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Saturday night means it's time for CoC! I painted these Cape Town Highlanders a while ago for a clubmate, but didn't get around to take photos and write a proper blog. They're a combination of minis from a small obscure company that pretty much ran these as a kickstarter and didn't do much else afterwards, and conversions from Warlord's new plastic 8th Army box. It's a really odd army (Highlanders in the North African desert with kilts), but that's partly why I love it. The kickstarter force ended up not having everything I needed for support (or even SMGs), which is why I used the Warlord guys as well. They ended up working pretty well together. Instead I ended up with more sections than I needed, and the temptation to just expand it into a second platoon as well…. maaaaaybe with Footsore's extremely nice looking Highlanders? Who knows. Until then, they'll kick Kraut rear end in Tunisia while looking swag as hell.       https://krigetkommer.weebly.com/mediterranean-theater/cape-town-highlanders-part-3
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Apr 13, 2019 20:33
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| # ? Jun 12, 2024 06:43 |
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Those Highlanders are insanely good, you gotta get some in-game shots of them sometime.
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Apr 14, 2019 00:47
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Business in the front, party in the back. The mullet of kilts.
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Apr 14, 2019 00:54
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It's always time for CoC.
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Apr 14, 2019 01:55
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Beautiful work!
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Apr 14, 2019 03:18
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Did Vallejo take down their paint range compatibility charts?
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Apr 14, 2019 04:26
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Thanks! Yeah, I'm going to base my new Fallschirmjägers in tropical uniforms as well, and then I'll see if we can get a few games of them against each other, starring one of the handful of StuGs that reached Africa. I'll call it "snowflakes in the desert".
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Apr 14, 2019 11:29
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Solid job on the tartan. Looks great when you see the whole lot of them all regular like that.
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Apr 14, 2019 15:54
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How's the Warlord 8th Army Kit? On a semi-related matter, their winter Hungarians came out a lot less terrible than the regular dudes. Those faces...
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Apr 14, 2019 17:46
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The moldings are pretty poo poo, and the poses are straight out of an action movie. And they look like space marines next to Perry!
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Apr 14, 2019 18:22
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Was defending the honor of ye Bolte Actione and one grandpa got really mad that I claimed that Chain of Command needs houserules/2nd edition:quote:Wrong. You simply lack reading comprehension. The subtext for TFL games is: not for half-wits.
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Apr 16, 2019 12:41
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I'm impressed that he doesn't understand that the word "subtext" should not be applied to a collection of rules...
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Apr 16, 2019 13:43
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Ah, yes, berating the youth, a great way to engender them to the hobby. Enjoy faxing order forms, old man; without us young whippersnappers, your hobby goes the way of the dodo.
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Apr 16, 2019 13:49
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What the heck, there's alredy something like 6 pages of errata and a new morale mechanic in the 1940 Blitzkrieg expansion. (Plus some glaring omissions in the rulebook...) I still love the game, but it could use some polish. Boomer wargamers are about as oblivious as boomers everywhere else.
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Apr 16, 2019 14:26
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I remember my first game of CoC ground to a halt because we tried to resolve a rules ambiguity about bouncing grenades off walls
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Apr 16, 2019 14:32
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And the mine/wire/roadblock clearing rules work WAY better if you treat them like "Tasks" from Sharp Practice 2. And never mind mortar barrages... Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love Chain of Command. It is hands down my favorite miniatures wargame. But if you think it's perfect as-is, that just means you haven't played it enough to run into the cases where there are gaps or ambiguities.
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Apr 16, 2019 14:44
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That's just obnoxious. No game is perfect.
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Apr 16, 2019 14:50
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JcDent posted:Was defending the honor of ye Bolte Actione and one grandpa got really mad that I claimed that Chain of Command needs houserules/2nd edition: Please kickstart my new Wild West miniature game. The rulebook is just a copy of Blood Meridian with a sticky note on it that say "figure it out, dummy". MSPR $100 -- Honestly, even Bolt Action's rules could use another pass. I went to a tournament recently and there were gaming groups from the three local metropolitan areas present, and we discovered that all three gaming groups had completely different ideas about how certain rules worked. The tournament organizer had to make a ruling on it before we could proceed.
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Apr 16, 2019 14:50
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Cessna posted:That's just obnoxious. No game is perfect. And at the same time quote:
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Apr 16, 2019 14:56
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1. Can you bounce grenades off walls
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Apr 16, 2019 14:58
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2. What does a Comissar do?
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Apr 16, 2019 15:02
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quote:>There are a lot of things that aren't explained in the rulebook They made a 104 page rulebook that requires 28 pages of errata. I'm willing to bet that there's at least one more thing that wasn't explained in the rulebook.
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Apr 16, 2019 15:45
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Cessna posted:They made a 104 page rulebook that requires 28 pages of errata. Lol. Thats impressively dumb.
