3rd Analogue Painting Challenge; A (Brief) Game Report; Painting Update

Last year, I followed the progress of some of the painters in Curt's 2nd Analogue Painting Challenge and was impressed by the legend....wait for it....ary output of certain people who were taking part. Anyway, Curt has announced the 3rd Analogue Painting Challenge and I have opted in. I have no hopes of getting anywhere near the output levels of Kent and Ray, even if my fatigue levels improve but the challenge will (I hope) provide a spur to getting some painting done.

Unfortunately, as only historical minis are counted towards the challenge it does mean that my massive leadpile of 15mm SciFi figures will have to wait until after the challenge. I do have plenty of historical figures to paint though:

15mm
Medieval Swiss pikemen, halberdiers and command groups (depending on how things go, I may add more figures to complete the army)
30YW - 24 "Croat" light horse, 24 late war horse (Swedes?), casualty markers, 6 artillery limbers. I might add some more figures later on, eg Scottish mercenary foot

28mm
I've got plenty of 28mm plastics to assemble and paint up as well
Saxons (Gripping Beast and Wargames Factory)
Vikings (Gripping Beast and Wargames Factory)
Normans - foot and cavalry (Conquest)
Late medieval mercenary foot (Perry)

6mm
I've still got the bulk of the Baccus ACW start box to paint up. Given that next year is the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg campaign, maybe it would be a good use of the time I spend on the Challenge to get enough units painted up to game some of the battles? Not to mention that the scoring system looks very skewed in favour of 6mm  with each foot figure scoring 1 point (for comparison, foot figures for 15 and 28mm score 2 and 5 points). Maybe it's to compensate for the risk of eye strain?

The entry fee for the challenge is to paint up a "47 Ronin" figure for Curt. Luckily I have some mid/late 1980s Citadel Samurai figures kicking around, so I just need to choose which one to paint up for him.



Game Report

On Monday I had my 2nd game in the club's ECW tournament, my New Model Army against Mike's Parliamentarian Northern Association. I used the same list as I used against Gordon a couple of weeks ago. Unluckily I'd forgotten to check my camera's battery and it ran out after just 1 shot:

I guessed correctly that Mike would have opted for the very shooty version of his army, so I was glad to win the initiative as it would let me see his deployment and deploy my own troops accordingly. As expected, his right wing and centre were a long line of foot, with a couple of units in reserve and dragoons covering the right flank. His left wing had his artillery, a pike and shot unit and his cavalry - 2 units of average horse and 1 unit of average cuirassiers.

I opted for what could be a risky strategy and split my forces with a left wing of infantry (left flank covered by dragoons) and a cavalry right wing with the artillery covered by "firelocks". The main reason for putting my artillery on the right was to make use of the hill down there which would allow me to fire over my own troops.

The photo was taken at the end of the 2nd turn. My battle plan was to engage and hold Mike's right wing with my foot, whilst my cavalry would engage his cavalry and then turn in on his left flank and rear.

My artillery did quite well at first and managed to break Mike's cuirassiers through base losses. My superior determined horse were then able to get into position to engage his average horse. However, Mike had moved one of them up into a position that forced me to charge his pike and shot at the same time, which would put me at a disadvantage. The impact and first melee were tied, and dragged out to the end of the game. My other superior determined horse weren't quite in range to charge at the same time, so I had to wait  2 turns before I could destroy his other horse unit, leaving me free to engage in the other melee.

Meanwhile over on my left flank, the two opposing dragoons engaged in a phoney war of threatening each other while my foot advanced to engage Mike's right wing. My superior foot succeeded in fragmenting their opponents through shooting and declared a charge - Mike failed the cohesion test to stand and the unit broke, upsetting a couple of units around them. The next unit down the line was charge by my foot and rapidly broke as well and I managed to kill one of his generals - revenge for me as on the other flank Mike had fluked a kill on my cavalry general. This disturbed Mike's right wing even more. In the pursuit phase the foot who had won their melee managed to charge into another foot unit. This was to prove disastrous for them as it left them open to a flank charge which I couldn't prevent.

Back on my right wing, my artillery couldn't engage any targets within arc as my cavalry were in the way. Stupidly I forgot for a couple of turns that I could pivot them onto a new arc. When I eventually did remember, I got in one shot against the unengaged end of Mike's foot in the melee but Mike decided to use his artillery for counter-battery fire and managed to hit with both dice (a 1 in 9 chance). If I rolled a 1 on my death dice my artillery would autobreak. Guess what I rolled - yup, a 1. Artillery gone, my first losses (apart from a general and a couple of bases) of the game.

