Latest Dutch Units

I realized that if I wanted to start gaming Maurice I really needed to get more units completed for my 6mm War of Spanish Succession (WSS) project.  I made a minor basing change - originally I had based my first two units on four individual 25mm square Renedra bases.  After playing one game with these, I decided to switch to 50mm by 25 rectangular bases, two per unit.  I made the change for two reasons: 1) the bases were two thin for such small units - it's easier to pick up the 3mm thick bases and 2) the bases just look better on longer rectangular bases.

After that decision was settled, I had to decide on what regiments to paint them in.  In the end, I went with another regular unit representing Nassau-Usingen, and a grenadier unit from Orange-Friesland.

Here's a few pics.

Both units - grenadiers on the left

Orange-Friesland grenadier unit

Nassau-Usingen infantry unit

above shot

Project Greatswords: Part 2

So more than one year after I began my project to build a unit of greatswords with alternative miniatures, I'm finally done. Well, mostly done.  I still need to add a standard bearer and musician, but that's for another project.  The unit is now 18 strong and ready to be varnished for protection.

As I mentioned before I really never liked the GW greatswords in any of their incarnations.  And once the "new" Empire army book came out for 6th edition, the Reiksguard Knights on Foot disappeared forever from the army list.

After lots of hunting, I settled on a collection of figs from various manufacturers: some dismounted men-at-arms from Front Rank miniatures Hundred Years War range, men-at-arms from Wargames Foundry War of the Roses line, and some dismounted nobles from Steel Fist miniatures 15th Century Nobles line.  As the unit champ, I lucked out with a single fig from Wargames Foundry that was included free with my order of some other stuff.  Score!

This link will show some of the work-in-progress shots, as well as the variety of sizes I was dealing with.  For the most part, everything was compatible. But the Foundry figs were from the mid-80s and noticeably smaller.  I boosted them up by mounting them on pennies before basing them. Not the greatest result, but those guys were mainly to fill out the unit cheaply.

Once I get the standard bearer and musician dilemma sorted out my plan is to rank these guys up 5 wide, 4 deep.   The background of the unit is the personal guard of Baron Edmund "The Absent".  They bear his colors of blue and yellow.  To represent this, I alternated the colors of the sword scabbards.  Some guys have yellow, some blue.  The champion has the blue and yellow feathers, and the Captain , Dieter Krup usually joins the unit in battle (also blue and yellow). 

Here's some pics of the final results.

Unit champ with feathers was the free Foundry fig!

My favorite fig out of the whole group is easily the Steel Fist guy in the center of the below pic with the holly leaves on top of his helmet.

Age of Sigmar...Redux

Fresh off the heels of our first game of Age of Sigmar we got together and played game last night.  It was, again, High Elves vs Empire, but this time we used some of the advice in the Warhammer podcasts and the Internets: play a scenario, use lots of terrain, and have some limit on army composition.  We decided to keep it simple and just limit the number of Wounds in each army to 80.  We used no other restrictions, but I sent my list over to Rookie Wargamer beforehand so he had a sense of what I was bringing. This was a natural comp and produced two pretty balanced armies.

We played a pretty simple scenario. There was a large, strange rock in the center of the board. Objective was to capture the rock as it may potentially be warpstone or some other useful rock-like item.  At the end of the game, add up the total number of models within 3 inches of the rock (can't be a single character, war machine, or unit with less than 5 models, i think is what we agreed to).  Whoever has most models, wins.  Any other result is a draw.  The other thing we learned was to ditch the rule that says all terrain pieces have to roll for an effect on the Terrain Table.  It's just too much stuff to remember during the game. So we picked two pieces of terrain, and rolled for those. The farmhouse on my side of the table (empire side) and the far hill on the Elf side with the Bolt Thrower and Elf Mage.  Both rolls were "Mystical" which basically meant any unit within 3 inches, in the Hero Phase had to roll a die.  On a 2-6 they got a buff, on a roll of a 1 they were "befuddled".  As the game went on the elves on the hill were befuddled almost every turn. It was kinda funny.

We divided the table up straight down the center in two halves on either side of the road, with deployment zones on each of the far edges.  Because of the road, it made for a bit of a zig-zag deployment which was cool.

