A while ago Fréderic Machu did invite me and some friends to do some minature photo shooting for his upcoming rulebook Congo. Tilman was so kind to recommend us to Fred, since he knew about our Darkest Africa Campaign a while ago. So we did some pictures for the rulebook in two sessions with our friends with Africa miniatures. It was really a great time and we were very happy to see most of the pictures in the wonderful rulebook.
Personally the rule book really hooked me and I am preparing my own African Kingdom column with the wonderful miniatures by Wargames Foundry.
Here you see a quick shot of my first models, which are my first test for dark skin and african soil and vegetation. I think there is still some more color expression possible, but I will try to improve that with the next models.
The shields are painted on both sides, an important detail I luckily read on Dakka Dakka.
So the first Warriors were really fun, the shield designs were inspired by real Azande shields. Since this is roughly 20% of a full column I am pretty sure that we can play soon.
With the publication of SAGA Crescent & Cross plans erose to beef up my Norman SAGA armie with some Crusader elements. First addition are the pilgrims. I have chosen to paint armed and umarmed pilgrims and some models from other blisters of the Perry Crusader range. It was important to me to depict them as strange group of people with various backgrounds including some, who own at least a shield and a spear and some who just carry a sleeping bag or some wealthier guys who actually want to see Jerusalem. All should look somewhat fanatic as they were.
Boys, it has been a really long time since the last post. Actually has to do something with the little fact that 2 little girls are living with us now. My twin daughters are 10 months old and I am kind of busy since their birth. However here is a paintjob I did for the 100 year anniversary of the start of the Great War. We decided in our club to reactivate our trench gaming table and to learn how to play „Through the Mood and the Blood“ by ToFatLardies Gaming Club. We are not sure if this will be the system of our choice, but it is a start.
We already had one game but we made plenty of mistakes so it is to early to give any comments on the system. Here is what I have painted.
The MG 08 is a model by Great War Miniatures I painted them as a late war unit since the machine gun is painted with camo. The helmets should have the same pattern but I decided to go with grey ones, since this would look to busy. Sometimes I make decisions based on design.
Way back our club Spieltrieb Frankfurt presented a WW1 game on the german Wargamingshow Tactica. I painted some additional models since we plan to play „Through the mud and the blood“ by too fat Lardies. Once I painted the new models I was tired about my green background which was not appropriate for the historical background of the late war models.
Therefore I created four elements for picturing my models: A background print, which is a colored version of an historical image, a hill segment with barbed wire, a trench section with a fire step and a wall section with sandbags on top.
The first photo shooting was quite good. The elements profed to be quite variable, it is possible to use them in different angles and combinations.
The trench raiders rally before the assault.
The Stormtroopers march to their assault perimeter.
Actually this is one of the first finished armies on unfinished armies. The last two units I wanted to paint are the hungarian Bofors and a second objective.
After collecting hungarians for now three years I finished my mid war hungarians with the core troops for a Lorried Infantry company and Tank company.
The hungarian Bofors for mid war need to get an head swap with the german or hungarian heads available from Battlefront. Meanwhile there are Bofor Anti Air Emplacements available, which have special rules for late war. Painting these models is very time intensive, since the guns have many peaces, and I painted ammo boxes, crews, gun carriages and guns separately.
The hungarian Bofors seemed to be used without the gun shields. Battlefront wrote, that there were some shields which looked different from the british versions coming with the miniatures. In Flames of War the two guns with the command team are available for 50 points, which is very attractive from a army composition point of view.
For the Bofors I painted a present from Ekimdj, who designed this excellent emplacements or dug in markers for FoW. They were a fun to paint and show oil barrels, wooden boxes and sand backs with a very realistic look. I need to get more of them, since they add a lot of flavour to the scenery.
When playing hungarians it´s very essential to dig in to cope with the overwhelming sovjet mass. Hence it´s very good to have markers for this special hungarian skill available. Hungarians may repeat their dig in roll.
Another detail modeled by Ekimdj are the three oil barrels with the camo sheet on them. I painted them in the typical hungarian camo style.
For a very long time I planned a hungarian field kitchen as my second objective for playing FoW. I wanted this because in german field kitchens are called Gulaschkanone which literally means Goulash cannon. Although the famous goulash soup is a national dish in hungary but the phrase Gulaschkanone is not used. I couldn´t resist and had to build this model by modifying the horse cart model by battlefront. I added a chimney, which could be folded down and some round devices on my scratch built cart construction.
The original battlefront cart can be seen on the right. It is covered with a tarpaulin in hungarian three colour camouflage.
