the league:

1000pts
HQ
Company Command Squad 100pts
w/ Regimental Standard, Vox-Caster, Lascannon Team, Commander has Power Weapon

'Primaris Psyker' (Chaos Sorcerer) 70pts

TROOPS
Veteran Squad #1 170pts
-Meltaguns x3
-mounted in Chimera w/ Dozer Blade

Veteran Squad #2 185pts
-3x Plasma guns
-mounted in Chimera w/ Dozer Blade

'Penal Legion' Squad (maddened cultists) 80pts

FAST ATTACK
Scout Sentinel Squad 120
-3 Sentinels, all with Autocannon

Rough Rider Squad (1 Rough Rider Sgt, 5 Rough Riders) 80
-2x Grenade Launchers, Sgt has meltabombs

HEAVY SUPPORT
Leman Russ Tank 195
-w/ Lascannon, Heavy Bolter Sponsons, Dozer Blade

1250 pts: add
TROOPS
Infantry Platoon #1 250
-Platoon Command Squad w/ Vox-caster, Autocannon team
-Infantry Squad #1.1, w/ Vox-caster, Autocannon team
-Infantry Squad #1.2, w/ Vox-caster, Autocannon team
-Heavy Weapons Squad, w/ 3x Autocannon teams

1500 pts: add either
TROOPS
Infantry Platoon #2, equipped as #1 250
OR
ELITES
Ogryn Squad (1 Bone'ead, 5x Ogryns) 250

1850 pts: add
2nd Leman Russ, equipped as #1, 195
FAST ATTACK
Hellhound Squad 155
-1x Bane Wolf, w/ Multi-Melta, Dozer Blade

2000pts: add
5x more Rough Riders 50
ELITES
'Ratling' Squad x10 (possibly Skaven minis?) (100)

EDIT TO ADD:
SPECIAL BONUS 400pt COMBAT PATROL LIST
Veteran Squad #2 w/ Plasma guns
Penal Legion Squad
Full-strength Rough Rider Squad
TOTAL: 395

Revolt on Antares #3: Psionics and Status

2010-03-25T01:46:00.010-04:00

Bear with me. In the Revolt on Antares mini-game, the heads of each colonist House have powerful psionic abilities, and in my attempt to hack it into a RPG setting I'd like to key in on this, with the notion that the more of the 'royal blood' you've got, the higher your power level will be. I'd thought about just taking the notion of psionics as written in the Diaspora rules as a Stunt that lets you swap a skill
for another skill, and just changing that wild-card skill from Psionics to Assets.

My second idea was using it as is, and just saying that you can't buy Psionics skill at a level above your assets without some explicit Aspect ('Exiled Heir-in-hiding' or the like). This version feels like it allows for more, and more interesting, stories than the first one, and also makes powerful characters (scions of the various Houses) have to invest some real character resources in being both wealthy/powerful and being hereditarily psionic instead of the cheap freebie of the first idea.

But both of these made me wonder - is just putting Assets as your Apex (or close to it) skill sufficient to model the kind of semi-feudal overlordship I'm trying to convey? For people who aren't familiar with the game I'm emulating, maybe a decent comparison would be the head of a House in "Dune." What's the thing on Duke Leto's character sheet that lets us know he's head of House Atredies, and lets him act
as such in game terms? Is it just Assets: 5 and an Aspect (Imperial Duke)? Should something as powerful as "Head of a powerful, militarized Royal House" be a full-fledged Stunt? Or am I missing something? And how would we model someone further down the line of succession? What's on Feyd's character sheet, other than the Aspect 'Tiny Leather Underpants?'

not pictured: the na-Baron Feyd-Rautha's aforementioned tiny leather underpants

Halp!

Panthers or Tigers or StuG Gs, oh my

2010-03-17T23:22:00.006-04:00

Eastern Front, midwar lists: should I go for a three-Tiger Schwerepanzer company (with 335 points of miscellaneous list-filler), or a 7-strong Pantherkompanie with only 185 points of other stuff, or a mixed bag panzerkompanie with even less room for hangers-on (150 spare points in the version below)? The problem with all these is that I wind up with just a tiny tiny amount of infantry - usually one smallish specialist platoon like scouts or pioneers. Are pure- or nearly-pure tank lists even remotely viable in FoW?

1943 Schwerekompanie (Heer) 1500
HQ: Company HQ: 1x Tiger I E, Sd Kfz 9 (18t) Recovery Vehicle (400)

CP#1: '43 Schwere Panzer Platoon: 1x Tiger I E (385)

CP#2: '43 Schwere Panzer Platoon: 1x Tiger I E (385)

WP#1: Gepanzarte Aufklarungs Platoon, 3 squads (6 MG teams), Command Panzerknacker SMG team, 4x Sd Kfz 250 (230)

WP#2: Panzer AA Gun Platoon, 2x Sd Kfz 7/1 (Quad 2cm) (100)

Pantherkompanie (Heer) 1500
HQ: Company HQ: 1x Panther D, Bergepanther Recovery Vehicle (210)

CP#1: Panther Platoon: 3x Panther D (565)

CP#2: Panther Platoon: 3x Panther D (565)

DSP#1: Panzergrenadier Platoon, 2x squads (4 MG teams), Mortar Squad, Command Panzerknacker SMG Squad, 3x Kfz 70 trucks, 1x Kfz 15 staff car (160)

Panzerkompanie (Heer) 1500
HQ: Company HQ: 2x StuG G, add Sd Kfz 9 (18t) Recovery Vehicle (345)

CP#1: Panzer Platoon 3x Stug G (510)

CP#2: Panzer Platoon 3x Panzer IV G(late) or H (495)

WP#1: Panzer Scout Platoon, 3 squads (3 MG teams), Command MG team, replace bikes w/ 4x Kubelwagens (150)

EDIT: interesting note on the Pantherkompanie - if I ditch the infantry and the Bergepanther, the points I'd have left are just enough to buy a 2iC Panther, which I could then use the kampfgruppe rules with (although doing so in a 8-model list might be odd at best...)

Tunisia? I hardly knew 'er!

2010-03-12T03:45:00.004-05:00

I may clean this up a bit later, but basically it's two proposed Flames of War lists for the Tunisian theater. Looking for suggestions/criticism as usual:

1500 Panzerkompanie (Tunisia) (1500)
HQ: Company HQ: 2x Panzer III L or M, add SdKfz9(18t) recovery vehicle (235)

CP#1: Panzer Platoon: 3x Panzer III L or M (345)

CP#2: Panzer Platoon: 3x Panzer III L or M (345)

WP#1: Panzer Scout Platoon: 2x Scout Squads (115)
[1 Cmd MG teams, 2 MG teams, 3 Kubelwagens]

WP#2: Panzer Pioneer Platoon: 2x Pioneer Squads (120)
[1 Cmd MG/2 MG teams, 1 Kubelwagen, 2 Sd Kfz251/7 (Pioneer) halftracks]

DSP#1: Assault Gun Platoon: 2x StuG G (340)

And someone to fight them, of course:

1500 US Tank Company (1500)
HQ: Company HQ: 2x M4A1 Sherman, add M31 TRV (240)

CP#1: Tank Platoon: 5 M4A1 Sherman (575)

CP#2: Tank Platoon: 5 M5A1 Stuart (310)

WP#1: Recon Platoon, w/ Bazooka teams and AA MGs on Jeeps (90)
[Cmd rifle, Bazooka, 2xRifle teams; M2 half, 2 Jeeps]

WP#2: Recon Platoon, w/ Bazooka teams and AA MGs on Jeeps (90)
[Cmd rifle, Bazooka, 2xRifle teams; M2 half, 2 Jeeps]

DSP#1: Armored Field Arty Btty: HQ section (swap Jeeps w/ M2 Halftracks, 3x M7 Priest (195)
[Cmd carbine team, staff team, observer carbine team; 3 M2 halftracks, 3 M7 Priest]

I wanted two armored forces, but I also wanted them to have some differences in composition and playstyle. Will these two forces be too similar to make for a fun teaching/opfor duo for me to lend out?

Missing comments

2010-03-11T16:29:00.002-05:00

So this is weird/sucky - several comments (mostly from around the new year, and almost all of them from Britt) have vanished from my blog. Anyone more familiar with blogger/blogspot/whatever got any kind of info for me on how I can recover these?

Battlefleet Gothic

2010-03-04T13:36:00.008-05:00

"Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh."

Well, after some (admittedly rather disorganized) pushing to get the 40k league off the ground, maybe the smart play is to get the people who are already regular Hypermind Attendees and who already have BFG stuff to start something up as well? Who do we have, and what fleets are they planning to use?

ALTON - Space Marines (Black Templars)
JIM - I honestly cannot remember which fleets he had
STEVE - has large Chaos fleet, needs some escort ships though
ME - can bring 500pts of Imperial Navy, Chaos, and Eldar
NEW BRAD - seems like he'd mentioned BFG as well, maybe this is an opportune time to email him again?

