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PatGParticipantCan you switch it off if it gets too spammy? If yes then give it a try.
Worth a shot.
PatGParticipantGet off my lawn.
No you get off my lawn!
PatGParticipantOne big ape – very nice.
PatGParticipantIn Her Majesties Name with the Sleeping Dragon, Rising Sun Supplement would be a good start. Low figure count but scale-able, lot’s of room for “Heroic”actions/skills and fast play.
PatGParticipantVery Gruntz-like – which is a compliment.
PatGParticipant….
So, yes, why weren’t these issues solved in preliminary testing?donald
Any group of play testers is going to be a very small sub-set of the eventual player base. Even they can only cover what they think of. Experience helps of course but you still can’t possibly cover every situation, every edge case that comes up. There’s a certain set of tournament WWII rules set I do not play where in one iteration the most cost effective use of one’s LMGs was to sell them and use the points to buy something else. It’s not a case you would expect to come in play testing since LMGs are such an integral and important part of the historical section. In the tournament environment especially, what is effective is far more important than what is accurate.
Similarly, DBx wound up falling prey to oddly angled formations and of course the buttocks of death. Any rational player with any understanding of and respect for the period simply wouldn’t do these sorts of things, so it slipped past testing and only became an issue when the rules were released into the wild.
PatGParticipantThey look great!
PatGParticipantGreat work Victoria
PatGParticipantNice!
PatGParticipantI would use it as a foundation of a 6mm army for the Old Striker rules. I can see many other purchases that would have to be made from you. The main use of course would be to justify these purchases to my lovely wife. I won the big expensive piece so I only need to by a few more things….
😉
PatGParticipantGood luck and best wishes for a speedy recovery!
PatGParticipantAll three of these have very heavy building components. I can spend many enjoyable hours just creating new vehicles and ships all without rolling a single dic
I like the building aspect and spend probably 99.9% of my hobby time either making models, painting them, creating background for my rules or thinking about those things.
Escapism more then gaming in terms of miniatures.
I get most of my gaming fix from consoles…While I also enjoy modelling, I was referring more to the design or economics aspects. You have a sub-compact car with so many spaces for components and so many pounds of weight capacity, and a budget of so many dollars. How do you go about balancing these constraints to make an effective or at least interesting design?
You can use story to drive the process the other way. A courier needs a ship to move a shipping container as far and as fast as possible while retaining enough armament to drive off any pirates. With the cargo as a given, how do you maximize the other factors? What options like fuel scoops or drop tanks will improve performance? Or – perhaps the best solution is to use an unmarked container, ship it commercially and hopes customs doesn’t catch it.
I find this design meta-game immensely satisfying and I have many, many ships, cars, tanks and space destroyers whose creation I remember fondly but will never see the gaming table. But then I am not normal. 😉
PatGParticipantGreat work!
PatGParticipantWell done Rhoderic!
PatGParticipantVery pretty
PatGParticipantA great many TV spaceship models used in filming use bits from plastic model kits. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble. IP wise I think you would be fine using generic or historical parts like Sherman drive sprockets but I would be very careful about using identifiable parts like 40k blasters. Another issue would be commercial production – you have a few pieces already that would cross the line if not for personal use only.
PatGParticipantDayum…..
PatGParticipantLittle baby GEVS! You madam, have an exceptional talent.
PatGParticipantTo provide others with a new and I hope interesting gaming experience with rules and miniatures they otherwise wouldn’t have access too. I have a big collection – why not share it?
PatGParticipantWell said Mike H!
Is it irritating? Sure but I don’t let it bother me.
PatGParticipantI had a platoon of Grizzly 6 wheel LAVs advance across an open field. I had done recon and found nothing, shot up the treeline to be sure, dropped smoke to be really sure – then got utterly destroyed by a couple of T-80s packing theoretical Soviet thermal imaging gear.
Next move – the table cracked up when I drove my lone Husky LAV recovery vehicle out to pick up the mess.
PatGParticipantDaaaaawwww….. So cute!
PatGParticipantThis very generous offer is very much in the need to have category.
Please find below my humble figures for your most worthy and excellent consideration:
You can see the other 300ish here: http://irregularwarbandfast.blogspot.ca/2016/05/martian-muster.html
They currently live all squashed up in a converted tool chest. Hardly a suitable residence for such noble warriors of Mars, such honourable soldiers of the Queen… Only you can prevent homeless lead….
PatGParticipantSo we should ask Michael if he is up for generic f/sf articles for the articles section here.
PatGParticipantAnimal Farm should be balanced out by something on McCarthyism. Fail Safe and Dr Strangelove should be introduced at the appropriate ages.
Edit: Next time read the list provided by the educational expert first. Great Resource!
PatGParticipantPatGParticipantLoving the battle slugs. Inspired by Mother of Demons?
EDIT: Worth it for the Harambe figure alone.
Edit Edit – so nothing from Doing it for Harambe actually goes toward Gorilla protection?
Hrmmmm
PatGParticipantSo I’m sort of jealous of people who can buy unpainted figures and play with them straight away.
And some of us are a little jealous of those who can sculpt and cast up entire ranges of unique figures. 😉
PatGParticipantI will paraphrase Sue Barker of WRG fame – If you don’t care enough to paint them – why should they fight for you?
PatGParticipantMost players I play with (and me too) consider ourselves 28mm wargamers (without more precision)….
Now that is an idea I find utterly alien for two reasons. First because 28mm is not a “scale” though 25mm is (1/72) 😉 The second is because I think you should tailor the scale of the figures to the scale of what you are trying to portray. Skirmish games work well with 25-32mm figures, platoon sized games with fire team sized units work well with single based 20/25/28’s or multi based 15mm, Company sized games with section sized units can look good 15s but start to shine with 6mm.
