2011-10-31

Adobe buildings - Part II

I have created another pair of adobe houses, this time I did them two at the same time and tried it to see if I would make them faster, and this time I don't think I used more than 1½ hours for both of them, the only stage that took noticeably longer with two buildings was the cutting part. It really takes a long time to cut out all those little windows.

This time though I did some small changes on each house, one got a chequered pattern on the top and the other some beams over each window. Just to at least try to make them different.

I also got some small walls going, got some small pieces over from the walls so I tried to do something with them and they turned out quite nice.

But see for yourself, I once again added some Imperial Guard miniatures in there to give some scale to the buildings.








Next step is now to mount these on bases to fit into my Malifaux/Infinity table.

2011-10-28

Table building - part III

I've gotten some more time to work on my table and things are starting to look like something you could game on.
So far I've painted the first half in my base colour and a first highlight dry brush not only that, but I've made the second half also and painted that just as far.

On the second half I decided that I wanted some lager areas to place terrain on, something that could be a larger forest, house or perhaps just some walls. So I put some of my 6" squares right next to each other. I hope that this will work out in the end, and for the times when you don't want something large and imposing on the table, there is nothing stopping you from placing a empty square in one or more of the slots.

Here is the first stages of the second half

Here it is with some structured paint applied

And with some of the base dark brown paint


Here I've made the first drybrush 



And when they are both put together.


The paints I've been using so far is inspired from another blog I follow Quindia Studios he did a paint approximation to some old Games Workshop paints that worked great together to create your basic dry earth kind of look. I can strongly suggest looking at some of his articles on building a table and also some of his amazing miniatures.

2011-10-27

Another building

I decided to try to build a Adobe type building yesterday, and to do it as simple but practical as possible, just to try it and see how much time it would take.

So I did, and I choose to use some left over foam board I had laying around that was more or less destined to go in the bin, but I managed to get a few walls and a roof together, I did however have to glue some parts together to make a section big enough to make a wall and the roof...

After just under 1½ hours of effective work (this do not include drying times) it was done. And I'm certain I can do it in just 1 hour apiece if I do a few of them at the same time, and use foam board thats large enough to start with.

And here are some photos of them with a few Imperial Guard soldiers to give you a scale.





It is large enough to fit at least 9 miniatures on 25mm round bases on the roof, you could probably get another one or two in there if you really tried.

2011-10-24

Warhammer Historical Waterloo - a quick glance

I've just received my package from Warhammer historicals crazy 50% off sale and the first book that really caught my eye was the Waterloo book.
So far I've only had a quick read though the basic rules, but I thought that I should write a few lines about what I've seen so far.

The book is very well presented, it's filled with drawings form the time and more newly produced (you can for example find some of the artwork  from the Perry boxes in there) mixed in with beautiful photos of well painted miniatures and terrain.

The game is written with 28mm miniatures in mind, but have some suggestions of how you could use other scales, but they do boil down to "do whatever suits you" and they are written to work on a 4'x6' table, so in comparison with games like Black Powder, they are kind of compact.

The rules then, well they do in part remind me of warhammer fantasy battles, you have fixed movement speeds (4" for infantry, 6" for heavy cavalry and 8" for light) you have complete control of your army, and you can't premeasure anything. Cannons and the like have guess range and round shot bounces. So far so good, but they have removed single figure casualty and instead based the whole idea around companies.

A company is one base of about 6 infantry miniatures and a unit or regiment, is normally made up of 3 to 8 companies. A company can then take a number of hits before it's removed from play, a infantry company can take 6 damage points and a cavalry company (or squadron) can take 2. But not only that, but each unit has a resilience value, and this is the number hits that it take to make a single damage on the company. This vary between the different types but normally a infantry unit only has a resilience of 1 and cavalry have 2. If a single volley only does 2 hits on a cavalry unit, then they will be discarded as it wasn't equal to it's resilience, quite nifty and reminds me a lot of how warmaster works.

When it comes to stats on units you only have a few to worry about, there is a Fighting skill, this is used to determine who fights first in a melee situation
Attacks, the number of dice rolled when fighting in melee
Resilience that I described above
Command that is used for morale checks, basically 2 dice plus you command, minus any modifiers > 10 and your OK
Tactical points used to determine how much you can do with the unit in a turn, all actions have a cost in tactical points, such as move, reform and fire.
Strategic points used by commanders to do special orders.

The turn then, this is  divided into 6 phases

  1. Initiative
Both players roll off to see who gets the initiative and therefore selects who starts in every turn
  1. Artillery fire
Here the players takes in turn to fire all of their artillery.
  1. Movement
Any units that wants to be moved is moved here, the player with the initiative selects who moves first and that player moves his entire army before it's the next players turn.
  1. Shooting
And basically the same here, initiative determine who fires with his units first, then the other player gets go shoot
  1. Melee
All units that is in base contact fight it out, with the order determined by the player with the initiative.
  1. End phase
Here you handle all effects that's remaining in play, see if any player has won, and everything else that's not included in the other faces

Quite simple, but nice that each player gets do to one phase at the time and not having one player sit around forever while the other gets to move, shoot, charge and everything else. I also like the idea that artillery fires first as guess ranges are used and you get to do all of them before any measurements is done at all.

When it comes to hurting units all weapons have a "to wound" roll, this is more or less the standard GW to hit and to wound rolls in one, after this the receiving may get a "save" roll, but normally there isn't one as most units don't have any type of effective armour, but a unit can be granted one if they take cover of some sort.

Army building follows a point based road, where a small army will amount to about 1000 points and will give a game of a few hours and a 2000 point battle will take you the better part of a day.
In a 1000 point you should get about 4-6 infantry units, 2-3 cavalry units, 1-2 artillery units and 2-3 independent officers, so from a Napoleonic gaming perspective it's not to bad, and you can get a decent game without painting hundreds and hundreds of miniatures.  