I need to work on some way to synergize this stuff. Jim brought his copy of the BFG supplement about tying boarding parties, gamed out with 40k, into BFG - maybe when the new Battle Missions book gets here there'll be some inspiration for an update of that idea (and maybe if I win that eBay auction for a whole Necron fleet, Britt might borrow them to run tandem with his 40k Necrons for that kind of dual-game fun)?

Plus maybe we need an "Admiral's Cup" to compete with the prestigious "Golden Warboss" trophy....

(EDIT: the fact that an Al Swearengen quote came to mind for this turn of events has nothing whatsoever to do with the name of my Imperial Retribution-class Battleship, the Lord Swearengen)

EDIT #2 - added Steve to list

Revolt on Antares #2: One Size Fits Most

2010-03-03T23:19:00.014-05:00

I'm not as up on my current game theory stuff as I should be, but I just had a revelation about handling the Imperial Terran presence on Antares 9. Vincent Baker - who is well known in indie RPG circles for his amazing Dogs in the Vineyard, and whose Lego-based mecha-themed wargame Mechaton will be getting some love on this blog sooner rather than later - also wrote a little bit o' wonder called Rock of Tahamaat, Space Tyrant. In 'Rock', one person plays the eponymous and nearly-all-powerful Rock, and everyone else plays people who are being crushed by his tyrannical rule. The genius of the game is that mechanically, it treats the Rock differently than everyone else. He doesn't have the same type of numbers as eveyone else but 'turned up to eleven;' the game handles him in a fundamentally different manner than all the other players.

And this is the cognitive leap I had - that while it would be nice for there to be different results for any given table's version of the Imperial Terran consular government, there's not only no need for it to be delineated or generated in the same way as the Houses, it might be better for the game and the story your table tells if it's done in a totally different way! Instead of shoehorning the Terran faction into the same set of stats as the Houses, why don't we come up with some different model - something that still has room for variation from campaign to campaign, something that helps us come up with good stories for RPing OR interesting scenarios for wargaming. Maybe all we need for some nice variation on our Imperial Terran consulates is one stat! But what will that be?

To do this, maybe we should set some assumptions about the Terran role in the game. In the original boardgame, the Terrans have more and better units than any of the Houses, and have at least double the 'replacement points' of any single house as well. In two of the three scenarios of the original game, it's Terra and their hangers-on versus someone else (either the Rebel Houses in the main game, or the Silakka invaders and their hangers-on in the second scenario). Imperial Terra isn't here winning hearts and minds; in the introductory paragraph of the gamebook they're described in terms meant to evoke a sort of crumbling Roman Empire; perhaps here it'd be worth pointing out that the Terran 'leader' unit is Ward Serpentine, Imperial Consul and 'commander of the Berserkers of the Imperial Guard,' who are a stronger-than-usual Power Infantry Battalion.

Fig. 1 - Imperial Consul Ward Serpentine negotiating with Silakkan envoy
So Terra is set up to be at least partially a military overlordship, having probably come to Antares 9 and imposed, at blaster point, their rule over the Colonial Houses (who no doubt came here Lord-knows-how-long ago and did the same thing to the poor natives) and I think their military and technological supremacy needs to be a constant. It can get whittled away during the game by the acts of the PCs (or by the results of continuous campaigning in a wargame setting), but for our start-state there's just no reason to roll for it. Similarly, while the Terran forces on the planet are probably cut off from the Empire as a whole (either actually cut off somehow, or just as a result of the weakening of the Empire overall), their high 'replacements' value means they've either got access to a logistical infrastructure of their own, or at least have pretty massive reserves of both materiel and personnel they can call on in the same timescale as the Houses' resupply efforts.

So what's interesting enough to make into a variable? How about we take a cue from Mr. Baker and jump the tracks entirely? Instead of rolling for firepower or industry, why not roll for the Imperial Terran attitude?

Granted, we've already established that Terra is probably doing a lot of (if not all of) their governing by the sword. But a Consulate that's wary of the colonials to the point of paranoia is going to generate very different stories from a Consulate that's nakedly contemptuous of them. A Ward Serpentine that expects (and may one day get) backup from the rest of the Empire will behave very differently from one who suspects (or knows for a fact) he's all on his own here on Antares 9, left behind by the receding tide of a dwindling Empire.

So maybe two stats, to give us a nice 4-box x/y graph. "Degree of Contempt" on one axis, and "Degree of Isolation" on the other? What would be other interesting variables along these lines? The book itself only ever mentions the Empire in terms of it's growing weakness - would it be better to assume that whatever's on the planet is all they've got and all they'll ever have, and come up with a different variable here?

EDIT TO ADD: The Silakka - the alien invader faction - are pretty powerful too, and cry out for some kind of behavior matrix of their own....

Diaspora Hack: Revolt on Antares

2010-03-02T15:36:00.007-05:00

The very first 'gaming' product I ever bought was the old TSR mini-game "Revolt on Antares." While my first copy is lost somewhere in the attic or something, I grabbed a fresh copy off eBay a few years ago and have fallen in love with the setting all over again. I've made a few half-hearted attempts at figuring out some way to do some gaming in the setting - either RP, or once I stumbled into the wonderful world of 15mm sci-fi minis, tabletop wargaming. Nothing has ever really seemed to click, but I think Diaspora's version of FATE (plus its integral wargaming ruleset!) might be the way to go. I'm going to hammer away at this some here as well as on the Diaspora mailing list, and I'm actively soliciting feedback, suggestions, or just commentary on the process. I think one of the main strengths of this approach will be the player 'buy-in' as they'll be actively involved in detailing the setting, which was one of the neatest moments in our first Diaspora session.

For people who never played the original "Revolt," the bare-bones version of the backstory is that Antares 9 is on the edge of the (presumably crumbling and decadent) Terran Empire; seven noble houses, descended from the first wave of human colonists, are fighting for power and control of the planet. The leaders of each house have some fantastic over-the-top psionic ability (teleportation, electrokinesis, telepathy - a different one for each house), and each house also has some artifact of unreproducible Precursor god-tech. In the basic scenario for the original game, some of the houses revolt against Terran rule, some remain loyal, and the others get recruited into one side or the other as the game goes on. Other wrinkles in the setting include a lot of off-world (some frankly alien) mercenaries;. the (again presumably) oppressed native population of Antares 9; and gribbly tentacled alien invaders (that show up in the second scenario, but I'd certainly want to include them in my conversion).

One of the reasons I'm thinking Diaspora will be a great fit for this is that rather than sitting down and doing all sorts of background work for all seven houses and hoping that I'm brilliant enough to capture the imaginations of the rest of the players, I can hack the Cluster creation rules and let the whole table help define each house, with the help of some Fudge dice! But this takes us right up to my first issue: what are the 'stats' we'd be rolling up for each house?

Here's the only one I've gotten so far: the starting state of Loyalty. This is the key, because rather than having to sit and decide who takes which side, etc, we'll roll for it. +4 is absolute fanatical servile devotion to the Terran Throne; -4 is going to be open and total rebellion, taken to war-crime-y lengths like systematic atrocities visited on Terran civilians and/or Terry sympathizers. Zero will be 'neutral.' We'll put a 'slipstream guarantee in at this point as well: if there's not at least one House at +2 or higher and one House at -2 or less, we'll use [some algorithm that we'll determine when we figure out what the other stats are] and place a House at any needed value of +2 and -2.

Now we've pointed out my problem - I'd like to figure out what other stats need to be determined. I don't think tech is a good choice, as the original game presents each of the houses having equivalent values for their forces (in other words, everyone's laser tank battalions are as good as everyone elses), with the Terran forces being slightly better than their House counterparts. So I think tech gets a pass here. Which house gets which power is set by the original game as well, and rolling to determine which Artifact they get isn't interesting enough from a narrative point of view to bother with (if we even stick with this idea, it'll just be a flat die roll, or picking the actual chits from the original game out of a bag).

The original game does give each House a slightly different mix of forces, and the ones who have arguably 'worse' forces get more reinforcements - this dichotomy might lend itself to a 'guns or butter' stat, where +4 is an overbuilt military force that's already stretched the limits of a House economy to the point that it's unsustainable, while -4 is a House with virtually no military at all, but with tons of economic and industrial potential to be converted to a war footing in the future. The problem is that this feels a bit reductionist and silly, and I'm not sure it really passes the laugh test. I could split this into two seperate stats - 'Mercantile' and 'Military.' That would give us the possibility of having some houses be all-around powerhouses, and some getting screwed on both fronts. This doesn't replicate the game, but I want to be inspired by the setting, not shackled to it; and the thoughts of some Houses getting to be like pre-WWI Germany, with a massive military and a bumpin' economy while others get stuck being post-WWI Germany with no military and a boned economy seems like it could make for both good RPing as well as interesting fodder for wargaming scenarios. But splitting them out thusly means we're already at 3 'rolled-up' stats for each house. I'd be willing to go to four stats, but five or more feels like it would be a bit much.

