Buck's Blog

For our Mars game, I wanted some dramatic, painted desert-like rock formations.  I wanted ones that could also be used in cowboy games.  I enlisted the help of my daughter, who enjoys helping with terrain but doesn’t care much for painting figures.

We cut 3/4″ insulation foam into irregular shapes.  After gluing these together, we painted the “rock formations” with brown latex paint from the hardware store.  We then dry-brushed the layers in different colors to give them that stratified look of the American west.  I think the final result is pretty good.

While making the painted-desert hills, we also made felt-covered hills to match the copper canyon ground cloth we’ll use for the Mars game.  You can sort of see these in the background of the previous two photos.  I don’t like sculpted, flocked hills, because they don’t match the ground cloth.  I don’t like sculpted hills under the ground cloth because it is hard to tell where the contours begin in rules in which there is a penalty for each elevation level.  Figures also tend to topple over when placed on those hills, particularly if the figures are individually mounted.  My technique is to make hills that have a slight slope on the edges, but too steep to tempt players to place figures on them.  The result is “wedding cake” hills that match the terrain.

Chris and I continue to paint figures for our 20-layer GASLIGHT Mars game for Historicon.  Early this morning I finished my second unit of Red Martians.  In this picture they are fighting off a white ape.  All figures are Bronze Age.

This picture shows a slightly different view of the figures.  I painted the skin a light orange and then applied Windsor Newton nut brown ink.

The white ape will act as a “wandering monster” in the Mars game.

Ironclad miniatures makes these Jawa-looking figures for science fiction games.  I like them as Martian desert raiders.

Ironclad makes a couple of different types of cannons to go with these figures.

The ground cloth for our game is a color, called copper canyon.  We used a variety of spray paints to give it a mottled look.

 

Last night Sam and I started working on these eagles.  The Battle of Five Armies box comes with three sprues.  I bought my two sets second hand and somehow ended up with 9 sprues, minus one figure.  I combined these with a bag of Eureka 10mm Elves riding eagles.  For LSNC: Fantasy, Ancients, and Mediaeval, this gives me five bases of eagles, one base of eagles and riders, and one eagle “brigade commander.”

These painted extremely quickly.

Now I’ve begun working on more 10mm Dwarves and about 20 figures to complete my needs for the Historicon Mars GASLIGHT extravaganza.

For the two people who follow this blog, you’ll know that I’ve been pushing hard to finish my Prussian corps.  I’m committed to running two Napoleonic games at Origins and a few more at Historicon.  The last bunch of figures I needed to finish to complete the I Corps from 1813-1815 was five units of Landwehr cavalry and the generals.  As it turns out, since we’ve decided that the Prussians need regimental commanders in the game, I am short a few Prussian generals.  I can substitute Russians or Austrians for my upcoming games, but I need to paint one more bag of Prussian generals before I am all done.

I’m going to concentrate on writing the rules now and beginning development of LSNC: Fantasy, Ancients, and Mediaeval before considering British and Spanish units or adding to my French, Austrian, or Russian armies.

After finish a bunch of Prussian 10mm cavalry, I was looking for a short project as a change of pace.  As we are beginning development of LSNC: Fantasy, Ancients, and Mediaeval, I’m slowly building my army for play testing.  Taking figures from one of the Battle of Five Armies boxed sets, above is a picture of three units of dwarves, and below is a picture of three units of human spearmen.

Chris asked the other day why I painted my human in different colors.  I want the option of either giving a player a “brigade” of human bowmen, or creating mixed “legions” with spearmen, bowmen, swordsmen, etc.  In this way, I can have a maroon legion, green legion, and blue legion of humans.

These 10mm fantasy figures on strips paint very, very quickly.  Up close, they certainly don’t look as nice as 28mm figures, but deployed on the table at arms length, they really look like units in battle formation.

Sam helped me finish a second ERLT farm house.  I had a previous post about the first one we completed, but Sam wanted me to take a picture of this second one to post.  She picked out the figures in front of the house from my “unarmed civilian” box.

A handful of HAWKs got together yesterday to game.  We ran a scenario with 1813 Prussians.  Actually I ran it twice, because the first run was a blowout after less than two hours, so we reset and started over.

In this play test, I wanted to try out three things:

• A new artillery rule
• Command and control for the Prussians
• A lot of cavalry in a battle.