In the cavalry fight, the SDH who had only charge cavalry won their fight and made a token effort at pursuing the routers. That was good for me as it allowed me to turn them and move them to a position where they could join in on the other melee. Things got even better as my other SDH unit broke their cavalry opponents, allowing them to spill round and concentrate their dice on the pike and shot unit, now disrupted from seeing the cavalry break.

Back on my left, Mike had managed to manoeuvre a few of his shot-only units into position to fire en masse against one of my foot units, which had already lost 2 bases from shooting. He managed to score 6 hits which meant an automatic base loss and my foot broke.

And then it was the last turn of the game. My unengaged SDH charged in on the flank of Mike's pike and shot, dropping them to fragmented. unfortunately the impact was a draw so it would all come down to the melee phase - if I could break the foot, my pursuit would take my SDH into his (undefended) artillery and I would have achieved a rout. So, the melee phase was on - Mike rolled his 3 dice, scoring no hits even with a re-roll. I rolled my 8 dice, scoring 5 hits and 3 re-rolls. The re-rolls were all hits. Automatic base loss (taking him to 4 bases) and with Mike needing to roll a 3 or more to avoid losing a 2nd base which would cause him to auto-break. He rolled a 4. Damn! Still, there was only a 1 in 6 chance of him passing his cohesion test (needing a 10, 11 or 12) - he rolled a 10! Damn and curse and damn and curse!

Oh well, it was still a convincing (13:7) win for me:
Mike's losses - 11 APs from 13 BGs
My losses - 6 APs from 11 BGs

I've got my 3rd game lined up for this Thursday against Brian's Confederate Irish. Having taken a look at his list I will probably need to revise my own army list for this game.



Painting Update

FSE Ships - no progress
Norman knight - horse finished and some work done on the rider. The technique I use for 15mm horses does seem to work for 28mm as well.
30YW cuirassiers - almost finished, just gloves and sashes to do, then Klear/ink coat, basing, matt varnish and flocking/tufting.

I should be able to get the cuirassiers done to at least the Klear/ink stage today and might do a bit of work on the Norman knight. Once they are done I'll finish the FSE ships and then it will be a case of finishing as many of the started-painting-bit-got-sidetracked figures as I can before the Analogue Painting Challenge starts on the 20th.

Quick Update and Book Review: Redshirts

I'm back! It's been interesting the last two weeks watching to see how many page views I got despite the lack of posts. It seems that I've got 50-100 people who take a peek every day. To those 50-100 people I offer my apologies for not having posted anything for so many days.

I have been doing a little bit of painting over the last couple of weeks, but nothing worth showing just yet. My plan for tomorrow is to finish off painting the 30YW cuirassiers - there's not much left to paint now, but it might be a while before they are completely finished - the cold winter weather isn't conducive to opening windows to provide ventilation for spraying matt varnish!

I've also done some work on the FSE spaceships - various panels have been painted red or white. I just need to touch up some of the blue, paint weapons, engine surrounds and the exhaust. The red and white panels do improve the look of the ships, but I'm still not sure about the colour scheme. I'll see how they look when I've finished painting them, but suspect that I might end up stripping and repainting them.

As well as the above, I've also assembled one of the Conquest Norman Knights to see whether the technique I use for 15mm horses will work for 28mm horses. I'm pretty much finished on the horse (the technique seems to work OK) and just need to finish the rider.

Well, that's enough of an update. Onto the book review.

Redshirts by John Scalzi

Imagine you are a junior officer newly assigned to the fleet's flagship, the UUS Intrepid
Imagine that all of your colleagues make themselves scarce when the senior officers are looking for people to go on away team missions
Imagine that junior crew members on away team missions have an extraordinarily high chance of dying in stupid and pointless ways
Imagine that at crucial moments the laws of physics seem to take a vacation
Imagine that a feral crew member warns you to stay away from the bridge and to avoid "the narrative"
Imagine he later tells you that the only way all the above makes sense is that you are somehow part of a television show (and not a very good one at that) in some alternative past timeline
Imagine that you come to realise that he might be right
Imagine that you don't want to die a pointless death as part of "the narrative"
Welcome to the world of the Redshirts


Heading the dedications at the start of the book is this:

"To Wil Wheaton, whom I heart with all the hearty heartness a heart can heart"

Yuk. In the words of the inimitable Dr Sheldon Cooper:

Yup. I'm not a fan of dear Wil. However, I didn't let that detract from my reading of the book.