Since my mid war collection for infantry and tank company is finished, I painted some models, which are suitable for late war. I always liked the german Hetzer from a design perspective and urgently wanted a unit of them. Since mid war is done, this is the first late war model in my collection. The king is dead, long live the king.
For completing my Impetus Tournament army I painted another element of heavy cavalry. I have chosen a patrician family from Frankfurt Weiß von Limpurg and added many banners. The smaller banners were inspired by Frank Becker´s Lannister knights. The smaller banners were a fun to model.
This time I modeled my own lances using plastic bristles from brooms with greenstuff added for the hand guards. These are flexible which is very important for transport and gaming.
During the Tournament this element was our commanding element. We played with the Sigismund´s Imperials list and came 7th from 8 participants. Waldi was my team mate. We learned a lot and immediatly started to think about better combinations for our lists.
I rebased these norman infantry with kite shields in order to build the backbone of my SAGA warband. Unfortunately the battleboard focusses on bowmen and cavalry, what a pity that I have so much spearmen. But on the other hand I have beautiful miniatures to take pictures with.
During finalizing these miniatures the worst case of all painters took place: I took by accident the paint can instead of the varnish can. After that mistake I reduced the brown spray with Acetone and q-tips. It worked quite good, surely because I had varnished the models years before. But try if you managed to make that mistake, too.
The fortified farm house are from Hudson & Allen, I purchased them via EBOB miniatures. They were designed for scotish highlands but I think they also fit perfect for 1066. I painted the model in order to have a backdrop for the pictures and to have a dark medieval feeling on the battlefield.
I added pale static grass to the roofs. This came out very good, if you ask me. I tried cocos fabric with another roof, but these are far to thick although the color looks excellent.
All spears are made from Flexi Pikes.
The crossbowmen were painted this year in order to play SAGA. I did them in a hurry, but they came out not too bad.
In our wargaming club Spieltrieb Frankfurt we play occasionally Song of Blades and Heroes. Since we do this with Warhammer Fantasy miniatures, I decided to get some for myself and painted them. I have chosen the Skaven since I really like the style of the miniatures. The colors were inspired by the source book for skaven with plenty of color schemes. Although I usually rant about the book products by GW, this one is really a good idea with tons of artwork.
I painted the fur by hand with single strokes in several colors which came out really good as you might see on the arm of the rat in the front on the left side. The mage was painted by my club collegue Kerstin, as a very good deal unpainted miniatures for one painted miniature. Thanks a lot for this beautiful addition to my collection.
With the few miniatures I decided to build some foto set scenery elements in order to compose more exiting pictures. Learning from Frank Becker I decided to do similar setups but my challenge is, not to use Photoshop for generating great composits. I did three stripes of grass, a couple of rocks (made from excellent Ceramine Rocks by Rusus) and a background. The colour concept of dark dusty volcanic earth with yellow grass was followed both in basing and scenery elements.
I hope you like the composition, taking pictures this way and trying to tell a story in the picture is really interesting. I really need to borrow some oponent miniatures from some mates in order to have battle scenes, too.
Colours
Since I was asked how I painted the Skin of the rats, I just post here a scan of my colour note book.
At the Beginning of the year I played SAGA with Wraith and really liked it. This was an excellent excuse to paint some more of the Norman knights. These models are part of my basing nemesis. Initially they were based for Warhammer Historical, but I did not really fell in love with either the basing and the system. Now I painted them including a model which depicts my Alter Ego Tankred of Tarent with some modifications to make him a knight from Silicy.
The first three SAGA games with my Norman Warband were great fun and I will add some more pictures of the warband in the near future.
I did not post for ages. There was a lack of hobby time and I was unwilling to take pictures until some additions to the picture scenery were made. Frank Becker did inspire me very much to change the picture style a little bit and these are the two first pictures looking a little bit more like paintings. However I think I will try much more to make the pictures a story of their own.
For those of you interested in setups I added this picture of my desktop. The idea of adding grass elements to the front was taken from Frank Becker.
Yesterday ElComandante and me had a nice game together with Thorsten, who gave us helping hands with the 3.0 version of the Flames of War Rules. You need to know that learning rules is a matter of years for ElComandante and me. Therefore we now established a rules corner with big prints of the rule summaries, where you can think of your mistakes, if somebody sends you there.
My first impressions of the rule system were very good. We had several situations where changed rules applied. I will now give you a short summary of what happened and why it felt intuitive and correct.