Can anyone suggest any other stats that you, as a player, would be interested in knowing about a faction before you sit down to game with it? I'd thought of some sort of 'democracy' or at least 'decency' stat - while the houses are all run by the noble families, maybe something that moves them along a spectrum from 'legitimately concerned with our subjects and giving them some voice in their governance' to 'throw another serf on the fire, this one's quit screaming?' Maybe a stat for how stable each House is? While the backstory suggests that they're some sort of long-standing hereditary nobility, an unstable house might have lots of cadet branches of the main family arguing that they're the real heir?

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Later on this week I'll post something about character creation in this setting, and fish for ideas on how to handle the 'immovable objects' of the setting (the Imperial Terran Consulate, the natives, the invaders, and the mercs).

Diaspora 2: The Gazetteer (1st draft)

2010-02-23T15:47:00.004-05:00

COMBINE (T:0, E:2, R:-1)
We called it Combine, after the generations of strife were over and we were all finally in agreement on everything important.

Now able to look outward after centuries looking in, we began to re-explore our system. Finding remnants of our former glory didn't surprise us - but finding the Slipstream beacons of the Fallen Ones did.

Their hubris destroyed them, and their children are too enervated, or too corrupt, or too complacent, to do anything more than play with their dead Fathers' abandoned toys - the same toys that killed them.

We won't make their mistakes. We learned their foreign tongue, are learning to eat their poison food, but we'll find our own way up the ladder. When we climb to the final rung, we won't be indebted to these vultures.

DESERET (T:-1, E:1, R:0)
The people of Deseret are... different. Mostly, they look human, but subtle differences make others feel on edge when looking at them directly. A lifespan of 200 to 300 years is one difference, but an extremely low birthrate (caused by 1 in 3 females being infertile) limits population. Life, at least of others of "The Chosen" (as they call themselves) is precious. The Chosen are unified by a benevolent theocracy, who worship and revere the Fathers in a constant plea that they return and take their left-behind children with them into Forever. In the meantime, though, they jealously protect their world from all others... with atomic force if necessary.

LORD CARNAVON (T:2, E:-1, R:-1)
It seems nice enough. Air's alright, suns aren't too bright (a little heavy in the UV spectrum, but nothing a little melanin tweak can't handle). It's got a slightly different version of the same ecosystem all Fathers' Kids have (not like those left-handed freaks from Combine). And the house they left - even when the household AIs followed the Fathers into Forever, the walls and floors and furniture and everything still work perfectly; still change themselves to stuff you didn't know you wanted them to change into, but damn if they don't guess right, every time.

Maybe that's why it's so horrible here.

Smart Diggers don't squat in the Old Manses. Smart Diggers truck in their own food, too. Smart Diggers wear blinders and earphones and nose filters, and basically do everything they can to stay as seperated from this place as they can.

Poke around, try and find something useful, then drug yourself to sleep every night until you can buy your way back offworld.

THE LESTER STRAND (T:0, E:-3, R:-1)
The Strand is the used up, burned out system used by the Fathers to fuel their society. Now it's controlled by warring families who have their hands in all aspects of life here. Nothing happens without their blessing or knowledge. Rules don't apply here. Lack of indigenous food sources have forced the Families to become the black market/money-laundering system of the Cluster. You can get anything here, but it will cost you.

NEW EDEN&trade (T:-1, E:3, R-2)
A trio of paradise worlds orbiting a glorious yellow star. The worlds themselves are the result of precise terraforming by the Fathers, but are now each controlled by competing corporations out to exploit the natural resources, both human and otherwise, to turn a profit. Life is cheap here, unless you are an executive in a corporation or a visitor at one of the resorts. The population grows weary of this exploitation, but currently lack the leadership and coordination to do anything. For now, visitors see only the pretty face of New Eden&trade, which promises to do anything, and they do mean anything, to keep their business.

TELLOS (T:2, E:1, R:4)
"Nothing is too good for my guests." This is the philosophy of Tellosian culture. Blessed with an unlimited supply of everything and wanting nothing, they have developed a society where humility is the ultimate hubris.

This is the world where the Refusers came after the Fathers went into Forever. Technology has collapsed some from the Fathers' level due to the sheer abundance. Drive has left the Tellosians and they exist to please. Society is paralyzed.

Vague recruiting post goes here

2010-02-12T08:12:00.003-05:00

Well, I couldn't think of a better way to organize this, so here we go. If anyone is interested in joining any of the minis fun we're trying to get set up at Hypermind, just reply here. We're trying to start with a Combat Patrol league for Warhammer 40k, but I'd like to expand in the future to things like:

Warhammer Fantasy
Battlefleet Gothic
Battletech
Heavy Gear
Flames of War

and other stuff as well; if there's something you're interested in that's not listed, please feel free to reply and tell me about it!

If you're interested in any of this stuff, just reply here, let me know who you are, some form of contact info (email works best), and which minis gaming you're interested in!

Thanks in advance!

Ken Coble

WWI Naval gaming, and naval-style gaming in general

2010-02-11T09:10:00.005-05:00

Late last year I read Robert Massie's Dreadnought, and I'm currently about halfway through with his Castles of Steel, so of course I'm looking into some WWI (and maybe some pre-dreadnought) naval gaming. I ordered a copy of the "Dreadnought" rules by Ben King, and am grabbing two more rulesets in PDF (Grand Fleets and Naval Thunder) later this week. Once the rules get here I suppose I should start figuring out what scale to go with, although I'm looking at the lovely Navwar 1/3000th scale offerings.

All this has sort of revived my interest in several different naval (or faux-naval) wargame settings; when I ordered the "Dreadnought" rules I also gave in and grabbed a set of GW's Napoleonic-era naval wargame "Trafalgar," as well as digging out my old Battlefleet Gothic stuff and taking a serious look at it, and the BFG rules, for the first time in a long time. I'm also eagerly awaiting Catalyst games upcoming dieselpunk/WWI-ish game of giant flying ships, Leviathans. This style of gaming is something I've got no experience with at all, but it seems like an interesting area to explore.

A detour: Diaspora cluster creation mini-game

2010-02-11T06:20:00.011-05:00

"Mini-game" not in my normal sense of "game with minis," but in that it was designed by its authors to be the separately playable world(s)building portion of the wonderful Diaspora Role-Playing Game (which, to be fair, does actually include a wargame system utilizing a modifed version of the FATE system, which I hope to try out sometime this spring when/if I ever get any of my 15mm sci-fi stuff painted up). Chris N, Tom G and I sat down during boardgame night this week, broke out our Fudge dice, and took a stab at it.

Briefly, Diaspora is a sci-fi RPG, with only the barest of background details. Humanity has spread throughout the galaxy (hence the name) and systems are connected by 'slipstream points' allowing limited instantaneous travel between connected points. Each Diaspora 'campaign' is set in a small cluster of such colonized systems, and the Cluster creation mini-game is how the table generates and conceptualizes those worlds. You roll for three stats (Tech level, Environment, and Resources), discuss how you're interpreting those stats for the world/system, then roll to connect the systems to each other and discuss the implications of those connections. (Those of you interested in playing along at home should buy the book, obviously, although the creators were kind enough to release a SRD you can look at while deciding on your purchase.)

Since we only had 3 people, we went with two worlds each, for a small cluster of 6 planets. To be fair, we actually threw out our first set of results, as the Fudge dice gave us all a very, very flat set of values, and we wanted a bit more 'oomph' in the stats we were playing with - our first 6 planets had no values above +1 or below -2. Our second set gave us what we thought of as more interesting numbers (although we did have to invoke the Slipstream Guarantee, giving two of our planets advanced enough technology to be able to use slipstream travel), so we ran with them. I'll list the finalized Aspects here as well, although there was plenty of change right until the end of the process:

COMBINE: {0,2,-1}
-Legitimately Foreign
-Totally Unified
-Meiji-era Japan - IN SPAAACE

LORD CARNAVON*: {2, -1, -1}
-Combat Archaeology
-Too Perfect
-Scraping the Bottom of Someone Else's Barrel

THE LESTER STRAND: {0, -3, -1}
-Ghost Town
-City-States
-Cattle Barons

TELLOS: {2,1,4}
-"No, no - it's on me"
-Hand-me-down Utopia
-Potlach Society

DESERET: {-1,1,0}
-Don't Tread On Me
-Failed Experiment in Transcendence
-Untapped Potential

NEW EDEN&trade: {-1,3,-2}
-Revolution is Right Around the Corner
-Playground of the Idle Rich
-Going All the Way to Get Your Business

(*Lord Carnavon was called 'Junkyard Prime' most of the way through the creation process, until the table drastically rewrote our interpretation of its stats and it's place in the cluster's history - more on this in the writeup)

The two planets blessed by the Slipstream Guarantee were the fantastically wealthy Tellos system and the sort of raggedy Junkyard Prime. Junkyard Prime was immediately described as being the relict former home of a Transcended faction, and the T2 didn't represent an actual working technological base so much as the organized scavenging of the leftover artifacts of the Transcendants that we came to call "The Fathers." Tellos, the other Slipstream-capable system, was obviously the current center of power in the cluster, with a sustainable technological base that we later decided was also based on the Fathers' old technology, but with more of a capability to produce their own new stuff than the grave-robbers of Junkyard Prime.