Artillery rule:  Napoleonic rules design requires a careful balance between infantry, artillery, and cavalry as well as column, line, and square to get the proper “paper-scissors-rock” feel.  I was feeling that artillery was under powered and didn’t seem to have a large impact on the game.  I couldn’t figure out why the artillery seemed fine in the ACW version of Look, Sarge, No Charts, but that it felt wrong in the Napoleonic version.  In conversations with Sam Fuson and Dave Wood, I finally realized that it was about “formations.”  Neither the WWII version nor the ACW version have explicit representation of formations.  In the ACW version, a hit at long range merely accrues a morale check, not a hit.  I added a rule that says that long-range artillery (only!!) fire against columns or squares results in a hit as well as a morale check.  The math was okay, but I wanted to see how this worked on the tabletop.  I tried to test this two weeks ago at HAWKs night, but the way the scenario developed there was little long-range fire.  Yesterday we had a chance to really try it out.  The consensus was positive, so that’s how the rules will be written.

Those of you familiar with the Napoleonic Wars will know that the structure of the late-war Prussian army was three battalions to a regiment and three regiments to a brigade.  This gives a Prussian brigade nine battalions, closer to a French division.  This means that pitting a French division against a Prussian brigade involves about the same number of battalions, but the French have three order dice and the Prussians only one.  If the number on the Prussian order cube doesn’t come up on a card before the end of the turn, nothing in the whole brigade (division) acts.  That seemed okay, but on the other hand if the card is drawn, the whole brigade (division) acts at the same time.  This had two outcomes in the game: 1) in the attack, it was easier for the Prussians to manage their forces and 2) it took a Prussian player a long time to complete his activation.

In our second game yesterday, we added a regimental commander for the Prussians.  I was afraid this would give them too much tactical flexibility, but it didn’t seem to do so.  In fact, by having four dice for the brigade (division), one for each regiment and one for the brigade commander, it actually seemed to reduce the synchronization of the Prussian attack.   I’m pretty sure that’s how I’ll write the rules; however, while a Prussian brigade commander has a morale rating of 4 (typically), I think that I’ll make commanders of Prussian line and reserve regiments 4’s but landwehr regiments 5’s.

Finally, since I had finished a lot of Prussian cavalry recently, I wanted to put a lot of cavalry on the table and see how that worked.  I think the effect was about right.  When the French launched their brigade of six hussar and dragoon regiments at the French cavalry division of three chasseur regiments, there were a couple of turns of swirling melee before the Prussians broke through.  It seemed about right.  in the second running, the French cavalry was stymied by a line of Prussian squares.  A couple of French artillery batteries caused some damage, but there was no infantry to send forward to break the squares.  The effect was good, I think.

In summation, I’m pretty happy with the rules the way they are shaping up.  The play test games have been fun.  It is most gratifying to hear people who have sworn off Napoleonics games say they really like these rules.

I took a quick break from 10mm Prussians to try my hand at 10mm fantasy figures.  These are from the Games Workshop Battle of Five Armies starter set.  They are mounted for the under-development Look, Sarge, No Charts rules set for fantasy, ancients, and mediaeval warfare.  I always thought the old Ral Partha dragons were underscale compared to their 25mm figures.  I think the dragon looks about right compared to the infantry.

Because these figures are mounted on strips, they paint rather quickly.  GW recommends that you leave the strips on the sprues while painting them.  I have two BOFA sets that I bought second hand.  One set was till on the sprues, while the other was already removed.  I actually think they were easier to paint after being removed.

The standard base size for LSNC rules sets is 3″ wide and 1.5″ deep.  It takes four of the GW strips to fill a base at this size.  A BOFA set includes six strips of these figures (men with spears).  Two sets, then, have enough figures for three bases of spearmen.

Now back to Prussian landwehr cavalry!

I have been piddling with Prussian curassiers and Prussian artillery in 10mm for over a week.  The curassiers were the easiest, because they wore white tunics with gray pants.  They painted very easyily.  The artillerists were a little harder.  It’s much easier to paint the infantry figures on strips than the individual figures like artillerists and skirmishers.  To finish my Prussian 1st Corps for 1813, I just need to complete several regiments of landwehr cavalry.  I’ll being work on them this weekend.