A mixed bag

Hundred Years War

Last week I sorted through my cleaned up Hundred Years War Minifigs 25mm miniatures to see what sort of armies I could muster. I will be basing my units on 4" by 3" bases with 10-12 foot figures and 5-6 mounted figure. The unit numbers will be determined by fit and availability. I currently have a preference for mounting my miniatures on 4" by 3" bases so they fit nicely into a 6" square grid and allow enough room to place terrain pieces and speeds up the game. In all I should get 3 long bow units, 4 crossbow units, 8 men at arm units, 4 levy/pike units and 8 mounted knight units.

Testing the base size.

I am hoping to use Lion Rampant rules for small engagements and One Hour Wargaming rules for larger battles. In both cases I will track casualties using a couple of dice and leaving space on the base to move the dice with the unit.

Swatters / SciFi

During the week I was able to get in a couple of games using Swatters ruleset with modifications to both combat and shooting rules. The modifications seem to be working for me now, by which I mean, I am enjoying the flow of the games and not tweaking the rules on a constant basis. I am now considering starting a short campaign to give the games more purpose and a narrative now the rule changes have settled down.

Space Marines vs. Necrons

WW2 Rules

After playing a few WW2 campaign games the previous week I have decided to make a rule change to how artillery and mortar shooting occurs. Previously the grid-based rules stated that only one square could be attacked by one mortar or artillery unit. The idea behind this restriction was to avoid undisrupted units being eliminated by barrages alone. I still want to keep the approach of not eliminating units with a barrage, but want the option of allowing barrages to overlap on a target to increase the likelihood of disrupting a unit. The new rule allows multiple barrage attacks on the same square, but only barrage hit will apply to the unit.

WW2 campaign game report

Over the last few days I have been able to play three more WW2 campaign games. The first one described here had Commonwealth forces (in Red) launching a limit attack on German forces (in blue). The attack plan was to have the first wave move up through the woods with armoured units and contest the buildings, while the rest of the first wave would move on to the village. The bulk of Red reserves would be used to seize the village.

Attack plan

The starting positions of the forces with both sides having half their forces in reserve. Normally the game is played in a 4' by 4' table gridded into 6" squares. However, my table marker for the edge of the table got knocked so I ended up playing on a 4' and 6" wide table.

Blue forces had laid minefields covered by a pillbox located next to the village.

Game start

The attacking Red force quickly moved forward and the armoured left flank made contact with Blue forces.

While Red's left flank continue to press forward their casualties were starting to rise.

Blue's reserves arrive just as it appears the Red flanking force was about to breakthrough.

Blue reserves bolster the defence and attempt to stem Red's armoured advance with a counter attack.

Red air support assisted in the elimination of Blue's mobile artillery while Red's armour engages with Blue's counter attack.

As night closes in Red forces have full control of the village and have control of the woods. A victory for Red just before time runs out.

The game was in the balance until the final three moves when an effective airstrike and artillery bombardment by Red eliminated the treat of a counter attack by Blue.

The other two games I have played were also limited attacks on either side, and both failed to reach their objectives.

A blast with HYW

This weekend I completed cleaning up my Hundred Year War Minifig 25mm miniatures. I have been slowing cleaning off the paint on these armies over the last few weekends. It's a laborious job once the miniatures come out of the paint stripper. I found while most of the paint came off, but the remaining paint needed a quick scrub to clean them up. All very time consuming and messy.

Water Blaster - Added to the modelling toolbox

With another weekend of cleaning ahead an alternative approach was required. The new approach involved the use of a high pressure hose, and it worked a treat (hence the post title). The clean up was done in a third of the time including tidy up time afterwards.

Water blaster in action

I have some ECW miniatures to clean up in the future which will be made much easier with this approach: into paint stripper for 1 week and then water blasting 30 minutes.

Gaming on a smaller table

I usually play on a 6' by 4' table and have a tendency to use too many units in a game, and overload the table leaving little space for and flanking manoeuvres. Most of my recent games (WW2 and SciFi) have been played on a 4' by 4' table and I am learning to resist the temptation to play with too many units. This is because I know I cannot use all my units, and partly due the playing games in a campaign where the selection of units is generated by rules.

This week I was continuing to play some SciFi games on a 4' by 4' table as I wanted to test out some rule variations and have some quick games as well. With one of the games I decided to keep the forces picked and just open up the game by playing on 6' by 4' space, increasing opportunities for manoeuvring of units and not relying on the edge of the table to protect the flanks. It is an approach I will be trying to do more of in the future to break the tendency of crowding too many units on a tabletop.

The latest addition to my Chaos forces

AWI terrain - fences

My 15mm terrain was looking distinctly European and I am planning to play some AWI in the next few weeks. Thanks to some useful terrain suggestions from Ross (much appreciated).  I have started to introduce some variety for my fences. As with all my 15mm and 20mm terrain I am taking a very simple approach to the building of terrain features which often employs balsa wood and simple paint techniques to avoid doing anything too fiddly.