We played the reworked cauldron mission, which saw changes in the setup area. The cauldron now is at one long table edge, which I like very much and the defender has delayed reserves. Since the attacker has reserves too, there is less material on the table at the beginning. As far as I remember the old cauldron saw incredible much stuff on the table at the beginning.
The new setup was quite good for ElComandante since he had an entire maximum unit of Kartjushas across the Don, and an heavy mortar platoon (anybody happens to know if that is possible?). Since this leads to an devastating template ElComandante was initially lucky with the die result of the cauldron mission.
Since I decided some seconds before we rolled the dice for a scenario that I will field tanks and not an Assault Pioneer Platoon I cursed some times. A minefield could have been helpful against a tank company. However I fielded a hungarian Gépkocsizó Század with 2 platoons infantry, 1 anti tank platoon, 1 weapons platoon, 1 Artillery platoon and 1 tank platoon. I decided to start in the cauldron with two infantry platoons and 1 antitank platoon in immediate ambush. I chose to use off board artillery as ElComandante did.
I decided to act very defensive, which is the usual choice for infantry in a cauldron. ElComandante attacked with infantry and tanks at my left flank. He rolled both units available at the start in the same segment.
Hungarian infantry in the cauldron
Now it came to the first changes in terms of rules. I was able to let my anti tank guns go to ground. If guns do not shoot or move they now have a 3+ save and are gone to ground. Therefore I could position the anti tank guns at the edge of a wood and I could wait, until the tanks attacked my infantry in close combat. Before that rule change it was possible to shoot down anti tank guns with tanks especially when the range of the tanks exceeded that one of the guns. Now it´s less easy for an attacker to get rid off the guns.
Since there were enough options for my opponent to put pressure on my guns with artillery the change felt good. Now it is possible to have guns on the table if there is no ambush option.
First sovjet assault on the hungarian positions.
The next changes came to live when the first assault on my right flank with the first reinforcements took place. ElComandante attacked rather quickly with a T34 company. The new rules are very intuitive since only teams with enemies in 30cm distance may move into the assault, and only teams with enemies in 20cm may shoot defensive fire. Congratulations for these excellent changes. This reduces cheesy movements in FoW by 80% I think. In our case the attacker´s dice where unwilling to win and the T-34 lost the first attempt, which was not very likely. One tank was bailed out, the company had not the morale to attack again and lost one vehicle in combat.
On my left flank the infantry with lots of submachineguns rushed towards my positions. I have chosen to let my infantry fire with the help of two heavy machine guns attached from the weapons platoon. Since I faced only one infantry platoon I decided to change the position of the third machine gun. A rule change made that happen because not the whole second platoon was treated as having moved, only that specific gun team. I moved this one in the woods and therefore had a entire infantry platoon gone to ground on my right flank. A very good change!
With a lucky shot from my artillery I was able to achieve an delay in the advance of the russian Sherman tank company. ElComandante had to reassign a company commander with his Bataillon commander, which draw some movement and diminished the amount of shots I had to suffer. At this flank the changed rules we used a lot were, that tanks may shoot over stationary infantry, which ElComandante used a lot. Same is for gun teams, which also applied, since there were two Maxim machine guns at that flank and a lot of tank rider infantry.
In parallel ElComandante searched the decision on the right flank again. But he was not able to kill any infantry therefore I broke off. In my turn artillery shot a barrage on the tanks, after that I moved the guns through the woods and was able to take down another tank. The movement of light, medium and heavy guns has increased, which brings far more flexibility for infantry based armies.
When fighting a russian infantry company or even more of them it might be very interesting, that the rule of mass only applies for teams that rush into assault. This means, you need to carefully move your russian infantry in an assault in order to have enough teams in action who count. It is a big difference for defending troops to pin down an assault by hitting 5 times or 15 times. It took me two rounds of shooting to get his infantry horde down to the interesting number, which was very important on my left flank.
The modified hen and chick rule was appreciated since movement is now a bigger option for Soviets. They may shoot during movement of 30cm at +1. This is not brilliant since the Hungarians are veterans, but it feels better and leads to a more dynamic style of gaming.
Although ElComandante was extremly unlucky that evening we both liked the new rules. The game was finally a major win for the defending Hungarians in the cauldron and ElComandante failed to use his advantage of 400 Points of tank support. In our campaign this victory for sure will be an important success. On the other hand I am very sure, that ElComandante will learn to combine infantry and tanks very soon.
Having played Flames of war for quite a while I am very happy to say that once more the authors proofed to have an improvement in mind and not the optimisation of sales in another way but to have satisfied customers. Well done Battlefront!
If you happen to read this article I am curious which is your new favourite rule change!