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Apr 16, 2019 15:49
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moths posted:2. What does a Comissar do? In their Errata they say: quote:Commissars. The role of the Commissar changed throughout the war and as such the role is not defined in the main rules. However, various interpretations of the Commissars role have been outlined on a number of Army lists and Pint Sized Campaigns. Full and complete details will be covered in the handbooks which will cover the entire war. Just LOL at that bullshit.
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Apr 16, 2019 16:04
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I'd rather that than the rule we all know they'd write otherwise.
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Apr 16, 2019 16:15
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Anarcho-Commissar posted:I'd rather that than the rule we all know they'd write otherwise. Sure, yeah. That said - the main rulebook has a Soviet list that is specifically a "Late War" list. Why not provide rules for the "Late War" Commissars that are in that list? Yeah, the role of commissars changed around the time of Stalingrad, but that's two years prior.
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Apr 16, 2019 16:31
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Class Warcraft posted:Please kickstart my new Wild West miniature game. The rulebook is just a copy of Blood Meridian with a sticky note on it that say "figure it out, dummy". That's easy, just use any old west ruleset, just make sure you're depressed and/or lose faith in humanity afterwards.
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Apr 16, 2019 17:40
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Anarcho-Commissar posted:I'd rather that than the rule we all know they'd write otherwise. TFL is probably the only game producer who doesn't do that. They can be prickly at times, but they generally get things right. My favorite iteration of their commissar rules treated him as a junior leader who counts as two models for morale purposes. But that certainly wasn't in the core book or the FAQ!
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Apr 16, 2019 17:56
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I know SA has done fan revisions of rules before, would anyone be willing to clean up the CoC rules? I have only played twice, and I am certain we got half the rules wrong.
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Apr 16, 2019 18:32
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Signal posted:I know SA has done fan revisions of rules before, would anyone be willing to clean up the CoC rules? I have only played twice, and I am certain we got half the rules wrong. The basic rules are ok, in general. The main reason why a second ed is needed IMHO: -A lot of rules are written in an unclear manner, or references stuff that are not in the rulebook (like the mentioned commissar). -The FAQ is quite big and should be folded into the main rules instead. -The army lists are completely FAQ:ed by now, and have evolved over time (does a German LMG team have two crew or three? etc.) -The vehicles in the support lists are all outdated and the community uses the Consolidated Arsenal instead (which is a google spreadsheet document linked to in an unstickied(?) thread on the forums) Some other things spring to mind that could be tweaked- heavy mortar barrages are overpowered in general, snipers should be able to put themselves on overwatch (is that in the FAQ by now?) and so on. My opinion is, and has always been, that the Lardies make some of (if not the) best core rules, but would be greatly helped by an editor, a more critical group of playtesters and a revision of the rulebooks that doesn't have them. They are not good at making anything close to balance in their games when they get into army lists and army-specific special rules, and they are downright bad at making scenarios. There are several scenarios in their rulebooks that are so unbalanced that they stop being fun, and some are simply unplayable. Famously, the first scenario in the CoC rulebook is one of the worst scenarios to showcase the game, which has probably put quite a few players off from it. But overall SP2 is much more solid than CoC as a rulebook, for example, and they've tinkered a lot in the 1940 book, introducing stuff that I think ought to be in the main rulebook in a second edition. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Apr 16, 2019 |
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Apr 16, 2019 20:07
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Yeah, you goons lead me to believe that CoC could use an SP2 treatment.
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Apr 16, 2019 20:11
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lilljonas posted:My opinion is, and has always been, that the Lardies make some of (if not the) best core rules, but would be greatly helped by an editor, a more critical group of playtesters and a revision of the rulebooks that doesn't have them. Yeah, they're like DBA back in the day. "Fifteen pages of rules, sixty pages of clarifications."
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Apr 16, 2019 20:40
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Part of it is that there's a difference between writing and technical writing. When you are writing rules for a game, you should be using technical writing. That means ironclad consistency when using terminology. Example: what constitutes a "unit" in CoC? Is it a squad (or "section")? A team? Does that team have to be stand-alone/detached, or does it still constitute a separate "unit" if it's within cohesion of the other component team of its squad? And is a Senior Leader a "unit" all by himself? CoC uses the term "unit" interchangeably to mean some or all of these things, and there are a few cases where it's not clear which it should be. And don't get me started about what it might or might not mean for a Senior Leader to be "attached" to a "unit." If you're writing rules, you need to use the same words the same way all the time. Infinity is a really good example of how this is (mostly) done right. For the most part, the answers to these questions can be sussed out by applying a little bit of logic and common sense, but it does mean that there will be variations in how different groups/clubs/individuals play the game. CoC isn't really competitively focused so maybe that's OK, but it does make pick-up games a little harder. The TFL forums are also generally very helpful in hashing out anything that's really fringe, with one important caveat: it makes me crazy when certain forum oldsters will answer someone's rules question with their own house-rule interpretation like it's god's own gospel (because they've been playing it that way so long it has calcified in their brains), then get all indignant when you call them on it.