I wanted to try out the "battalion" rules and brought a State Troop Detachment battalion of an Empire General on foot, unit of 18 swordsmen, unit of 12 halberdiers, 10 Hunstmen Archers, and 5 Pistoliers. With the Detachment was also a unit of 5 Knights, a Battle Wizard, a Battle Standard Bearer (General with War Banner), and my newly painted Helblaster Volley Gun. (i'll follow up with a post about that later...)

I spy, with my little 28mm eye, some elves...

With one game under our belt, we got started pretty quickly.  The simple rules make this game super easy to pick up.  You rarely pick up the rules to check stuff. After about two turns you pretty much remember everything.  The only real hiccup is that you're referring to all the special rules in the warscrolls.  That can be a little annoying. But like anything, once you play enough with the same army you'll memorize almost everything.

Turn 1, I won the initiative and moved up.

This wasn't really a battle report game - we were really interested in playing the new rules and getting familiar with them. But we took a few snaps here and there to grab the more interesting moments...like...when the special rule for the High Elves "Storm of Arrows" unleashed a ridiculous volley of fire into my archers and wiped them from the board!

shit dies fast in Age of Sigmar

 I've been wondering how Age of Sigmar would hold up with larger armies. It's definitely a skirmish game and seems perfect for a smaller-sized game, especially after our first game when it just degenerated into a slog in the middle. I was also hoping that i could continue to deploy in ranks and movement trays even if it wasn't "ideal" for the best effect with the rules.

However, there is a subtle tactical element to this game that is not apparent the first time you read the rules and first time you play.   The first time we played we totally screwed up the alternating combat in the first battle round.  This time, we both knew it going in and it really made a difference.  you can also make the pile in rule work with ranked units - just deploy them on your movement tray as normal, move the unit around that way (unless you need to go around scenery or whatever) but then for combat, just charge them in and remove them from the tray.  Way fucking better than the old "lap 'round" rules which were never good.  Plus, stuff dies very fast and in large numbers in this game.  It still has a tendency to turn into Operation Grind Face once you're in combat, but you also have the Retreat rule and can leave a combat whenever you want.  And if you're playing a scenario, getting stuck-in isn't always the best plan.

Pistoliers and General charge in but the Halberds failed their charge. Boo!

Take that you elves! Uh..er..Aelfs!

I had placed my Knights on the far right flank behind the town, shielded from the elf bolt throwers on the hill.  But in my excitement to get them into game, i charged them into the spearmen unit a little too early and the Swordmasters of Hoeth hit piled-in on the Elf turn.

As usual, the horses did more damage than the riders.

Anyways it was getting late and we were going to play 6 turns but we called it at the top of Turn 4.  we thought it was a draw but I noticed that the Elf Spearmen unit (seen above) was probably within 3 inches of the objective stone.  We measured, he had 7 guys within 3 inches.  Now, we had decided that the objective stone was also "Deadly", Option 4 on the Terrain table which meant that after each battle round on a roll of a 1 the model is slain.  So it came down to whether or not he could roll seven 1's.  If they were all 1, the elves in range were dead and no objective claimed (draw).  If any survived, he wins.  Sure enough, only one elf died and the Elves had claimed the objective.  Win for the Elves!

So I won't get into a long discourse about AoS, but overall, after 2 games, it's pretty good. Sure, it has some flaws (like measuring movement by any point on the model. that's just plain dumb. we immediately ditched that and measured base-to-base).   But overall I like it. It's not Warhammer Fantasy, but it's a cool, different game. It's really easy to pick up and fun to play.  That game last night was probably the most fun I've had playing Warhammer in a long time.  AoS doesn't provide (yet) the same level of mental stress and challenge as Warhammer Fantasy, but I think it might be there later.

Siege!

We playtested some Warhammer Siege rules a few weeks ago. It was great.

Here's a few pics.

The Mighty Fortress

Thoughts on Age of Sigmar

The impending release of Games Workshop's new game, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar has been impossible to ignore.  Once they provided the rules and Warscrolls for free download I was pretty amped to try out the new rules. 

So we got together last night and played Empire vs High Elves.