And that's about it, naturally the strategic points will get some flavor in you games, and I think they can be a game changer if used at the right time.

Other than this there is a bunch of scenarios in the book, I haven't read though them all, but they do look nice, they have also a campaign system in there, and a campaign over the waterloo battle with battles such as Hougoumont. But thats not all, there also is a brief history of the Napoleonic wars. All in all they have manage to get a fair amount of information into the pages.

And a verdict then? Well on a rating of 1 though 10 I'll give it a 7, it's a beautiful book, but it weights a ton and I got tired in my arms when I sat down to read it, I would not recommend dropping this thing on your foot. The rules feels a bit old, there are some new things in here, and while its not a one side does all kind of deal, I still miss some sort of Fog of War in there, you can always count on you unit to move and you can predict exactly when they will get from A to B. It is a bucked of dice kind of thing, you will roll lots od dice to determine the outcome of you actions, and while some will like this, other will not. It is a bit set in base sizes, while the game tries to give you free hands, they way some things are handled it's not really practical to have your nice 80mm round base with commanders on.

But overall I like it, I will have to get some miniatures together and try it.

2011-10-18

Table building - Part II

So, I've got a few spare minutes here and there to work on the table, and it's not that bad, since there are quite a lot of drying times between steps I still make some progress.

What has been done then?
Well, I've finished carving up the road thats going though the board, and I've also filled it back up again with filler, well, not all they way but part of it.
The rest of the board has also gotten a second layer of filler in many places, after the first round around the ice cream sticks it didn't cover up as much as I wanted, so another layer was called for.
And the last thing done so far is that I've covered more or less the entire board with some textured paint. The textured bit isn't that advanced, I just took a bit of wall paint we had over after repainting more or less the entire house and just dumped a bit of sand in it.

And here is what it looks like right now


If you are keen eyed you might notice that I show the same board in all the pictures, and thats because I only have one board to work on right now. The place I have for this is too small to allow me to work on more than one piece at a time, so I do one half of the board now and then I'll have to do the other.
 I hope this will not make them all to different, but I've already learned quite a few things in the process and I hope to be able to use some of them in the second part, as long as that doesn't make them all to different.

2011-10-16

Table building - the start

I finally got some time to start my project of building a gaming table for Malifaux and/or Infinity. I've had plans for this for a long time now, and even got the boards for it several weeks ago. But terrain building in 1:1 scale has slowed the whole process down until it stopped completely.

But now it's underway!

I started out by cutting two boards down to 3' by about 2', they are about 2" thick and will form the base of the 3'x4' that it's going to end up in, my first thought was to do a single piece 3'x3' board, but after cutting the first board down I came to the conclusion that this would be far more work than I had thought, and the edges would not be as straight as I wanted them. I really need to find a better way of cutting them than using a slightly wobbly knife thats a bit to short...

I'm going to this a bit modular in a way, the boards will have 6" by 6" squares all over them and in those I'll place  MDF bases with whatever I need for the day, some will have houses, other trees and still others will be flat if thats whats needed. I hope this will turn out to be a good idea, and that part of way my first try is not a gigantic 12'x8' board for napoleonics or something similar.

I started by drawing out how I wanted the squares and where I wanted a little road though the whole thing (everyone needs a road right?)


Then I added some ice cream sticks as the base for the squares and covered the edges of them with filler to blend them into the table, I also cut out a bit in the road part to make it a bit sunken into the table, I will later fill this up partway with filler to even the road out a bit and be able to get some texture into it.


And thats how far I've gotten now. I hope I'll get some more time to spend on it during the week, but with work, life and other unpredictable things you can never be too sure.

2011-10-14

Nurgle Defilers for Epic

I actually had a game this week, I know it sounds crazy but it's true, and not only that but I got a game of Epic Armageddon under my belt.
I got to face of a nice Imperial Guard army with my Death Guard, using the latest edition of this list, and I got to use my titan I showed of a while ago, but anyway, this got me into wanting to make some of the units I still miss for my army, and one of them is a anti-aircraft unit and the one for that is the nurgle marked Defiler, or Desicrator as it's known in the list.

I based my variants on Nurglins from 40k/WHFB and made some legs and weapons for them. As a little try I did one that I wanted more organic and daemonic and one with a bit more metal parts, so for the legs I did some plasticard legs for the later, basically a few 2mm strips glued together.



The claw arms are from a old epic ork dreadnought that got in the way for my knife.

The other one got arms from some of my Wargames Factory vikings I have around, So I got some arms, a blob of green stuff and stuck them into it, then the hands got a bit flattened and there you have it.



The gun is from an old Gorkamorka mini I think

And  here we have them both, in all of their unpainted glory!

2011-10-07

Nice sale at Warhammer Historical

I'm not one that usually likes warhammer historical products that much, they are expensive and/or unsupported. But I do have them on my watch list and I have been interested in their Waterloo game, not least for having a great looking book, but paying 36£ + shipping for a book I can't see first isn't quite my thing.

But now they have a 50% sale on all items, and also a somewhat lower shipping fee, so if your have been thinking of getting a game or supplement from them this is the time to go get it.
They stated in their newsletter and on the page that this if "for a limited time" but fail to specify when this time will end, so probably it's not going to be around for so long, perhaps until they sell X amount of books or something. But  I would recommend everyone to be a bit quick about it.

The other theory I have is that they are selling out everything they have and then removing the entire line, you never know when Games workshop is concerned.

But until we know more hop over to Warhammer Historical and grab something you had your eyes on.