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Apr 16, 2019 22:46
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Yeah, most of my gaming group comes from a way more technically edited background, M:tG and Malifaux. They tend to get stuck on the specifics of what is correct. Thank you for the responses guys.
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Apr 17, 2019 01:51
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moths posted:TFL is probably the only game producer who doesn't do that. They can be prickly at times, but they generally get things right. They do still have Ronson rules and insist that Soviet tanks universally lack radios throughout the war; there's a few things they fluff on. That said I did appreciate that the difference between green soviets and green germans is zilch (platoon org notwithstanding). Ilor posted:Part of it is that there's a difference between writing and technical writing. When you are writing rules for a game, you should be using technical writing. That means ironclad consistency when using terminology. Example: what constitutes a "unit" in CoC? Is it a squad (or "section")? A team? Does that team have to be stand-alone/detached, or does it still constitute a separate "unit" if it's within cohesion of the other component team of its squad? And is a Senior Leader a "unit" all by himself? CoC uses the term "unit" interchangeably to mean some or all of these things, and there are a few cases where it's not clear which it should be. And don't get me started about what it might or might not mean for a Senior Leader to be "attached" to a "unit." If you're writing rules, you need to use the same words the same way all the time. Infinity is a really good example of how this is (mostly) done right. The latter isn't unique to TFL, fwiw. I have endless arguments with people over things like TY (which is... better, if not perfect), over things that are crystal clear in the rules, but aren't how they imagine it should work. Honestly, I wish rules writers would just release their poo poo to larger crowds. The world is full of pedantic assholes like me who'll go "the rules say you lose foxholes when you Move and you don't Move when you make a blitz move so QED I have carried my foxholes with me" and then you can go "Oh, no, that's not how that works" instead of having a massive FAQ. But hey ho. spectralent fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Apr 17, 2019 |
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Apr 17, 2019 21:16
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Anyone played Lion Rampant? Got saga demoed for me but when I started looking for figures I kept falling for Gallowglass and Landsknechts...
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Apr 18, 2019 20:39
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zokie posted:Anyone played Lion Rampant? Got saga demoed for me but when I started looking for figures I kept falling for Gallowglass and Landsknechts... EDIT: But I just picked up Dux Brittaniarum and holy poo poo does it look fun.
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Apr 18, 2019 22:36
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I'm working on some stuff for Mortal Gods (a quasi-historical? It has ancient greeks!) and I have to say that I'm really impressed by the quality of Victrix's 28mm ancients. I wasn't expecting much since they throw so many models in a box for cheap, but the details are crisp, especially on the non-helmeted heads.
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Apr 19, 2019 13:54
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Anarcho-Commissar posted:I'd rather that than the rule we all know they'd write otherwise. Whenever a unit with a commissar attached attempts to execute an order, roll 2d6: 2-7: The order is executed normally. 8-9: The commissar and commanding officer disagree on exactly how to execute the order. The unit may take no actions other than defensive fire. 10-11: Last battle this commissar executed a "coward" in the unit. This was a very unpopular decision and the commissar was quietly moved to another unit to stop him from executing more skilled soldiers. Roll 1d6: On a 1-4, replace the commissar with a new one from Table 14.5.a.iii(revision 2): Commissar Generation, Autumn 1942. On a 5-6, the commissar trades places with another commissar you control. 12: The commissar shoots the unit's commanding officer over exactly what constitutes a retreat. The soldiers then shoot the commissar. Remove the commissar and the highest ranking officer in the unit, if possible. Errata, December 5 2019: If no eligible officers or commissars are available to execute or move, select the next highest step. Errata, May 10 2020: Replaces DEC 2019 errata. To the end of option 12, add "If no officers are eligible for removal in the unit, treat as 10-11." To the end of option 10-11 add "If you control no other commissar, treat as 8-9." Errata, May 23 2020: If you roll 10-11, 5-6 multiple times for the same commissar in a single combat, you must choose a new commissar each time. Errata, August 25 2020: In option 10-11, 1-4, the new commissar has all the same status effects as the commissar leaving the table.
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Apr 19, 2019 14:39
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long-rear end nips Diane posted:I'm working on some stuff for Mortal Gods (a quasi-historical? It has ancient greeks!) and I have to say that I'm really impressed by the quality of Victrix's 28mm ancients. I wasn't expecting much since they throw so many models in a box for cheap, but the details are crisp, especially on the non-helmeted heads. The previews of their summer released (vikings and saxons) look pretty promising.
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Apr 19, 2019 15:18
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