Deseret, one might argue, was the seed crystal for the theme which grew to encompass the whole cluster (and even our last minute decision to make Combine an explicit outsider to this theme just seemed to reinforce the theme further). The pseudo-Old West theme its name called out wound up being a major thread of our cluster, growing to influence both the Lester Strand (specifically referenced in its first Aspect, "Ghost Town," and later used as fuel for its internal political situation as "Cattle Barons") and at the very end of the design sequence by helping to push Combine from its original conception as a sort of British Empire/Soviet Ukraine analog (don't ask) into a hard-charging Victorian (and therefore Old West-appropriate) Japan as seen through the lenses of The Difference Engine and Red Sun. The insular hillbillies of Deseret, complete with orbiting atomic platforms as the reskinned shotguns toted by a suspicious homesteader warily greeting some stranger come to his front doorstep, wound up being the hidden repository of the Fathers' biological experimentation. Low birth rate, two- to three-hundred year lifespans, and who knows what other alterations may be hidden in the junk introns of their DNA?

New Eden&trade probably changed the least over the course of the creation process, but it had such a wonderfully perfect and spot-on role from the beginning that all the table could do is refine it a tiny bit. With three garden worlds, the system was pictured as a luxurious resort from the beginning; also present from the beginning was the image of the simmering resentment of an increasingly exploited service-industry underclass. As we started to tie everything in the cluster in with the story of the Fathers, I think we agreed that New Eden&trade's utterly unlikely bounty was the result of early practice in planetary engineering by those Transcended busybodies.

The Lester Strand, mentioned in passing before, was visualized as being a mined-out system, stripped bare by those same busybodies as they went about the process of running up the staircase to godhood. As a crumbling, clapped-out asteroid belt, it tied into both the Western theme as well as our continuing story of how the Fathers altered everything in the cluster. Originally we saw it as being like a Chicago gangland, but actually the day after we did cluster creation Tom G realized that a better note than 30's Chicago was the classic Western trope of the warring Cattle Barons. Stranders barely have enough resources to survive, and as things continue to creak along they're having to trade even some of those scarce resources for the simple necessities of life.

Tellos wound up being the next-to-last place the Fathers were messing around with before their apotheosis, and by now they'd gotten things almost perfect. Packed with resources (probably stripped from the Lester Strand), with a single lovely planet and the technological base to exploit slipstream travel commercially, they're the dilettante overlords of the rest of the cluster. Originally populated by the Refusers (those who didn't want to Transcend), whose descendants make up the moden population, Tellos has an elaborate reputation economy based on humility and generosity. Naturally, this pisses off the hardscrabble inhabitants of virtually everywhere else in the cluster to no end.

Right up until the end of the creation session, we were calling Lord Carnavon "Junkyard Prime." Late in the session, however, the table turned this idea through 180 degrees - rather than being marginally habitable due to ecological collapse, the planet (no longer a junkyard) is actually still in the pristine condition the Fathers left it in. It's just that the degree of perfection the Fathers engineered for their day-to-day lives is toxic to normal humans; not poisonous to the body, but to the psyche. Diggers live in windowless bunkers and drug themselves to sleep. When they go outside to search for usable artifacts they do all they can to insulate themselves from the world with earplugs, nose filters, and visors. From here we moved from talking about it in terms of a junkyard, and more in terms of grave robbery and the Mummy's curse - hence the last-minute rename to Lord Carnavon.

Finally, Combine, which never quite seemed to fit into the rest of the Cluster, got revamped so that it actually never was. Unlike the other five systems, which were basically the Fathers' backyard garden/laboratory, Combine was discovered but never contacted by the Fathers (possibly the slipstream link was one of the Fathers' last grand experiments before they got bored with this universe). We noticed that the other five systems in the cluster were either explicitly balkanized, run by warring coporations, or were mere coalitions of individual groups; so to run counter to this we made Combine a tightly-organized unified world government. We also decided that while the other five worlds in the cluster all descended from the same founding population (and were therefore fairly homogeneous), that Combine's population were part of some totally separate branch of the original human Diaspora that no doubt stabilized into a different 'melting pot' state, and so they look totally different from the rest of the cluster. During the final writeups we even toyed with the idea of making them chiral to the branch of humanity found in the cluster (using right-handed proteins and left-handed sugars), but whether they're that different or not, they certainly view themselves as being different (and better, in their own minds), than the relicts of Fathers' Children.

So again, we had a blast. The cluster creation mini-game is a ton of fun, and a great tool for getting the table to come up with weird stuff you wouldn't get with just one person having to handle world-building. It also does a neat job of encouraging the whole table to be involved with each world, while fuzzing the boundaries a bit so people don't feel like they're the sole and final arbiters of what goes on on 'their world.' Although, in the interest of full disclosure, I noticed we did tend to defer to the 'originator' of each world a lot. We still had fun, and still gave and accepted a lot of input among the table, but I wondered if another step (something like everyone rolls up their planets, then hands those raw rolls to the person on their left, or mandating that at least one aspect per planet come explicitly from another player, or something) might help decrease the ownership issue? Again, this presumes that people find it problematic - I don't think our table found it to be a problem, but I did think on reflection that we were probably a bit more invested in 'our worlds' than the Platonic ideal group would have been.

Thoughts/feedback are of course totally appreciated - while I've got my (tiny) core readership who come for the minis gaming stuff, I'm linking this to the Diaspora mailing list, and if you come here from there feel free to comment, or even just say hello!

EDIT TO ADD: I realize I left out the cluster map - which is fine because I cannot find the app I saw once that would draw them for you, and there's no way I can freehand one. Suffice it to say that we uniformly rolled high for connections, with no world having less than two direct connections (Tellos) and a hub connected to four seperate worlds (Lord Carnavon). I'm trying to recall if we specifically said so or not, but I have a vague memory that we cited this high degree of interconnectedness as another relic of the Fathers' screwing around with T4+ grade science to make their little pocket of lab worlds easier to navigate. If someone could point me to the app I'll happily post the cluster map here!

EDIT #2 - thanks for pointing me to the cluster gen software, Brad! Here's our map:

Loaner Lists and the Build Queue

2010-01-23T20:07:00.011-05:00

I suppose Mark G. will be the person to ask about these, since he'll be the one borrowing them, but here we go just so they see the light of day:

CHAOS SPACE MARINES: (Alpha Legion, 400pts)
Troops: 8x Chaos Space Marines
-flamer
-IoCG
-Asp Champ with PF
-mounted in Rhino w/ Havoc Launcher
225pts

Elites: 5x Chosen
-3 flamers, 2 meltaguns
-mounted in Rhino w/ Havoc Launcher
175pts

The Chosen can infiltrate, or outflank if held in reserve. And the two missile-armed Rhinos might be a big plastic hassle for people to deal with at this level. But it's a small list, only 13 minis, and only 8 of them are scoring.

SPACE WOLVES: (13th Company, 400pts)
Troops: Grey Hunters x10
-flamer, plasmagun
-power fist
-Rhino
210pts

Elites: Wolf Scouts x10
-plasma pistols x2
-meltagun
190pts

Like the Chosen, the Wolf Scouts can infiltrate or outflank, or even come in from the enemy's own board edge using their special rules. They don't have quite the ranged punch of the Elites, and they don't come with their own transport, but then again there are 5 more of them.

These lists are a fair amount alike; both have a mobile Elite element that will probably get devoted to anti-vehicle work before turning on any remaining infantry. The CSMs have more punch, but might be more brittle, since they have only 13 men to the Space Wolves' 20. On the other hand, the CSM have an extra APC, and both of them are much shootier than the Space Wolves' vanilla ride. Both of these lists will have the (mild) added complexity of the Infiltrate/Outflank rules to deal with, but I don't think that will make them too much of a headache for a starter army.

I've also toyed with pulling two of the Wolf Scouts and their Rhino; if I did this, I could give them an 8-strong unit of Fenrisian Wolves for some additional melee punch, as well as an additional maneuver element. But at the moment, I'm not sure that losing the mobility of the Rhino for the only scoring unit is worth the addition. They'd certainly be the 'sideboard' unit for this list.

And storyline-wise there's no problem with them; having spent the past 10,000 years or so in the Eye of Terror, I'm sure any Emperor-fearing Sister of Battle would attack these guys first and ask questions later. Frankly, I'm starting to sell myself on these guys; if Mark doesn't want to play them I might (especially since all my Dark Angel stuff is on hold in case the current rumors about them getting a new codex sometime this summer wind up being true).