Before we started we briefly went over a few of the basic rules so that we were in agreement on how we interpreted a few things, then decided to basically play the rules “as-is” as much possible.  We did, however, want to compare how the new rules would workout with equal sized armies, so we used the old point values to attempt to keep things “slightly” balanced.  We also added a few extra High Elf models before we started to get the total model counts within the 1/3 threshold.  I had 98 models and Rookie War Gamer had just under 70 (I forget the exact number). We didn’t want to deal with the Sudden Death rules in our first game (if you’re outnumbered by your opponent by more than 1/3 total model count, you can pick a Sudden Death victory condition).  The basic rules state the victory conditions are to completely kill all of your opponent’s models. All of them. If you do that, it's a Major Victory.  If that’s not possible (for whatever reason) then you calculate the percentage of models lost – the player that lost the highest percentage of models from their original model count is the loser and the other player wins a Minor Victory.  Otherwise, there's no set game length. It’s a little strange, but I think they intend to expand on that with supplements, campaign packs, scenarios, etc.   I was also wondering how long the game would take if the objective is to kill all of your opponents models. Then we started playing – let me tell you, stuff dies quickly and in large quantities. Once you learn the rules and start memorizing your troops stats, this game can definitely be played fast (relatively speaking).

Set-up:

Both players roll a die, the winner decides how to divide the table up into equal halves. Rookie War Gamer won and decided to go diagonally from corner-to-corner. Then you alternate placing units no closer than 12 inches to the enemy’s deployment zone.  Nice little twist with the diagonal setup. 

The rules also state that you roll for each piece of scenery to determine its special effects. We thought it would be too many things to keep track of so we decided to roll a D3 for each piece, so on a 5 or 6 we’d roll on the scenery table. We ended up with one group trees being “Mystical” and two hills were “Arcane”. This added just the right amount of flavor, but it’s easy to forget the terrain effects during the battle.

Overall, Age of Sigmar are simple, fast, effective rules. In most cases, it was really easy to play. It’s fantastic to just lookup what you need to roll on the unit warscroll. Also, pre-measuring at any time really eliminates a lot of guessing, thinking, agonizing, and generally wasting time. It was long overdue (although apparently this was in 8th edition which i haven't played yet...) I like the roll for initiative at the beginning of each turn. Winner gets to choose who goes first. There are definitely times where deciding to make your opponent move gives an advantage. I like this.

I'm going to highlight some of what we encountered in each of the new "phase" in a battle round.

Hero Phase: Really great idea. It’s the first phase of your turn, and here’s where any of your heroes get to influence the battle. General can use a command ability, wizards can cast a spell. The magic casting is really simple too. And I love that you can only attempt to dispel (or “unbind”, as it’s now called) with a wizard within range of the caster. Pretty neat.

Movement Phase: just move. If you decide to “run”, you add D6 inches. If you run, it means you can’t shoot or charge that turn.

Shooting Phase: Also much improved. After two months of me bitching about “long range / short range modifiers”, they actually scrapped that. They reduced the ranges of most missile troops, but it’s all one effective range. You’re either in range or out, and you just roll to hit. Archers specifically, they’ve jacked up their effectiveness. High Elves have some special rules where once-per-game they can unleash a “Storm of Arrows”, each fig gets two shots! Empire archers get bonuses for "Ordered Volleys, re-rolling 1s to hit. They also get bonuses for bigger units, like units of 20 or more you get to re-roll 1s and 2s to hit. Suddenly archers are a very, very viable unit.

They changed up cannons a decent amount, which allowed me to wipe out some elf Reavers in one round of shooting:

dead Reavers

Charge Phase: now we start to get a little…wonky. It’s simple: pick a unit, if they’re within 12 inches, they can try to charge. Roll 2D6, that’s their charge distance. However, here’s where the “skirmish based” rules start to show up. You move each model up to the charge distance. Since you’re trying to get into combat, you want them as close as possible.

We immediately realized you’ve gotta take the figs off the movement trays for this to be effective. Fine for smaller units, but like you see in the picture above it starts to bog down a bit moving 30+ figs. This (and combat) is very much like the current 40K rules. It doesn’t really work for ranked up units. It’s meant for smaller blobs of figs.

Combat Phase: The combat mechanism on its face is great. Roll to hit, roll to wound, opponent tries to save, then determine total damage/and allocate wounds.

