[PatG]

Lovely

[PatG]

I get my dinos from the dollar store. I recall seeing some really big ants and grasshoppers as well in the 6″ range.

Now I want to game Robert Aprin’s The Bug Wars

[PatG]

That’s a nice increase.

[PatG]

A cad I tell you, a blasted cad sir!
A unit commander has jilted the colonel’s daughter. His unit must move to attack every turn until destroyed.

Old school tie
A unit in close combat’s commander went to the same school as the commander of a supporting unit. The supporting unit must move to “rescue” the first.

Not one of us….
A unit in close combat’s commander is a grammar school boy possibly jumped up from the ranks. A unit moving or firing to support has its orders cancelled.

Play up and Play the Game!
You must allow your opponent to re-roll any one failed dice roll.

Captain Nolan.
An single enemy order has one part reversed. If the order says “Advance at full move towards the enemy infantry” It can be changed to either “Retreat”, “half-move” or “Artillery”

Thousands of them sir!
One native unit appears on the board edge of the controlling player’s choice.

War Correspondent
A designated unit has a war correspondent and possible future prime minister attached. Inspired to glory, they get +1 (on a d6 or system equivalent) to one die roll during the game. Ideally this should be a saving throw of some sort.

Logistical Incompetence
All civilized troops fighting a battle in an extreme climate (hot, cold, wet etc.) drop one morale level because an officer decided to leave environment specific equipment or uniforms on the transport.

Following the regulations exactly
One European unit can’t fire for one turn because the ammunition boxes are screwed shut and the tool to open them is missing.

[PatG]

Cooking – it got me my wife 🙂
Reading – mostly historical research right now but I am a long term SF addict.
Historical Sabre Fencing – Rowarth and Le Marchant – not sport fencing but not quite HEMA either.
Re-Enacting War of 1812 British Cavalry (see above)
Boardgames, Military Euro and other.
A small number of computer games.

A bunch of other activities that come up from time to time

[PatG]

Oh we’re doing intros? I’m Pat usually know as PatG. I used to hang out on WD3 but now I’m on another smaller board and here.

Usual story for those of us in our early 50’s – Britains, Airfix, AH, SPI, D&D, AD&D, WH – second ed, Traveller, Micro-armour, Work, school, marriage, work, family, work and a very long gaming dead space. Got back into tabletop gaming in 2009 with DBA and DBMM (Go Ancient Brits!), though I haven’t played much of that recently. Current games are Soldier’s Companion – Space 1889 Mass Battle, Chain of Command – Home Guard and FJ in 28mm, Canadian Motor Platoon and assorted bad guys in 20mm plastic, Gruntz, IHMN, and a little Aeronef and I am converting some Baccus ancients for Warmaster.

[PatG]

Ok so I would suggest you start with an honours BA in history, with a minor in stats, work through your masters in 20th century Military History then after completing your doctorate in WWII Operational Science, get a squad of undergrads to do the digging as part of a research project. That’s about the only way I can see such a single book being written. Either that or being Warren Buffet and hiring a squad of History Doctorates to do the digging for you….

Seriously though, I would find the official European theatre war history for the country you are interested in and start there.

[PatG]

I enjoy Anthony Beevor – his book D-Day: The Battle for Normandy would be of interest to you.

Can you clarify exactly what you are looking for? It’s a massive area of study at many different levels. I can point you in the direction of a couple of Canadian Regimental war diaries which go into an excruciating level of detail but then you would need the German ones as well to get the full picture. If you are looking for Divisional level history, then there are a lot more of those about.

Give us a bit more detail of what you want to get of the books and we can make better focused recommendations

[PatG]

Looks interesting – how does it compare with Harpoon?

[PatG]

Not Connard Sage wrote:

Bit of an odd question. If your main interest is, say, Napoleonics then a side project of WWII in Western Europe 1944 might be a bit tricky without buying more paint…

But by way of an answer, I buy paint as required. Hang ‘making do’

I’m cheap, but I’m not that cheap.

Now that’s a different circumstance. For historical projects, I will buy at least the base uniform colours and I will always use model paints for flesh tones. I still find I have to mix and match to get some of the colours I need. For early war green FJ jump smocks, I used a bottle of somewhat decent acrylic craft paint that just happened to be the right colour. Other substitutions are Vallejo Russian Uniform for British webbing and GW catachan green for British helmets and hardware.