Oh, and the third possible list, in case Mark surprises me and wants to go swarmy:

TYRANIDS: (Hive Fleet Name-to-be-determined-later, 400pts)
Troops: Genestealers x10
Troops: Termagants x18
Troops: Hormagaunts x20
Elites: Zoanthrope x1

The Zoanthrope will act as a half-assed synapse creature to keep the gants and gaunts on a slightly shorter leash than their instincts would permit; it'll also be a potential anti-vehicle unit assuming the stealers don't crunch the vehicles up first. They'd be even more straightforward than the two lists above, and having 4 units instead of 2 will probably be at least a little useful (particularly when 4 of them can hold objectives). Also, I priced this list out from memory - I might be 10 points off on the price of the Zoanthrope, which means two more gants have to go bye-bye (or two gaunts, and suffer the indignity of running a 398-pt list instead of using all 400). One of the best things about this list is that it's already built, and Nids are supposed to be tailor-made for the dip method of painting.

As for the Traitor Guard, I think they'd be too wonky for someone who doesn't own the rulebooks to work with for a first-time list; I must admit, however, that they look better and better. My Eldar are, conversely, looking worse - I'm just not sure that the two Vypers in that list can reliably (or even semi-reliably) handle 2+ Penitent Engines. Of course, having said that, I do have the odd notion of replacing one block of Dire Avengers with some Fire Dragons, and using the Vypers to mow down infantry like Khaine intended....

Putting the cart before the horse

2010-01-22T00:21:00.004-05:00

This one is more of a reminder for myself than a real blog entry, for which I apologize to my 1.5 current readers (the .5 assumes that Chris Norwood is still in fact reading these from time to time). But in the process of stumping for the 40k CP league, I've run across some other possible minis gamers at Hypermind:

-Two potential Battlefleet Gothic players - Jim, who Britt told me was a BFG player and Brad, who I spoke to at Hypermind this Tuesday, mentioned he used to be a big BFG player and still had his Imperial and Chaos fleets.

-and one potential Warhammer Fantasy Battles gamer, Beth whose last name I can't remember, but who's a semi-regular at boardgame night.

I'm interested in playing both of these systems - although it would be kind of silly to do anything concrete with WFB at the moment, since I think it's all-but-officially been announced they're getting a new core rulebook this summer. But a few pickup games of BFG - which I've long heard being touted as GW's best ruleset next to Blood Bowl - would be a nice little addition.

Still, I guess the main point of this is that there's at least some small current of minis gaming, even among the people at Hypermind who come for the board and card games. I'm considering making up two poster/broadsheets to ask Denise to hang up now - one for the specific CP league stuff, and another, more generic one, about other stuff such as BFG and WFB. If we could get Thursdays to be 'minis night' and get a quarter of the participation that Tuesday's boardgame night gets, I'd be thrilled stupid. Chris, if you are still reading these posts, I'd sure like to get some pointers from you on your efforts promoting and organizing the Tuesday night wingding.

Combat Patrol League: inching towards Doomsday

2010-01-21T02:16:00.006-05:00

Fortunately, Britt has sharper eyes than I do, and noticed someone painting up some Sisters of Battle at Hypermind yesterday. Brad (the gentleman in question) did seem interested in joining in once we got a firmer idea of what nights we'd play (he also mentioned Battlefleet Gothic, but that's a post for another day). Mark G. also seemed like he'd at least be interested in playing a few scrimmage games with a loaner army, and possibly joining the informal league; and finally original Brad said he'd want to use my Orks while he works on getting his built. So, preliminary interest and armies seem to be:

Britt: Sisters of Battle
original Brad: my Orks
new Brad: Sisters of Battle
Chris Knight (who we met at the 4 corners game): can't recall what army, although Space Marines sounds right for some reason
Mark G: whatever I foist off on him, I guess, although I will get some feedback from him next Tuesday if he's got any preferences and if I've got stuff that would fit
myself: whatever I don't foist off on Mark G, yet can still fight Penitent Engines (bane of the tables that they are)

So here's six players, one overlapping army (which is no problem, in my opinion - presumably Britt's SoBs and Brad's SoBs can try and burn each other to death over which hymnal they're supposed to be using this century), and I've got to figure out two more 400-pointers to finish up in a semi-timely fashion, along with my poor Orks that I'm going to be fostering out. I'm not going to use my Berzerkers, or hand them off to Mark, as I still think they're a bit one-note and cheesy in this format. My Eldar are almost assembled, so I think I'll go with them, and maybe I'll make a non-Berzerker Chaos Marines list for Mark's loaner - although I did get the new Nid codex last week, and I've actually got everything built to make a passable CP list for them already. I still would like to see the Guard make an appearance, but I've only come up with two lists for them, one of which is a static autocannon spam gunline with a borderline-cheesy three Chimeras, and the other of which is a probably almost impossibly gimmicky and unwieldy collection of convicts, veterans, Sentinel walkers and explosive-lance-wielding cavalry (which, to be fair, will probably be much more fun and characterful for Traitor Guardsmen than the disciplined gunnery one). If anything, that one might replace Eldar for my pick, assuming I don't wuss out and run the easy-to-paint Nids instead of either of them.

This looks disturbingly like the nexus of a decent little 6-person ladder league as Britt envisioned last year. Maybe now I should start working on firming up commitments, and trying to nail people down to Thursday nights; or conversely, get everyone to tell what nights work best for them and try to reach some consensus that way.

The next question is how to handle our rosters. I guess there's two main ways to approach this - either everyone turns in a master list at the beginning of the league, and sticks with it for the whole thing, or we allow some degree of change. I don't particularly want to end up with people custom-tailoring their lists to fight whoever's going to be their next opponent (not to mention that since I'm going to be providing half the armies in the league, I've got no real desire to be retooling three lists every week), but I'd hate for people to realize they don't like their force composition and yet be stuck with it for the foreseeable future. Maybe we can declare some sort of halfway point where everyone can totally rewrite their list, so long as it's still the same Codex they started with? Give everyone one or two free rewrite tokens, which they can cash in whenever? In any event, in the interest of fairness I'll finalize my list first and hand it off to someone unaffiliated, then collect initial lists and vet them for point totals, adherence to the CP rules, etc.

Hopefully we can maybe get this cranked up by late February? It's interesting that we're slowly unearthing people at Hypermind who play - one can only hope that real live games will flush more closet 40k players out of the woodwork!

EDIT TO ADD: assuming arguendo that we get 6 players and make a little 3-2-1 triangular ladder as per the 'War Without End' format GW mentions, how should we fill the board for this first informal league? Right now I'm frankly thinking just a pure random draw to populate the board, but I'm open to other suggestions. Also, what order should challenges be resolved/played in? For example, Players 4 and 5 (third rank) both issue challenges to player 3 (2nd rank); deciding whose challenge resolves first might be a significant decision, but at the same time, real-world issues might dictate who will have time to meet up in a given week. Or am I just borrowing trouble by thinking about this stuff this early, and should I just wait to resolve such possible 'problems' if and when they occur?

Talk me out of this

2010-01-20T19:04:00.002-05:00

Someone please talk me out of this.

A brief interruption for new content

2010-01-16T16:06:00.005-05:00

Got a nice heavy box in the mail yesterday from WarWeb.com, containing two really sweet looking Old Glory 15mm armies: mid-Republican Romans and Late Carthaginians. Earlier I think I mentioned that first game of Napoleon's Battles as my true move into full-on grognardism; however, I think the two bags of triarii I got yesterday, complete with piano wire spears, are the real descent into madness. I'm planning on using them with the Field of Glory rules. (Interestingly, while I'm sort of pushing uphill to get the 40k thing started up, Brett from Hypermind and my old buddy Steve have both, totally unprovoked and without lobbying on my part, expressed interest in some wargaming with this ruleset. I've actually lent all my FoG books to Steve, and he probably knows the rules better than I do at the moment.)

Also included was a copy of Sam Mustafa's "Might and Reason," a set of 18th century wargaming rules. I've barely skimmed them so far, but they look interesting - there's a nice initiative system, and each turn is made up of a variable number of sub-turns, or 'pulses.' It seems like it should do a good job of mitigating the 'I-go/U-go' problem, without being too cumbersome. The other thing I've skimmed is the campaign system. There are actually two of them - one a way to model a year's campaigning in a particular region, the other a method to run a large Europe-wide (or possibly worldwide, if I read it right) campaign of up to eight players. The problem with this second system is that it's predicated on using a boardgame called "Soldier Kings" as an integral part of the grand campaign system. I guess it won't be a huge issue, as playing the grand campaign stuff isn't on the radar for the foreseeable future, but I do wish it had been more self-contained. Also, Soldier Kings is listed on the Geek as a playtime of 4 hours, so I don't see being able to work it in boardgames night at Hypermind anytime soon.

Just so I don't sound overly negative, I do really like what I've read of the rest of the rules - they look simple enough to be quick to pick up. The book itself is nicely organized and laid out, and is full of little gems like the random battle naming table (Unterhunddorf will fall!) and some good historical primers (which makes sense, as Mr. Mustafa is a history professor). There's a nice list of rated officers for the various nationalities, and while there are only two scenarios in the book, there are several more offered for free on the game's website, as well as two free expansions for adapting the rules to other locales and conflicts (such as the War of Spanish Succession, or the wars of the Ottoman and Persian Empires). I'm looking forward to grabbing some 6mm dudes and slugging it out - maybe the War of Jenkin's Ear?