But combat starts with the “Pile In”. You pick a unit that either charged or is already within 3 inches of an enemy. Then you Pile In. Each fig moves up to 3 inches to get closer to the enemy. So now there’s more movement and trying to jam as many figs as possible into a mess of combat. 

what a mess

Again, a little cumbersome for traditional ranked-up units of 20+ models. You finish your attacks for that unit, and then it’s your OPPONENTS TURN to pick a unit and attack. So, based on our reading of the rules, it doesn’t matter who charged, or whatever, it matters what unit you pick to fight first, then your opponent picks a unit and attacks, and you keep alternating. I’m not sure if I like this yet. Example, on the same turn I charged my Pistoliers (who are suddenly awesome) into his Mage and charged my remaining Knights into that big combat from the picture. I chose to attack with the Pistoliers first, they killed his mage.

dead Mage

Then Rookie War Gamer got to choose a unit, and attacked my knights, who died before they could even attack on their charge. Seems…wrong. Now, we didn’t realize at the beginning that’s what you’re supposed to do, so it’s possible after playing a few more games and understanding how that works that it could add a whole new level of fun. But to me it’s a quirk of the rules that you have to deal with, and you’ll end up making decisions in order to take advantage of (or protect yourself from) the combat mechanic of the game, instead of more abstract tactical decisions. So, the jury is out for me on that.

Bravery Phase: This is really different but super cool. You have to keep a running total of models removed from a unit each turn, (shooting, magic, and combat), and then the last phase of a turn is Battleshock Phase, and all units that suffered casualties (you and your opponent) take a Battleshock test. Roll a D6, add the number of casualties removed, and if that total is greater than your bravery score, you lose that many models as they “flee the battle”. Example, I’ve lose two casualties (one from shooting, and one in combat). Baseline Bravery stat of 5. I get +1 for unit of at least 10 (advantage for large units). Now my bravery is a 6. I roll a 5, +2 for the casualties, my roll is now a 7. That’s 1 greater than my bravery. I lose one model. Yikes! It can get bloody really fast. I love this mechanism though. It played out awesome in the game. It's different than any of the other wargames that i've played (whether fictional or historical).

After about 2.5 hours and 3 turns, we called the game. Since nobody got tabled, we tallied up the casualties and the Empire squeaked out a minor victory.

On the whole, I really enjoyed playing Age of Sigmar. There’s a few other hiccups with heroes/characters and how they apparently attack with ALL the melee weapons they're armed with, and some other minor things. But I have concerns about the combat phase (the order of units attacking seems wrong) and the pile in/charge moving is really cumbersome for big units. I’m hoping that maybe we just missed something and played it wrong, but the rules are so short and simple that I’m pretty sure we played it correct.

I still think they could have introduced all of these changes, even the renaming of races to "protect the IP", but do this all without gutting and throwing out the existing background setting. To me, that was the best part.

Trouble With Metallics

I thought i'd quickly paint up some Reiksguard knights, but i'm struggling with the metallic technique on the barding.

I found some decent examples and can't seem to execute any of them.

First, the GW paint scheme:

I actually like this approach for Reiksguard.  Super-bright, clean metal, with minimal shading in the creases. That's pretty much it.  This was my original plan.  Didn't work.

Then I found this pic:

A little darker, a little rougher look, but nice shading.  Tried this, couldn't do it. Really struggling with where to apply the shading and the highlighting on the barding. The "scoop" section is my biggest problem. 

Then there's this pic: 

These guys are really well done, almost perfect balance of both approaches. 

Then i found this pic on the warhammer-empire.com forum (along with a nice tutorial which i also failed to execute):

This was very, very striking.

Again, i intended this to be a quick paint job. I primed them with very bright metallic silver (almost identical to the GW color).  I figured a quick, thin wash of black Nuln Oil and brief highlight and i'd be done.  Wrong.
The ink wash looked ok, but didn't get the "clean, Best of the Best" look i was getting for the guys that are supposed to be the Emperor's Guard.  Then the disaster began: me attempting to highlight the barding.  Now, a good hobby blogger would post the WIP pictures of these knights, but i didn't copy the pics to the computer i'm currently working on, so you'll just have to take my word for it and trust me when i say they look unsatisfying.

Suggestions?

Clash of Hordes

Waaagh Gorfang was headed into the human lands after hearing about all the fun outside of some Empire town of Lietzburg. Something about warpstone, but who cares; Gorfang just wanted a good scrap.

While moving through Bretonnia Gorfang found the juicy town of Summersall Fort, which looked like a perfect town to sack, but he hit a giant force of Skaven led by Thanquol.  Battle ensued...