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Love that ECW army - I found pictures of my old one and it pains me at just how long I spent painting it and never got it to the table. re: EPIC Black Powder - I'm very dissapointed to hear it's only one side, bum.
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Nov 5, 2021 10:15
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Southern Heel posted:re: EPIC Black Powder - I'm very dissapointed to hear it's only one side, bum. Well there's nothing stopping anyone buying a single smaller box for each side - you don't HAVE to buy a box big enough to refight 1/4-1/2 of the entire Battle of Waterloo!
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Nov 5, 2021 11:09
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Comstar posted:you don't HAVE to buy a box big enough to refight 1/4-1/2 of the entire Battle of Waterloo! Mods?!
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Nov 5, 2021 12:05
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Jorge Luis Borges, "On Rigor in Miniature Wargaming"
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Nov 5, 2021 14:03
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Comstar posted:you don't HAVE to buy a box big enough to refight 1/4-1/2 of the entire Battle of Waterloo! Yesterday I fired up my SLA printer for the first time in a couple weeks. Needed some 1:100 machineguns but had been putting it off because  . Some random files went on the build plate to round things out, and by the time I came to, I'd already burned off tobruk pits, AT pillboxes, ostwinds, turret bunkers, a platoon of Jacksons, and a company of Hellcats.Take from what what you will.
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Nov 5, 2021 16:15
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I got 10 bases of 15mm french fusiliers printed off before my printer screen died. Ugghhhh.
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Nov 5, 2021 16:37
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Guest2553 posted:Yesterday I fired up my SLA printer for the first time in a couple weeks. Needed some 1:100 machineguns but had been putting it off because I had the same intention of just printing out some 15mm WW2 British infantry for a game of Chain of Command, and thought I'd just do up a couple of test models. I ended up with a full platoon, HQ, a medic, a jeep, three Universal Carriers, and a Churchill tank. 
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Nov 6, 2021 22:47
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What are the popular WW2 rules for 15mm these days? I just remembered that I backed March to Hell: Europe, so I have all sorts of 15mm figs to print out.
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Nov 7, 2021 01:05
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You can play any of the single-based rulesets as long as you have both sides based consistently and correctly scaled. In terms of games specifically designed for 15mm I think Flames of War is probably still the most popular, but Blitzkrieg Commander always seems to be in the running.
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Nov 7, 2021 01:13
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No. 1 Juicy Boi posted:What are the popular WW2 rules for 15mm these days? I just remembered that I backed March to Hell: Europe, so I have all sorts of 15mm figs to print out. Squad-level: BA in 15mm (or What a Tanker for armd equivalents) Pl: Chain of Command Coy: Flames of War, I Ain't Been Shot Mum. I also heard alright things about a ruleset called 'From D-Day to Berlin' that was designed for div-corps using FoW style basing as Bns, if that's your thing.
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Nov 7, 2021 01:30
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Alternative options: Hammer of Democracy by Nordic Weasel, more beer & pretzels but fast play and I liked it way more than I thought I would. Dirt cheap to get and you don't need tons of minis to play. Just 8-12 stands of infantry and a handful of armor. Iron Cross by Great Escape Games, solid but the cold war game that came out Seven Days to the River Rhine based on it's system streamlined a lot of stuff and improved on it. In a weird place because a lot of people retroactively stitch those updates into the older game to make it play smoother. Crossfire by Arty Conliffe, a cornerstone of the genre for a good reason. You need lots of terrain to play but for a 25 year old game it still feels fresher than most of the big games out there. Massive fan base with tons of variations and house rules. Rommel by Sam Mustafa, will need the most work converting due to it's gridded table and ops deck, but Sam knows how to write game systems and edit books in a clear, concise way that puts Too Fat Lardies to fuckin shame.
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Nov 7, 2021 16:10
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CoC with clap emojis
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Nov 7, 2021 16:24
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I do love that CoC makes army composition dead simple. No complicated points value list comps like BA
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Nov 7, 2021 16:25
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I should add that of those I listed only Crossfire does Pacific theater stuff so if that's your thing you'd have to house rule the rest.
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Nov 7, 2021 16:35
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No. 1 Juicy Boi posted:I do love that CoC makes army composition dead simple. No complicated points value list comps like BA Sorry, what does CoC stand for?
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Nov 9, 2021 13:03
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SERPUS posted:Sorry, what does CoC stand for? Chain of Command
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Nov 9, 2021 14:23
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TFL's Chain of Command, which I've only gotten to play a handful of times but is fantastic and does a lot of things right in ways you don't typically see done. List building is that you choose a historical platoon and get that, then reinforce it with a few elements that would have been available to a commander of the era. So the building step also introduces complications a period commander would have faced, like "how tf do I coordinate all these riflemen?" for a Romanian player. (Whereas in other games, you'd taylor what you take to your own playstyle.) Limited activations also keep it focused on where the most exciting play is happening, so you're never just pushing around models because you have to.