Finally, while I've been too shiftless to get my German list finalized for Monday's game (tonight, I swear!) in the interests of fairness/full disclosure/all that happy nonsense, here's my new Ork list that will hopefully be less horrible against crazy people bolted into spinny cutty burny things like Penitent Engines:

ORKS REDUX, 399pts
Troops: Slugga Boyz x 12
-upgrade on boy to Nob
--w/ Bosspole, Big Choppa
-mounted in Trukk w/ Wrecking Ball
137 pts

Troops: Slugga Boyz x 12
-upgrade one boy to Nob
--w/ Bosspole, Power Klaw
-mounted in Trukk w/ Wrecking Ball
157pts

Fast Attack: Deffkoptas x 2
-both w/ TL-rokkit launchas
-one with Bigbomm
105pts

We'll see if the ability to get around the table a bit faster does any good, or if it just gets me cut into steaming green bits that much quicker... If Brad doesn't run Orks in the league, I think this will be the Ork list I use. If he does, I guess I need to get into R&D on something else!

Playing catch-up #4: Combat Patrol for the first time

2010-01-14T22:34:00.009-05:00

I am in a mad dash to get current before Monday, when the plan is to get in some Flames of War and some Warhammer 40k Combat Patrol; so I'm going to try and churn these things out pretty fast. Fortunately, this one will be short, since it was a total learning/practice game. Britt brought a Vindicare Assassin (basically a super-bad-ass sniper) and two ten-strong units of Sisters of Battle. I brought two eight-man squads of Khorne Berzerkers. We lined up on opposing table quarters with no real cover and started rolling.

Already I'm taking some pretty big casualties, despite being in power armor. Fortunately (and cheesily) Berzerkers effectively don't take morale checks, so I didn't really care; I kept popping bolt pistol shots into the groups, not really caring if they landed or not since I was just desperate to launch an assault. Unfortunately I inadvertently cheated, having my right-hand unit of Berzerkers both run and assault during their second turn. While I think I was probably in charge range anyway, this could have made a big difference - either another turn of rapid bolter fire, or a spoiling charge, might have changed the outcome pretty drastically.

The results of my perfidious behavior - each of my squads launched an assault on one of Britt's squads, and the Berzerkers' simply goofy amount of attacks (three, four on the initial assault) took over. Britt's Vindicare keep shooting into the melee, but there wasn't much he could do at one kill a turn. The left-hand Berzerkers killed their way through their victims, and prepared to turn on the Vindicare while their slowpoke comrades kept chainswording their way through the remainder of the Emperor's most devoted servants.

Eventually the surviving Berzerkers took down the Imperial Assassin with a flurry of bolt pistol fire, which seemed anticlimactic but was probably smarter than giving him another round to pinata-stick their noggins.

If, at this point, you find yourself feeling bad for the Sisters of Battle, bear in mind that this act of martyrdom would apparently piss the rest of the chapter off to no end, as they prepare to beat the whiz out of all comers for the rest of these batreps (and possibly the foreseeable future).

Playing catch-up #3: Illinois Nazis

2010-01-14T21:33:00.009-05:00

"I hate Illinois Nazis."

Not much of a batrep here. Poor Britt spent at least ten minutes setting up all his Soviet Strelkovy Battalion, digging in and prepared to fight tooth and nail for the Rodina. I cleverly (hah!) diluted my already numerically weak forces even more by using the German "Kampfgruppe" rule in an attempt to gain superiority in maneuver elements. The plan for this game was to also introduce artillery, so that I could start to learn the FoW rules for it; my force had some 10.5cm cannon, and Britt was fielding the dreaded Katys. You can even see the artillery template on the table, here at the end of turn one when things were already falling apart for me:

I basically wasted my 105s on Britt's light tankovy company - miraculously getting a kill on one of them, but not slowing them down at all. Instead they forged ahead and began blowing the jeepers out of the two units I was trying to roll up my right flank, killing two out of the three Panzer IVs I had left after peeling one off for a singularly ineffective Kampfgruppe on the left flank.

The next turn it got worse, as the last Panzer IV got hosed by the remaining six T-70s (I think that's what they were) of Britt's Tankovy company. My Gepanzerte Panzergrenadier platoon took a hit too, losing one of their three halftracks; and if memory serves they failed a morale check and ran the hell away in fine Teutonic fashion, instead of occupying the woods commanding the fordable portion of the river as initially planned.

Meanwhile, on my left flank, my kampfgruppe and another platoon of panzergrenadiers (mounted in Kfz 70 trucks) had bogged down under withering MG fire from Britt's Soviet infantry, who were dug in like ticks all along his deployment zone, as well as sporadic bombardment from Stalin's Organs (I guess that sounds less dirty in German? maybe not), the annoying Katyushas.

By this point I'd killed one tank, lost virtually all my armor (the tank I had left was pinned since the infantry carriers in the rest of his Kampfgruppe were pinnable), and had basically nothing that could realistically oppose Britt's virtually unscathed horde of valiant pesants, so I threw in the towel and we played a game of Space Hulk (which will eventually get a writeup here, despite arguably being a boargame rather than a wargame).

Wrap-up? I made some pretty big mistakes, and did some abysmally bad shooting with my tanks prior to getting them all shot out from under me. I also totally misused my arty; while it wouldn't have made too much difference, I'd have been better served by using it to shell Britt's densely-packed infantry, and saved shots on his tanks for later (presumably shooting over the open sights as they came barreling down my right flank, but no matter). But basically, Britt rolled through me like the Bluesmobile through the Illinois Nazis.

Playing catch-up #2: Napoleon's Battles

2009-12-27T16:45:00.007-05:00

or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Ten-Sider

I guess this game marks the beginning of my descent into true old-school grognardism - my first game of Napoleonics. Britt invited me to come watch as he and his friend Ron, who runs The Game Connection in Knightdale, played some 15mm Napoleon's Battles. When I got there, Ron was kind enough to step aside and referee a matchup between Britt and me instead (a lesson I should have learned before the Battle of the Four Corners). Ron had set up two fairly equivalent corps-sized forces before we arrived, using his own very nicely painted minis; I got the French, and Britt got the Austrians. We set up on opposite sides of a small village crossroads, and went to work.

This is another of those reports that I totally should have written earlier, because my memories of what went down are shady at best. For example:

I have no recollection of what happened to this unit that had it suffer two lost bases (and that red 3 means it's one hit away from losing another one); similarly I can't recall what I did to the unit in Britt's backfield. If I'm remembering the marking conventions correctly, both those units routed, but lord only knows why. On the left flank, his Grenzers are causing me a bit of grief, which I'm going to try and remedy with a cavalry charge with that unit of light cav I was holding in the backfield. Meanwhile our two infantry units (I think they were both regular Line troops) are facing off against each other on the outside edge of the house. Both of us have our artillery in our centers, taking potshots at each other, and on the right flank we've both lined up two infantry units and our heavy cav (if memory serves, the blue 'disordered' die on my cavalry is due to having made a fruitless charge against Britt's cavalry and bouncing back).

Here's the aftermath of the next turn: my cav charged his Grenzers and scattered them (you can barely see the top of their unit in the wheatfield behind the building). You can't really see past those horses, but Britt and I still have an infantry unit each facing off there on the outer edge of the house/village. I believe our cannons traded shots in the center; Britt put some casualties on me, but one of my two charging infantry units scattered one of his batteries. And on the right, I launched an infantry charge (mentioned above, I believe) across that turnip field and I'm apparently holding my cavalry back for some reason that I can't recall. This is where the subtitle of this entry comes from: I can roll a lot better on 10-sided dice than Britt can, apparently. His Insurrection troops did a lot better than they should have based on statlines, becoming the underdog heroes of the game, but they eventually took enough casualties to rout.

At this point, I've managed to win my infantry duel on the outer edge of the building, causing a third rout, and something or other has happened to cause a fourth rout that I simply cannot remember. I'm thinking it was Britt's cavalry who'd snuck up around my left flank (long way around that forest) and struck my cavalry and came off the worst in the matchup, but I won't swear to it. There are other neat things I remember, but I can't place them into the position they occurred in the game (like successfully getting one of my infantry units to form an emergency square and bouncing one of Britt's cav charges, or having my own heavy horse charge off the back edge of the table chasing down something). But despite my slightly fuzzy memories, I do recall having a total blast - enough fun that I picked up my own copy of the Nappy's Battles rules that night! But I also remember that I basically won due to having a series of really great rolls, as opposed to Britt who had a series of really awful rolls. Still, Napoleon himself (apocryphally) said to Ney, "Go back and find me a lucky general." That game, I was the lucky general.

BONUS CONTENT: Napoleon's cookies

Playing catch-up #1: Heavy Gear

2009-12-27T16:21:00.006-05:00

It's been over a month since this game, so this will be a sketchy-as-heck recap. Britt and I fielded opposing GP squads at something like 220TV; my filthy MILICIA proles versus his UMF wageslaves. Britt set up in and around some stoneheads in the steep terrain; my MILICIAmen came zooming in down a longer, gentler slope. Somewhere I should have a scrap of paper that told what our objectives were, but I picked 'Recon' for one of mine, and we settled on the biggest stonehead as the target of that objective.