As the question asks though, SF factions usually wind up as variations of real world military so the paints are the same, Ancients get earth tones and muted colours often using a wet palette to ensure variation. I’ll use anything on hand for them though, usually tinting a better quality base colour with a cheaper paint.

Fantasy and the a-historical parts of VSF get whatever I think is appropriate. For my martians that meant dollar store yellow ochre skin but I wound up with so many figures to paint that I ran out and had to buy a tube of student grade (but much better quality) artists acrylic paint.

Terrain gets the cheapest paint possible with dollar store acrylics and hardware store miss tints being favourites.

[PatG]

Two One Delta*, later Two One Charlie Niner. We infantry types didn’t muck about with fancy call signs.

*yes Delta. Most of our reserve section signed up 6 months ahead of the usual “summer camp” recruitment cycle so we were set aside as a fourth section in the platoon for training purposes. Most of us went on to reg force, took commissions or were made section commanders when the section was broken up. Sadly turnover was high in the ’80’s.

[PatG]

Matching colours is a fool’s errand. Even with modern paint and dye chemistry, there can be a huge variation in “standard” colours due to different lots and fading. It gets a lot worse as you go back in history. As a re-enactor and wargamer one of my pet peeves is that units in both are uniformly equipped with kit of identical colour and no with mending or patches.

[PatG]

I am cheap so I use what is on hand.

[PatG]

Most impressive.

[PatG]

Ooooh logistics… I haven’t heard of it but now I am intrigued

[PatG]

I would liken it to herpes – an irksome infection picked up from interacting with other human beings.

[PatG]

Followed. Love me some skellies.

[PatG]

15mm and using a crap camera – even then I had to muck around a bit in GIMP.

This figure is from the RAFM War Hounds of Sirius set that used to be old Traveller Vargr. I wanted something different from the usual puppies and decided to base them on the African Painted dog – Lycaon Pictis. I was able to work most of the dogs natural behaviours into their Gruntz stats – never ever shoot their medics. 😉

Edit – working on displaying the images directly but it is getting late – please stand by (or click the link)
Edit – Edit got it working
Edit^3 BBcode – why do you hate italics?

[PatG]

Facebook is primarily a social tool for connecting with family and friends. With my first FB account, I got sick of the bs deleted it and manged to ,stay off for about 4 months before family event planning forced me back on. Since then, I have been (relatively) selective in who and what I follow. It seems to work out well.

Yahoo groups used to be good but are now a dog’s breakfast. Google+ seems to be dying off, though I prefer the interactions over there. Overall I prefer a good forum though – they tend to be self-selecting.

[PatG]

Those look great – especially for a first “fast and dirty” attempt.

[PatG]

I would really like to see a generic fantasy mass battle game with more options than HotT but less lock-in to background specific detail than Warmaster. Second ed WHFB was nearly perfect for small battles – but I am looking for something with a few more units and unit sizes that show off the density advantages of 6mm. Warmaster is good and has a thriving community but it is locked into its own world.

[PatG]

Already followed – great to see the Stronghold back

[PatG]

I rather like the 50’s looking one. I love Japanese mechs but so much on the market is stuck on that aesthetic that it is nice to see a change.

[PatG]

Wow – that looks great!

[PatG]

Well done, I shall be grabbing a copy for future reference,

[PatG]

Nice work

[PatG]

Rather than creating a bunch of posts, I thought it best just to tack onto this thread. Over the last while I have been working on more dinos for future hunts:

More on My Blog

[PatG]

Nice work – they look great painted up.

[PatG]

Real life is a never ending stack of interrupts. 😉

There’s at least one non-Magic game that uses that same mechanic

[PatG]

I second it – You Don’t. When my girls were your’s age, a career counsellor told me that “Go to work, come home, dinner, kids to bed, tv, crash – repeat” is normal for families with young children. I did no gaming during that time – I was too busy being a parent. As the years rolled on things got better until in their pre-teen years, I was finally able to restart my lead collection. We also started a family D&D game which lead to a little painting on their part. They both wound up DMing for their friends and my 20 year old is actively involved in an online Rogue Trader rpg so something must have rubbed off.

The teen years were better. Understanding that living in a house with three women has its challenges, my wife had a new garage built as my man cave, and gave me permission to retreat there as needed. With the girls now grown up and leaving the house, it’s bittersweet – I am sad to see them go, but boy have I made a lot of progress on the lead pile.