The book was very well written (no surprise there) and absolutely hilarious as you read how the characters come to terms with what is going on and how they resolve to beat "the narrative".

As you would expect from the title, there are references/homages a-plenty to Star Trek (ToS) and the story just keeps you turning the pages. I read it in an evening. However the ending was a bit of a let-down (although Chapter 24 - the last one - did make up for it a bit).

And then I thought "Hang on a second, there are still a whole wodge of pages left in the book. What the heck?"

There are three "Coda" after the end of the main story, written in the first person (a blog); the second person and the third person. All are worth reading.

*****Highly Recommended*****

Over the past week I'd also read two other SF humour novels by Scalzi - "Fuzzy Nation" and "The Android's Dream". If you're unlucky I might subject you to reviews of those next week.

Liebster Blog Award

Another meme is doing the blogger rounds - the Liebster Blog Awards. the rules are pretty simple - if you have received one of these awards, you put a post up with a link back to the blogger who gave you the award, then award it to 5 other blogs that you think deserve it.

So, Anne of Anne's Attic got given the award, then named me as one of her 5 awardees. Curses - now I have to decide which 5 blogs I follow deserve the award (that haven't been given it already). It's going to be very tough to narrow it down.

I guess it has to be these 5 folks:

Mike Whitaker over at Trouble At T'Mill - if for no other reason than his excellent and informative series of posts on horse colours and heraldry.

Curt over at Analogue Hobbies - fantastic painting and a great guy

Colonel Shofer's Mild OCD Model Blog - whilst we see very little of his own work, he does an amazing job of linking through to inspiring work on other peoples' blogs, youtube channels and suchlike.

Brovatar over at Den of Imagination - fantastic modelling and painting

Frontline Gamer - for his Sunday Sermons if for no other reason. This blog is always entertaining and informative and he deserves kudos for all the work that goes into keeping it going.

So, there you go. That's my 5 nominees for the award. I'm certain that I've overlooked some that are equally deserving.

Not completely idle

Okay, so it's been a week since I last posted. I'm still feeling very tired in the evenings after work which means I'm not in the mood to do much painting or modelling. In an effort to get a quick mood-boosting win, I decided to start painting up some of my GZG starships (well, they've been sitting in the box for a year or so).

Ages ago, I'd bought some of the magnetic adapters from Ninja Magic to allow me to quick-fit ships onto flying stands. For painting ships, I'd figured it would be a good idea to fix some of the adapter bases onto long flight pegs that I'd picked up from Litko.

I therefore set to work. The first problem I found was that the base sections were pretty fiddly to glue together. The second problem was that I later found I'd used slightly too much Zap superglue to fix the two base sections together which meant the ship part didn't fit properly in many  of them. Unfortunately, by the time I'd discovered that, I had already done the same process on a number of flight stands. Grrrrr!! Hopefully I'll be able to drill out the excess glue so that they are usable. In the meantime I prepared another 8 flight stands

The next step was to decide which fleet to do. The easiest option was to do the FSE starter fleet - 2 frigates, 2 destroyers, 2 light cruisers, 1 heavy cruiser and 1 battle cruiser. Cleaning these up wasn't too bad apart from the drive exhausts which had quite a bit of flash that needed drilling out. After fitting the magnetic adapters, I primed them with Vallejo black polyurethane primer, base-coated with Dark Blue, heavy-dry-brush with 50:50 Dark Blue and Light Grey, with a final light brush of 50:50 Dark Blue and White.

I'm not totally sure about the basic colour scheme and don't want to go any further without seeing what people think, so here are some photos. For some reason, the photos against the black background have bleached the colours on the ships.

Let me know what you think of this as a base colour.

The scheme I'm looking at instead is a mid grey base dry-brushed heavily with pale grey blue, then some panels picked out in dark blue.

Remembrance

Posting tonight in case I forget in the morning.


They went with songs to the battle, they were young.
Straight of limb, true of eyes, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.


In memory of all those killed in war, both military and civilian and of all sides.

