15mm Painting Pics - finally finishing some long outstanding projects!

As a quick aside from the battle reports, I wanted to put up some pics of the recently completed armies I assembled for Hordes of the Things. These are Chariot Miniatures figures from their Undead and Lizardmen ranges; I started both of these armies over a decade ago and for the last dozen years or so they have waited patiently in hibernation for me to dust them off and put paint to brush once more, and this April/May I was finally ready to do so. On the whole I'm really pleased with how these came out (especially the War Turtles of the Lizardmen) and I have since expanded the skeletons significantly with some 'standard' units of blades, archers and spears as well as the Lizardmen with a unit of mages (this most recent stuff isn't pictured here but will be at a later date).

I also took the opportunity to finally base up some painted 6mm figures (Irregular fantasy and Baccus Romans) I've also had floating around for many a year; since the whole point of 6mm is to get armies that actually look like armies, I went with the 25mm basing standard (for HotT/DBA) to help make the units look bigger - I think they came out pretty well overall!

The desire to work on the smaller scales has continued to grow, and right now my focus is on 'finishing' the 6mm Irregular Elves to the point where they are a playable army as well as finally get some paint on my 15mm SF that has also been gathering dust for a long time now. It's interesting to see what is available out there now in these scales, certainly the 15mm SF has really taken off in a BIG way with some very impressive models and ranges from a variety of manufacturers. Fantasy also has a massive range of options.

Next up in addition to the above is a plan to add at least two more DBA armies to my collection - way back when I painted some Late Romans and Early Goths that have been my 'go to' armies for a quick throw down game of DBA for a long time (so long that they no longer match the army list in DBA 2.2, they were made for 1.0, though I'm hoping to correct this in the near future) as well as Classical Indians and Early Myceneans, which although they LOOK great actually don't game that well together being from two completely different periods of history. So, to correct this I'm going to put together a Alexandrian army and a Hittite one (to match up each of the other two respectively) which I am hoping will see them actually take to the table for some gaming action after a long absence.

I'm also excited that in addition to the Flames of War there is also some interest in doing some games using the above scales from several Club members - I can't wait! Maybe we will be able to try one of the campaign games from either HotT or DBA if we can get enough players/armies together, certainly I already own most of what I will need to make up the armies. Time will tell!

Flames of War - Late War Russians vs Germans

Following the 40K Carnage game, despite winning the game I found I was rapidly losing interest in GW generally (their current business practices annoy me) and 40K specifically (I don't like where the current game is at, and the confirmed reports of a new edition less than two years after the previous one were the last straw). The answer lay in returning to the world of 15mm miniatures; the first game I did since that decision was a 1500pt Late War battle using Flames of War, my Russians vs Ethan's Germans. I took a standard Strelkovy Battalion with armor and artillery support while he took an Armored Panzergrenadier Company with artillery support and a lone Tiger-I. We setup the table using some JR Miniatures roads, the GF9 Russian Battlefield in a Box set plus various hills, fields and trees from the terrain box.

Surprisingly he played very conservatively; his Tiger stayed mostly at the back while my T-34/85s cowered behind the hill/tree line on my left. Fortunately while this was going on the rest of my army were able to destroy all his halftracks and force his artillery from the table; luck certainly wasn't on my side though with my only unit losses coming from a Rifle Company that failed it's Rally test, failed the Commissar reroll and then shot the Commissar before running off the table! I also failed to range in my artillery three times which would have caught the Tiger under the template and the hail of shots I fired at it from the T-34s all bounced off the front (as a result of this game I proceeded to assemble and prime a unit of three ISU-122s which should have the firepower to make a dent in it! Just need to paint them now lol). Anyway, this was a very fun game, neither of us was especially competent with the 3rd Ed rules but we managed and the emphasis for us both was just enjoying the experience.

Between this and a recent game between Ethan's Germans and Chris' Americans there is growing interest in Flames of War at the club, with several onlookers asking about the game. We are trying to see if we can get it in at the store but what initially seemed to be a much more reasonable company to deal with than GW (their literature said there was no required stock level or ongoing stock check every week) turns out to have been untrue, with it now looking like the store will need to get in over $1,000 worth of product just to open the account and with regular stock checks - despite the interest, this is primarily a comic book store we play at and there is NO WAY this is going to fly. Oh well Battlefront, looks like you shot yourself in the foot there as there were several of us (including a couple of newbies that have definite armies they want to collect, not the generic stuff BF is insisting the store carry) that would have ordered a nice amount of product direct from the store if they had been able to place special orders. Your loss!