[PatG]

Stroezie wrote:

Oh thanks Michael,

I finaly convince myself that a swarm of stirges is impossible at this scale and now…..

Oh no!!! The madness…. Aaaahhhh!!!!!

Houseflies with thin skins of putty and little beaks added on?

[PatG]

If you price it out as modules, it’s less painful. Bridge, engine room and one corridor = $26 – and you can expand from there.

[PatG]

Very nice. Aden is one of my “some day” projects.

[PatG]

Nice work!

[PatG]

Thaddeus Blanchette wrote:

I think a problem you might have with PVA is that it shrinks as it dries and this might pull your river into weird shapes. You might want to try what the Yanks call “wood glue” instead. This does bot shrink as it dries.
….

Apart from hide, milk and fish based glues, most cabinet maker’s / wood glue is just high quality PVA. I have had no problem with shrinkage as long as I stay away from the dollar store/pound land varieties.

Speaking of which, I just found this very thick PVA on the Lee Valley* tools site. It’s Titebond so it should be easily available elsewhere and for less.

*Lee Valley caters to carpentry oriented retired gentlemen with too much money in their wallets. Top notch stuff but you pay for it.

[PatG]

I have to agree with decision points and player involvement in all parts of a turn – not just the bit where they move and shoot their stuff. I ran an IgoUgo convention game where initiative was diced for every turn – of course one side got a run and the players on the other side were left doing nothing for far too long. Lesson Learned.

Campaigns or a decent morale system to prevent fights to the last figure are also high on my list.

[PatG]

Panzer Ballet – There was an old (SPI?) WWIII board wargame that tried to combine ATGM, helicopter, vehicle and foot movement. Each turn was only a few seconds long which allowed you to steer your TOW across the board but it also required tanks and foot to accumulate movement chits until they had enough to move one 50 meter hex. Good idea but very clunky and made for very, very slow games.

Many black powder era games feature artillery reload times with heavy pieces especially firing every other turn or less often. This can lead to some interesting timing issues especially when cavalry out of sight but withing charge range is involved. There is a recent game, whose name escapes me, in which orders are given using cards with elites acting on the order cards immediately but regulars following the cards the turn after they were played.

GDW’s Striker SF combat game required regular units to be given clear orders at the beginning of the game (e.g. advance to hill 420, dig in and hold). The player/commander would have to take specific action to change those orders, only had so many things that could be done in a turn and of course had to deal with communications difficulties. It’s a great idea but it can suffer a bit from the DBx Ancients problem where the forces are lined up and let go with minimum player intervention. It does however build upon the long, and sometimes hated, tradition of written rules. There are other ways of achieving the same goal such as the turn by turn pre-plotted movement of Wooden Ships and Iron men – and now I guess X-wing.

[PatG]

I have a very soft spot for H. Beam Piper. He’s not politically correct though. Uller Uprising is a favourite – being based on the Sepoy Rebellion it ties into VSF rather nicely but also retains a hard SF feel. Space Viking is also good, this time blending hard SF with space opera. It’s best used as for ideas for a campaign background.

Most of his work is available for free from Project Gutenberg and in audio book format from Librivox.

[PatG]

There are a couple of ways of thickening PVA. Leaving the bottle open is the obvious route but funnily enough freezing the bottle can also thicken it (leaason learned from Canadian winters). Neither method is easy to control though and I wouldn’t recommend them.

Another option is to look for artists modelling paste. These are essentially acrylic medium (paint with no colour pigment) with a filler mixed in to stiffen it and allow it to hold its shape. Pricey though.

I have had good success with mixing PVA and dried spent tea leaves to make hedges for 6mm bases. They looked really good and held their shape well, but I am not sure if you could do a 28mm sized river bank with it – you would have to drink a lot of tea. A friend did something similar making monster figures out of used coffee grounds and Gorill glue. I have done other basing work with PVA mixed with sand but that does tend to slump a little before it dries out. I have also used baking soda as a filler / texturing agent – sculpt the soda to the desired contours and set with drops of super glue. Works great for snow and ice but is not flexible at all.

A final option is Oogru – the do it yourself version of Sugru. It is a silicone based modelling clay made by mixing silicone caulking with cornstarch. See this link for more details: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-To-Make-Your-Own-Sugru-Substitute/

Building off of this you may be able to experiment with PVA and cornstarch to avoid working with silicone caulk.

[PatG]

Another great set – well done sir – maybe that rust monster was bingeing on paladin plate.

[Author]

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