4Ground Dark Ages Buildings

As you may recall, I bought a pair of 4Ground buildings from their 28mm Dark Ages range while I was at SELWG a few weeks ago. I've finished assembling them now, so here are my pics and thoughts.

Anglo-Dane Dwelling (28S-DAR-103)

Late Saxon/High Medieval Hovel (28S-DAR-102)

These buildings were easy to assemble and for the most part needed no reference to the instructions. The only fiddly bit was assembling the "fire box" for each building (the raised area of the floor) and the most awkward bit was attaching the smoke hood on the Anglo-Danish building.

Being made of MDF, assembly only needed PVA glue, with the exception of the smoke hood - I used superglue gel to attach that.

These were "pre-painted" models. The paint job is fairly basic, but looks fine for gaming.

If I was to buy more of these, I would probably:
1) Give the walls and any exposed woodwork on the roofs a brown ink wash to dirty them up a bit. I might also wash the teddy-bear fur thatch to give it a bit of depth.
2) Before adding the walls, I would probably do some work on the floor - add the fire box; coat the floor with basing texture; paint and wash the texture; coat the floor with dilute PVA and sprinkle chopped-up sisal string fibres over it.
3) Paint up the top of the fire box
4) Add "curtains" swept to the side of the windows.

Would I recommend 4Ground's buildings based on my experience with these? Definitely. They are pretty cheap, easy to assemble and look good enough for gaming without any further work.

Viral Blog Post - "Are You a Proper Wargamer?"

Wow, a week without having posted anything. That's mainly because I haven't had anything to post. Last Sunday, just before I headed off to bed I realised I had another bleeding cold which combined with increasing my hours at work left me too worn our to want to do any painting this week and yesterday.

I did get some work done today though - the dark ages buildings are now finished. I'll take some pics tomorrow and post a review of the buildings. I also did a bit more work on the cuirassiers - armour has received a black wash, saddle cloths have been painted and the horses have been base-coated.


OK, so another viral on the wargames blogosphere has been kicked off by Phil B over at The Wargaming Site

So, here are my answers.


* Spent at least £500 on figures / tanks - and you get extra kudos for every £500 you've spent
Definitely over £500, possibly over £1000 (if not, I'm damned close). Not bad considering I've only been back into gaming for just over a year
* Pricked your finger or thumb on a pike block - several times
Pikes and lances, many, many times.
* Tried at least 10 different rule sets and vowed never to play half of them ever again
Not yet, but with only a year or so of gaming I haven't had time yet. I've definitely read more than 10 and decided against playing several of them (the wonders of free and cheap PDF rules)
* Bought an army off EBay
Not yet
* Sold an army on EBay
Not yet
* spent months painting an army - then used it in anger once
Not an army, but I do have several squads for SF skirmish games that haven't seen any tabletop action so far
* tried several different periods and genres
Yup
* dropped a box of figures on the floor from a great height
Not yet (thank goodness)
* lost a battle on the last throw of the dice
Yup
* made at least one enemy for life
Does having 3 stifles on PMT count as having 3 "enemies for life"? I've obviously upset them enough for them to want to ignore my posts
* had a proper, stand up argument over a wargames table
Nope, probably because I'm too easy going.
* thrown a dice across a room
Not intentionally - some overly enthusiastic rolls have seen my dice skip off the table, onto the floor and carry on to the far wall.
* rebased an army for a different rule set
Not yet. If I changed rules and the new one used different base sizes I'd probably opt for a different army (and maybe scale)
* inflicted a whopping defeat on an opponent
Only once
* suffered an embarrassing defeat due to a stupid tactical decision
Pretty much every game I play
* joined a wargamers club
Yes and no. Central London Wargames Club isn't a membership club, you just arrange games with other "members", turn up and buy drinks
* bought a ton of lead that remains unpainted
Certainly a good few pounds weight
* been to a wargamers show
Yup - Colours 2011, SELWG 2011 and 2012, Salute 2012, Broadside 2012, Campaign 2012
* have more dice than is logical or necessary to own - and have used most of them
Definitely more dice than I really need, but not all (or probably even most) of them have been used
* have taken boxes of troops down to a club just to show them off to your mates
Haven't taken whole boxes, but have taken units or individual figures.

So, that's:

10 definites
6 negatives
4 maybes or partials

I guess that means that I am a "proper wargamer"