40K Carnage game (March 2014)

Having dropped the cash on the Carnage dataslate (complete waste of money, btw - unlike the Warhammer Fantasy 'Triumph & Treachery' multiplayer expansion which is *excellent*) four of us got together to play a multiplayer game last March. We ended up with Tau, Tyranids, Orks and my own Imperial Fists on the table. The Tyranids kicked things off strongly by infiltrating two small units of Genestealers into strong positions, and then the Hive Tyrant somehow absorbing an entire turns' worth of Tau firepower without taking a single wound! The Fists and the Orks exchanged some fire before the Orks decided to take their chances with the Tyranids while they were otherwise occupied.

As the battle progressed the Marine flyers came on and forced off the Tau Broadside team before being torn to piece by the Hive Crone; the Orks proceeded to do a number on the Tyranids (fairly surprising to all involved!), the Mawloc popped up in the middle of the Tau and between them and the Marines forced them into defeat. Then on literally the last turn of the game the Terminator squad finally appeared with the Fists commander, deep struck perfectly right on top of the objective and basically were immovable by anything that came at them - they managed to ground the Hive Tyrant then blow it away with twin-linked Bolter fire. Good game but I was very lucky to get the win!

After this I ended up, between all the events I already mentioned in my previous post and the avalanche of stuff coming out of GW, getting very disillusioned and deciding to take a break from GW. Next up - Flames of War and DBA/Hordes of the Things :)

Random musings on a bad year so far....and a new beginning

Been a while since I updated this blog so I'm going to throw out a few random musing here concerning the current state of my gaming and other stuff. Following the previous blog entry covering the big siege game last Hurricon I continued to play Warhammer Fantasy, and once the new Dark Elf book came out I dusted off my old school Citadel all-metal army and proceeded to wreck some face at the club - this is a nasty, nasty list! I even picked up some of the new (incredibly expensive, even for GW) models and assembled them but somewhere around here I lost interest in painting caused by worry over the increasingly poor health of my Dad in the UK. This situation unfortunately did not improve and my Dad passed at the end of January, which was something of an emotional hammer blow as I got my love of painting and military history from my Dad and anything I painted I always loved to show him and get his opinion and commentary.

After this no matter what I tried I couldn't generate hardly any enthusiasm to pick up a brush; this culminated in an abortive attempt to paint some 28mm Perry French Napoleonic figures using the Army Dip method in an attempt to speed things up (this has previously worked really well for both my Beastmen army and my Warlord Games ECW Royalist army). However, they looked so bad when I was done that I ended up stripping the paint off them and throwing them back in the box until such time as I feel able to break them out again (it was at this point I made the decision that whatever I painted I wanted to achieve results that "I would be proud to show my Dad"). The general lack of interest in doing anything hobby related lasted for a couple of months; I would break out some minis, look at them, ponder doing some painting then ultimately just put them away again. In an attempt to kickstart things I broke out the 40K and played a couple of games with my Imperial Fists, winning both the games I played, however I still couldn't build any enthusiasm to paint anything new to add to my armies. I also played and very much enjoyed some Flames of War, with my Late War Russians (actually Mid War Russians dragged kicking and screaming into a Late War list) beating a fairly static Late War German Panzergrenadier list. Then about three weeks ago the completely unexpected and sudden sickness of one of my dogs (who we ended up having to put to sleep after a diagnosis of a ruptured spleen) dealt us another emotional bombshell; a combination of all of the above emotional trauma, the avalanche of new printed material issuing forth from GW on a seemingly weekly basis plus the increasingly ludicrous prices being charged by GW led to me turning away from GW completely.

Since then and over the last few weeks I have found myself embracing the much more reasonably priced and unbelievably wide-ranging world of 15mm figures instead. Now, regarding 15mm figures, I'd been painting and playing with these on and off for many years over the last couple of decades, however over the last few years they had fallen into disfavor due to their perceived small size (from my own painting perspective and aging eyes) and the glitz and glamor of Games Workshop and their graphically impressive models and books. Since picking them back up, though, they've experienced something of a renaissance in my gaming life and right now I'm busy working on several 15mm (and 6mm here and there, I just love how 6mm armies LOOK on the table) different projects simultaneously. I've even managed to get some of the guys at my local club interested in doing 15mm and 6mm fantasy and there are several folks working on Flames of War armies right now.

In summary, right now GW is out of the picture for me (definitely 40K, although the possibility exists that I could be talked into a game of Fantasy again) and 15mm is in. I hope to load some pictures of some of the games described above soon and get this blog moving again....time will tell!

Bob