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.
Friday, May 13, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
First games of Warhammer Fantasy
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!
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Family Photo: 800+TV of Heavy Gear MILICIA
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.
Monday, April 25, 2011
BattleTech Quick Strike Rules, o how I love thee
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.
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.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Games Workshop: phasing out metal minis?
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...
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...
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Summer of Slaanesh: WFB Warriors of Chaos build list
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
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
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
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
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