These are my fragmentary memories and impressions of what went down:

-the shooting felt very very inconclusive until we were practically on top of each other. It made me consider using the 'More Carnage' options in future games, until Britt pointed out the next day that I'd managed to totally miss the modifiers for being in open terrain, which would have made lots more of our shots hit.

-being in motion beats the hell out of being stationary; those defense mods at stationary are horrible, and only Britt's good use of the stoneheads as solid cover made his shoot-n-scoot tactics overcome those horrible mods

-Indirect Fire still doesn't make a lot of sense to me; I think we finally figured it out correctly, when Britt rolled a gear-scaled grenade over a small rise and killed my combat group leader (thereby fulfilling his Assassinate! objective)

-I need to do some 'housekeeping' stuff before our next game; namely, I need to finish making my homemade movement markers, and I should probably print out extra copies of the combat summary/quickref rules (frankly I should do this for every single game I plan to play)

-we need more terrain for these games, as cover and concealment are big parts of the ruleset

Eventually, we finished up, with a marginal win for me due to getting the VPs for my Recon objective. It was a good game, but still obviously a learning game, marred by me having to delve into the rulebook for everything more complex than a simple direct fire roll (and even then I had to look stuff up just to be safe). I like the HG rules; there's a pleasant level of complexity to them that makes even a little 5 gear vs 5 gear rumble like this one fun. There's cool stuff we totally neglected to do, like using our CGLs to set up crossfires; conversely, there's stuff that I still think is a bit clunky in the rulebook, indirect fire and some of the sensor/lock-on stuff being the chief culprits in my opinion.

Things that will probably replace my Burna Boyz for Combat Patrol

2009-12-27T00:07:00.009-05:00

SWAP BURNA BOYZ FOR
Fast Attack: Deffkoptas x3
-all with twin-linked Rokkit Launchas
-equip one with a Bigbomm
PROS: I have the models already from the Black Reach set; Twin-linking the Rokkit Launchas is a good way to counter crappy Ork BS with the low-ROF but high-ST rokkits; adds some real mobility to my otherwise footslogging list for late-game objective contesting; dropping the Large blast template in Combat Patrol sounds like good clean fun
CONS: only 3 of them; unit may be even more fragile than I realize (and I already think it might be heavy on the 'glass' and light on the 'cannon')

OR SWAP BURNA BOYZ FOR
Fast Attack: Warbikers x6
PROS: tons of dakka (18 twin-linked shots sounds nice, even at BS2), love the models, more mobility (see above)
CONS: will have to buy 3 more of the minis; will still need to be rolling 6's on the dakkaguns to even glance AV11

OR SWAP BURNA BOYZ FOR
Elites: Lootas x10
PROS: potentially sick amounts of dakka, 48" range will be brutal in the 4 foot by 4 foot Combat Patrol universe, at ST7 popping light armor will be quite possible
CONS: will be a stationary firebase so LOS will be a huge issue, seems kinda... dull, and dare we say it, responsible, for an Ork list, even with the random ROF

OR SWAP BURNA BOYZ FOR
Elites: Tankbustas x8
-up to two swap Rokkit Launchas for Tankhammers
-w/ Bomb-squigs x3
PROS: stupid fun; killing a Penitent Engine with a 5-point bomb squig would totally make my day; can build them from parts I have on hand
CONS: crappy BS plus only 6 guys firing single shots - on average that'll be 2 hits/turn, but 6 is a really small number of dice so they'll be flukey; will have to model up something for the Tankhammers and my scratchbuilding sucks

Playing catch-up #0; and the Battle of Four Corners

2009-12-26T22:44:00.008-05:00

Dang, I've got a decent-sized backlog of played games to work through, which I'll probably condense a great deal and post about in the next few days. But before I forget them, here's some thoughts I've had about today's four-way demo/learning game of 40k at Hypermind:

1) Four-way games of 40k should probably be 2v2 teams. Way too much downtime for the other players in a four-way, plus while it didn't seem to be a huge issue today I could see the last guy up getting totally shafted on a variety of things, both in set-up and in actual gameplay.

2a) Chaos Daemons DO NOT ENTER PLAY NORMALLY. I am so mad I forgot this, as it radically changed the way Brad had to play them. I'm still not sure how well they'll work in the Combat Patrol setting with their almost total lack of anti-vehicle capability, but not fielding them correctly means I'll never figure out how they'd have actually fared.

2b) they also don't make a great loaner/learner army, as the ones I have built don't have any shooting capability at all, and their Fearlessness means they don't help the person playing them to learn anything about the Morale phase (and I'm not really planning to buy any Horrors/Flamers just for this mini-list). The Berzerkers are better in that while they're still Fearless, you at least have to learn the shooting rules, and make the occasional decision between shooting with them and sneaking in an extra bit of running. Based on these two factors, I really should bash together those Traitor Guardsmen and probably some non-fearless CSMs for my other opposing forces.

3) Kill Britt's Penitent Engines at all costs. They're just plain nasty at this level, and the minimum amounts of anti-tank I'd been planning on in my earlier listbuilding exercises just doesn't seem like they will cut it. I haven't looked through all my other codexes (I wish GW would say 'codices' since that's the actual plural) yet, but I am thinking the PE's are the only 'fighty' walkers available in the CP setting. I know that the Eldar have their ugly War Walkers, and the Guard can bring Sentinels, but neither of those are the kind of CC ugliness that the PEs are; and in the small boardspace of a CP matchup, the PE's low armor and lack of long-range shooting are much less of a drawback since they're getting stuck into CC by turn two at the latest.

4a) I need to print off and bring multiple copies of the following-
-the quick-read rules from the back pages of the main rulebook
-summary sheets for all forces
-FAQs/erratas for all forces
-some sort of contact sheet/'league info' handout package to facilitate getting new people interested...

4b) ...because we had one person in the store today approach us during setup, and he seemed really interested in getting involved, so I grabbed his e-mail address; having a nice concise one-sheet handout (with some league info, my e-mail address, etc on one side, and a copy of the Adepticon CP rules/guidelines on the other) would have been perfect.
EDIT TO ADD: a stack of these for Denise to give out if people ask about the league might not be bad either; plus maybe an info sheet for the store bulletin board.

5) I really desperately need to shield my Burna Boyz with something. I keep creeping them forward in the deployment phase, and they always get slammed into CC without ever getting to drop a single flamer template. If this keeps up they might be 150pts I'd be better off spending on Lootas or even Deffkoptas; as it stands their Meks with Kustom Mega-Blastas are my only reliable anti-Penitent engine weapons, but I'm just not getting to use them in anything like a manner that makes them worth their pricetag. It's a shame, because they're probably my favorite Ork models, but what can you do?

6) my loaner World Eaters need some list work (assuming I keep them in the loaner pool, see #2b above); while I shoved in a few plasma pistols at the last minute today for a faint attempt at giving them anti-vehicle capability, it didn't seem like enough. I'm pretty sure their krak grenades will be fine against APCs, but again Britt's fighty-assed Penitent Engines screw that math all up.

7) We really need to figure out how to handle bunkers in this CP setting; I like the tactical decisions that having them available will bring to the game, but I also don't necessarily think that having something that's virtually untouchable on the board is a great idea either. I think giving them an AV of 12 at maximum is a good start; I just worry about some future game where the vicissitudes of terrain placement give one person a scoring (or even just a contesting) unit that is totally unshiftable, standing on an objective or scoring a table quarter. I'm not saying we shouldn't allow them at all (or at least I'm not saying that yet); but I do think I need to think about them more.

8) I need to build some cheap-ass terrain I can leave up there; preferably running the gamut of cover values, rather than just the pretty solid 4+ ruins that are already there (although they did look nice, and added a lot to the tactical space for my Orks at least). More terrain, and more types of it, will hopefully reward us with both prettier pictures for the blog, and more interesting games. Also I should really try and source a 4x4" chunk of cheap-assed green or brown or something fabric; something I won't care about leaving up at the store that will lay flatter on those boards.

9) I need to figure out if people are ever going to be playing when I'm not there, and if so I need to decide if I should put my cheap-assed old template set and a scatter dice in a box or a bag or something for Denise to hide behind the counter.

That's all I can think of for now. Pictures to be added later when I locate my frigging USB cable.

40k Combat Patrol: who to bring to the dance

2009-12-03T18:59:00.005-05:00

So as mentioned in the previous post, I'm still thinking pretty hard on a third* opposing force to try and get built/painted before New Year's for the embryonic store CP league I'm trying to get off the ground. Some outside perspective would be quite helpful, so I'm going to expatiate on the choices I mentioned earlier and pray for feedback. Now at the moment I think I have exactly two readers, but a) I'd be happy to get both their opinions, and b) presumably at some point someone else might read this and I'd be happy for them to chime in too. So, here are the choices, complete with my proposed CP lists for said choices, and some pros and cons for each.