Step 1 - Cut some MDF bases. In my case they are 6 inches long and 1 inch wide. Cut and stick balsa wood strips and tick to the base. Once the PVA rule is dry on each angle in the fence stick a cut matchstick on either side.

Step 2 - Paint the bases and use dark brown on the fence.

Step 3 - Using a light grey with a touch of medium brown watered down with 50% water to make a wash. This was is quickly painted the fence posts and sites to represent the fencing. No need to be too precise. The reason I use a wash is it flows on easily and doesn't look as stark on the dark brown which shows through a little bit.

Step 4 - Finally finish off the bases. I use a mixed grass flock of two parts light green and one part brown.

Step 5 - I like to coat my terrain in an acrylic matte varnish to keep the flock in place.

When I first looked into this project I did consider making everything with matchsticks, and I try one fence strip only to find it all a slow and sticky. This way of using balsa strips is a bit of a cheat, but it does work quite effectively for 15mm.

Swatters Rules Variations

This week I have played a few games of Swatters using modified combat rules. So far I am happy with the way the games are playing. The reasons behind the rule variations to the core rules are to make the game more geared to ranged combat and tailor them to suit my Warhammer 40K collection.

I have not changed any of the activation rules or expenditure of actions. These remain the same as I really like the mechanic, and have added the reaction rule idea from "Of Gods and Mortals" another Ganesha rule set. This rule variations allows any single unit once turning a turn to attempt an action for each failed action by an opponent.

In terms of combat variations there are five areas of changes:

• Units combat scores
• Combat rolls
• Melee
• Vehicles and monstrous creatures
• Unit elimination

The make up of a unit is still the same, but with each unit having an assigned combat score for the type of troops rather than based upon the number of models. The combat score is used to determine the number of casualties after combat rolls. So a lightly armoured troops have a score of 1, armoured troops a score of 2 and heavily armoured a score of 3. If a unit is in cover, then +1 to their scores.

Lightly armoured Cultists (C1), armoured Chaos Marines (C2) and heavily armoured Chaos Terminators (C3)

For combat rolls the defending unit does not roll. Only the attacker rolls and adds to their rolled score on 1D6 with modifiers for weapon types and subtracts for the range. A note here for ranged combat, -1 for each distance bound away from a target unit, including the first bound. The total score is then used to remove models from the target unit.

For example, a Space Marine unit with Boltguns and missile launcher shoots at some Chaos Cultists  en cover at a distance of 2. They roll 4 with adjustments of -2 for the range and +2 for the missile launcher. So with a score of 4 they can remove 2 Cultists who are lightly armoured and normally have a combat score of 1, but have a combat score of 2 because of a +1 for cover.

Space Marines cause 2 hits on Cultists in cover (C1+1)

Melee is treated the same way as combat, but the units being in contact. This is quite different to the way Swatters has melee working which forces an outcome, but I have found most combat situations are over within 2 turns with no negative range modifiers and cover to reduce hits. (Units only get cover on the first charge into melee.)

Vehicles and monstrous creatures are treated in the same way as other units, but with combat score of 4. The difference between a light vehicle and a heavy tank is the number of hits they can take before being destroyed. Only certain high power weapons can attack a vehicle of monstrous creature.

An Imperial Sentinel (1 hit), Chimera (3 hits) and Leman Russ (4 hits)

The approach to combat and treatment of units is along the lines of One Hour Wargaming rules where there is no combat reduction with the loss of models. I like this approach and have essentially modified the Swatters combat along these lines, keeping the stragglers rule and forcing units to take a quality check with one dice whenever casualties are taken. Any failed quality check with 50% casualties causing a unit to be removed.

I am going to stick with the Swatters rules, plus my variations, for the moment as they have to date provided some enjoyable gaming. Buying these rules was money well spent in my view, and the variations on my part are as much about me always wanting to mess around with any rule set I get.

A mixed bag and some old Minifigs 25mm HYW Medievals

A mixed bag of topics in this week's post with W40K, Medieval's and Swatters game. As I am slowly getting through building and painting my remaining Chaos Marine Warhammer 40K models I have stashed away. I thought I had better start preparing my next project, cleaning up my old 25mm Minifig Hundred Years War miniatures for painting.

One Heldrake all painted up to add to my slowly growing Chaos force

I did consider leaving them as there were, painted by me as a 15 year old, but I need to put them on big bases and quite a few of them were painted with some interesting colour combinations. Probably colours I already available in my paint collection. So putting sentiment aside into a container of paint-stripper went the men-at-arms, to come out the next day looking mostly cleaned up after a good soak, wash and rub with an old tooth brush.

Minifies 25mm HYW all cleaned up.

I intend to use Lion Rampant rules with these miniatures once completed. Rather than have single based miniatures they we be based in groups of 6 foot and 3 mounted, and I'll tracking casualties with dice.

My one question is how to paint these? I am leaning towards an old school shinny look as most of the miniatures in a unit will have the same stance.

A Swatters game underway with W40K models

I did manage to get a game in this weekend using the Swatters Rules (Ganesha Games) with some modified combat rules. I am really enjoying the games I have played and I will try and post the most recent house rule modifications over the next week.