The idea that portraying a Napoleonic infantry Brigade with one light figure, one grenadier, an officer a flag bearer and a lone musket man all on one base is to me ridiculous, though this kind of unit is very popular for historical gaming. Do it in 6mm at the same frontage and it starts to look good. Similarly, one 1/56 StuG representing an entire Gruppe is just as pointless.
I will admit though to having a Saga Welsh army – single based in 6mm.
PatGParticipantI say that I am a wargamer. If pressed, I would side with “historical” only because that is the sort of game I play to learn about things or understand history. I am actually more invested in SF and VSF (which is aweird mix of colonials and fantasy) but see those more as my “fun” genres. You can of course learn about combined arms operations and the fundamentals of tactics through any game but it is simpler when constrained to real life scenarios and forces. SF is a little more flexible in that it often mirrors real life practice at the time the rules or work was created – vis Hammer’s Slammers.
PatGParticipantWatched it again last night.
Did they really use tracers so frequently?Let’s just say an American sports network added digital “tracers” to ice hockey pucks to make the game more interesting.
It was a fun movie in the same vein as Inglorious Basterds and 300 with about the same level of historical accuracy.
PatGParticipantInteresting idea – great area too – lots of options for interventions
PatGParticipantSo, is anyone going to enlighten me by telling what a miniature is supposed to be, if not a token?
It’s another facet to the hobby, a value add to the experience and with terrain a way to more easily achieve immersion in the game. I’m very much in the it’s a counter camp and have played many a game using bits of MDF with the unit name penciled on. While my figures are painted to a table standard I am comfortable with, I completely understand that painting miniatures has an appeal all of its own.
I would also say miniatures are a way to hack the game in terms of units and also bring more beauty to it. PanzerBlitz for example has chits with a fairly soulless outline and some very practical numbers printed on them. You can make your own for units not in the proscribed mix (I have) but even then your room for creativity is limited. System 7 Napoleonics was better in that you had coat and facing colours on the chits but even then it was sterile. You can’t really show the mud and blood that spattered the Old Guard at Waterloo on a blue and white cardboard chit but you can certainly do that with a box of Perrys and some pots of paint.
Finally, and this is certainly not for everyone, there is the question of the soul of a unit. One Imperial Star Destroyer counter is pretty much the same as any other in the same class but a model you have spent hours of time on takes on a character of its own. Becasue it is unique, the model can get a reputation for pushing the rebels hard or cutting and running at the first sign of trouble. It creates a story. For my VSF collection I painted up a unit of skirmishers and gave them all red caps as a unit identifier. But then I asked the question of why they had red caps and a whole back story came into being. When I needed another unit of the same figures, they got blue caps and a whole rivalry was born. I can actually get enjoyment out of the hobby by looking at figures sitting in their storage box. I don’t think you can do that quite so easily with chunks of card or MDF.
PatGParticipantIsn’t 6mm 1:300?
Yes it is, but the ratio of ground scale to figure scale is only 3:1 for 6mm as opposed to 10:1 for 15mm. Four 6mm figures on a base looks more like a proper formation than 4 15mm who look like they are square dancing. As Rhoderic notes, there’s less disbelief to willingly suspend.
PatGParticipantNice work. I think you have the weathering right for 6mm. Those quad walkers would make excellent bots in 15mm.
PatGParticipantI Am A Serious Historical Gamer! (whose main Historical army is a theoretical ideal British Home Guard platoon for use in scenarios from an invasion that never happened.)
Honestly though if you want to see a work of fiction look at any Late War German list for the rules set of your choice including my beloved Too Fat Lardies offerings. Puma? Check. JadgTiger? Check. +10 for SS? Check. Sturmgewehr with night sights for everyone! Check.
If you want another work of fiction look at ancients rules especially the sources in the back. “This army list was constructed entirely from two fragments of pottery and eight lines of a poem written 300 years after the fact.”
Apart from GW who have created a whole hobby just for themselves, war gaming is a very broad church. I do see compartmentalization but if others do not – that is the way it should be and a very good thing indeed.
PatGParticipantI’m about the same age as Henry and for me there is a perceived if not actual generational divide. Back in when I started playing miniatures there was not nearly the same level of rules and figure lock-in as there appears to be now. You bought a bunch of archers or goblins and used them with several sets of rules – including Warhammer FB (shock horror). Same for SF and historicals, a Sherman is a Sherman is a Sherman. Ancients were particularly flexible once WRG basing or multiples there of became standard.
Now the impression I get is that things are far more siloed – specific miniatures go with specific rules. Warhammer is the obvious example but there are others cough Halo cough. I must admit I was a little saddened to see IHMN – a game with a heavy design your own component – bring out companies specifically designed to sell miniatures.
Fluff is also a component especially for SF but also fantasy – you can’t really compare the figures and rules in one universe to those in another the background stories are too alien. This too creates compartmentalization. On a Gruntz forum – there was a recent question asking where the stats cards were for the units pictured in the rule book since it was a given in the questioner’s mind the the rules were written for those specific figures. Historicals tend to have fewer problems in this regard – a sherman is still a sherman with fixed historical performance – regardless of the rules. Even so, I have seen more than one new(er) generation gamer say they didn’t want to switch from FoW to CoC because while they like the rules, they didn’t wan to have to sell all their 15mms and re-buy in 28mm.
It’s mind boggling and gives the impression if not the reality that the SF and fantasy communities are at best fractured into tribes.
I will also add that the 15mm and 6mm communities seem to be more open and flexible than some others.
PatGParticipantLook up H. Beam Piper’s The Cosmic Computer (alt title Junkyard Planet) and Space Viking for similar scrapyard ideas.
Both are also on Librivox
PatGParticipantInspired by Malc Johnston’s sternwheeler for his Liu River and African games, I built a boat.
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