CHAOS SPACE MARINES: Alpha Legion, 400pts
2 squads (1 scoring), 2 vehicles, 13 troops

TROOPS: 8x Chaos Space Marines
-flamer
-Icon of Chaos Glory
-Asp Champ with PF
-mounted in Rhino w/ Havoc Launcher
225pts

ELITES: 5x Chosen
-3 flamers, 2 meltaguns
-mounted in Rhino w/ Havoc Launcher
175pts

PROS: well, other than liking the Alpha Legion and thinking that two APCs (one with the possibility to use the Flanking rules) at this level might actually be a pretty hard thing to beat, nothing specific
CONS: having to build/paint two Rhinos, which is something I haven't tackled yet; the Chosen will require some light conversion work as I'm planning on making them on the so-called Doghouse-pattern Marines; there's already two, if not possibly three power-armour/bolter toting lists spoken for in the league and this would add one more to the MEQ (Marine equivalent) pile; only one troop choice for objective-grabbing; lowest troop count of any list I'm considering (even the one I'll mention in the footnote that I cleverly teased with an * above)

ELDAR: Craftworld Iybraesil, 398pts
3 squads (2 scoring), 2 vehicles, 15 troops

TROOPS: 8xDire Avengers
+Exarch w/ twin shuricats, Bladestorm
140pts

TROOPS: 7xDire Avengers
+Exarch w/ power weapon+shimmershield, Bladestorm
138pts

FAST ATTACK: 2xVypers
-both with Scatter Lasers
120pts

PROS: Eldar are neat; this avoids the issue of MEQ spam at the league level; the only conversion work will be trying to magnetize the Vyper weapons for future versatility
CONS: I keep hearing that Eldar are a finesse army, which means that handing them off to someone to use as a loaner/learner group might be counterproductive; I'm unreasonably skittish about painting and assembling the Vypers what with their clear canopy bits and all

TRAITOR GUARD: The Recusant 113th
4 squads (2 scoring), 1 vehicle, 3 walkers, 26 troops

TROOPS: Veteran Squad x10
-2x flamers
-mounted in Chimera, total 135pts

TROOPS: Penal Legion squad x10, 80pts total

FAST ATTACK: Scout Sentinel Squadron
-3 Sentinels, all with Autocannon, 120pts

FAST ATTACK: Rough Riders x6
-2 swap hunting lances for Grenade Launchers, 65 pts total

PROS: lotsa dudes, again we avoid turning the whole league into a MEQ fight
CONS: lotsa dudes, plus 3 walkers and an APC to build (although the Chimera doesn't seem like it will be too bad); the Rough Riders will be one of the more conversion-heavy things I'd be looking at building for these possible lists

So, anyone got any real pressing reasons I should go with one of these over the other?

Oh yeah, the footnote:
* I also realized that in additon to the tiny-model-count (21 models woo hoo) Slaaneshi Daemons list I've already built, I've also already (probably over 2 years ago) built ~2/3rds of a 16-man World Eaters list that will probably not win but would be stupid easy and fun to use, and probably also stupid easy and fun to paint. So I guess I am, in my own way, already contributing to the dreaded problem of MEQ spam. The sickness is within us all....

Trying to put together a 40k Combat Patrol league at the FLGS

2009-12-02T19:12:00.000-05:00

I've been blathering about it for something like a year now, and I'm making a big effort to get said league off the ground in 2010. The guiding document will be the 2009 Adepticon rules/scenarios packet, since they were kind enough to extend permission for me to use said resource when I contacted them. I've been waffling and waffling on which army I'll field for this event, rotating through basically every Warhammer 40,000 army I've got minis for (which is an embarrassingly large number of them for someone who's never played more than half of a demo game multiple years ago). Having said that, I think I'll be putting together three lists: one for me to field as my 'official' league entrant, and two as opfors and/or if anyone else wants to get in on the tourney and doesn't have an army of their own as of yet (based off Britt's offer of his teams to people in the Blood Bowl leagues he's run, hint hint Chris this is basically aimed at suckering you into at least playing, if not collecting).

For my actual list I think I'll be running some Orks (a decision almost entirely precipitated by finding out they finally made plastic gretchin that don't cost a fortune), putting together a nice little low-model-count Chaos Daemons list for opfor #1, and still deciding between Eldar, Traitor Guard, and Chaos Space Marines for opfor #2. At the moment I've got tentative responses from a handful of players - Alton has mentioned bringing some Black Templars, Britt actually has (and is therefore I guess not really tentative) Sisters of Battle, there are two possible Tyranid entrants, and Brad is (I think) still looking at some sort of possible list, maybe some sort of combo Guard/SM list from one of the older Inquisition codexes?

EDIT: while it's implied by the nature of a blog, I am of course soliciting suggestions as to which of the three potential second opfors I should put together. Show your work!

RTFM

2009-12-02T18:59:00.001-05:00

My perennial opponent Britt and I are both also getting into Heavy Gear. I stockpiled tons of minis over the course of the past few years, and I'm finally getting around to doing something with even some moiety of the pounds and pounds of lead they represent. However, our first game - game might be an exaggeration, skirmish might be more fitting - was a frustrating, stop-and-go affair at best, which is totally on my head. While I'd read the rules over the course of my protracted buying spree, a tenuous, mostly theoretical grasp of a ruleset is arguably worse than useless when the rubber meets the road for the first time. We split up a MILICIA GP squad I'd assembled and primed, plunked down some incredibly basic terrain and went at it. I don't think I got any pictures that night, which is just as well because I really made a hash of the rules, and wasn't even able to look stuff up terribly quickly. After grinding to a halt, we took another stab at it, and the followup match seemed to flow noticeably better and was much more fun, although still a halting mess. Fortunately, I think our enthusiasm for the background, the miniatures, and the rules themselves (despite my hamfisted attempts to interpret them) won out, and a week or so later we played a much, much smoother (although still quite interrupted by 'damn let me look that back up' moments) match between my MILICIA trash and Britt's UMF blockheads.

Game the second: or how I leared to stop worrying and love the assault phase

2009-12-02T18:35:00.003-05:00

My second game of Flames of War with Britt (and again, with his minis) was much more complex, but still fun. He's wisely been introducing one new game concept per matchup, and our second game introduced infantry. It introduced a lot of infantry, to be perfectly honest:

I will try to get Britt to remind me what the exact flavor of badass was for all those Russians I was looking down the barrel of in this picture - was it a Shock Battalion? In any event, there were more than enough of them, and my Germans were spread throughout the little town just enough to ensure that each assault flowed into a new counterassault und so weiter until basically all my foot were dead.

I managed to pull out a win anyway, through a combination of lucky dice rolling and historically questionable usage of StuGs as machine-gun platforms. At the time we weren't quite certain we handled the assault rules correctly, but as far as my follow-up readings go I think we got it pretty much right. I did find it interesting that while shooting in FoW is strict IgoUgo, there are reactive elements in the assault phase that the main game mechanics seem to be lacking. I'm not sure about the design philosophy behind this, unless it's maybe that pure IgoUgo with infantry would marginalize them into unplayability?

The Blog as Artifact

2009-12-02T18:32:00.000-05:00

I'm making this post as a sort of clearinghouse for the actual layout/interfacte/whathaveyou aspects of this blog. Comments, complaints, or suggestions about readability, color schemes, layout, linking, etc would be most beneficial if placed here.

Intro (as painless as possible)

2009-12-02T18:06:00.001-05:00

These 'opening salvo' kinds of things are always the shakiest, due to the hassles of figuring out both the content and the medium. So in the interest of clarity, this is going to be a blog about my miniatures gaming stuff. I've been interested in it for quite a while, and have accumulated tons of models without ever getting much further than a handful of painted squads with virtually no table-time. But starting this fall, I decided to finally get serious about this as a hobby, and so far I have had a great deal of fun. So in order to make this stuff a little simpler to talk about with people I know as well as other people in the hobby, I'm putting this blog together. As I begin, I'll be working from memory on my first handful of games this fall.

My friend Britt got me to finally actually play a game of Flames of War earlier in the fall (utilizing his minis, of course; we'll be a bit further along before we get to pictures of minis I own, and even then they're going to be primed at most for a long time), which I will rather arbitrarily be defining as the starting point for this blog's purposes. It was a straight-up armor vs armor matchup, with my Germans coming off much the worse for wear:

That's a lot of burning German armor. Still, I had a good time; it was a simple introduction to the ruleset, and while I know FoW's "I go/You go" set up is a sticking point for a lot of people, it seems like (based on this game and the two followups we've played thus far) a simple, straightforward ruleset, and possibly one of the best ones for me to use as my point of introduction to wargaming. In any event, this opener is out of the way now, which is probably a good thing in and of itself, regardless of quality.

EDIT: it would be both correct and politic to mention that the inspiration for this blog, as well as its name, comes from my friend Chris Norwood's blog GamerChris.com, which is a really good boardgaming blog that you're probably already reading if you're looking at this blog.