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Nov 9, 2021 14:30
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Southern Heel posted:
Have you looked at Absolute Emperor from Osprey? I think it fits very well between minimal figures required like DbN but still way fewer than NB or BP.
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Nov 9, 2021 17:33
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Welp my brother just snagged a copy of the Dead Man's Hand starter box, so I guess I'm going to be painting up some Old West dudes here soon 
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Nov 10, 2021 02:24
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I just picked up the Hit The Beach FoW box because that seems like the dead-cheapest way to get into 15mm Chain of Command 
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Nov 10, 2021 03:22
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Sydney Bottocks posted:Welp my brother just snagged a copy of the Dead Man's Hand starter box, so I guess I'm going to be painting up some Old West dudes here soon Sweet. If you want to spice things up get a copy of Dracula's America and then your cowpokes can fight Werewolf George Custer.
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Nov 10, 2021 03:34
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No. 1 Juicy Boi posted:I just picked up the Hit The Beach FoW box because that seems like the dead-cheapest way to get into 15mm Chain of Command I took stock recently and I have like a box each of 15mm Russians and Germans from PSC, and a couple boxes apiece of 15mm Americans and Germans from Wargames Factory, along with the Hit the Beach box and a crapload of various plastic 15mm WW2 tanks I bought for the Tanks! game a couple years back, and others from various manufacturers (Zvezda, PSC, etc.). And that's not counting the 15mm stuff I can 3D print from the two March to Hell Kickstarters. So, yeah, I think I can get something going for 15mm CoC here before long Class Warcraft posted:Sweet. If you want to spice things up get a copy of Dracula's America and then your cowpokes can fight Werewolf George Custer. Oh yeah, we've already had that discussion here shortly after he placed the order 
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Nov 10, 2021 03:40
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Sydney Bottocks posted:I took stock recently and I have like a box each of 15mm Russians and Germans from PSC, and a couple boxes apiece of 15mm Americans and Germans from Wargames Factory, along with the Hit the Beach box and a crapload of various plastic 15mm WW2 tanks I bought for the Tanks! game a couple years back, and others from various manufacturers (Zvezda, PSC, etc.). And that's not counting the 15mm stuff I can 3D print from the two March to Hell Kickstarters. So, yeah, I think I can get something going for 15mm CoC here before long MODS?!?!??!! (okay I have no 3D printed WWII stuff)
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Nov 10, 2021 03:49
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...yet
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Nov 10, 2021 04:09
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TBH there's not much I would need to print. I have something that'll work for most allied forces, and I've got plenty of spare tiny Nazis around. I think really just France, Italy and Japan would be outside my capabilities in 15mm right now, and for those I'd just try ebay some old FoW metal platoon packs.
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Nov 10, 2021 05:20
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Arquinsiel posted:TBH there's not much I would need to print. I have something that'll work for most allied forces, and I've got plenty of spare tiny Nazis around. I think really just France, Italy and Japan would be outside my capabilities in 15mm right now, and for those I'd just try ebay some old FoW metal platoon packs. When I was looking over the army lists in the CoC main rulebook, pretty much the only nation I didn't have any plastics for was Great Britain. I already have a bunch of stuff for the US, Russia, and Germany as mentioned in my previous post, so for those nations I'd only have to print support or heavy weapons if I wanted to use them. But if I wanted to play as the British I'd have to either order some and wait for them to arrive, or download some STLs to be able to 3D print some...STLs which I already had, thanks to the two "March to Hell" Kickstarters. So to that end I printed up an entire British Army platoon, HQ, and a couple of support weapon options the other night.
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Nov 10, 2021 12:42
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Last call on a Kickstarter for STLs of Finnish and Russian tanks in 1/56, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nightskyminiatures/the-unknown-tanker
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Nov 11, 2021 01:37
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It suddenly hit me that kickstarters for STLs are kind of weird what with them already being more or less completed by virtue of there being renders in the material. I guess it's an easy way to put up a storefront and motivate yourself to do the weirder stuff as a stretch goal?
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Nov 11, 2021 01:58
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Arquinsiel posted:It suddenly hit me that kickstarters for STLs are kind of weird what with them already being more or less completed by virtue of there being renders in the material. I guess it's an easy way to put up a storefront and motivate yourself to do the weirder stuff as a stretch goal? Yeah I think of it more as a way to try to recover costs that are mostly paid. But that's actually the same for physical sculpts. For example, I'm about to do a kickstarter for 22 sculpts. But to get to the point where I have master sculpts to paint up and show, which is more or less the standard for physical miniature kickstarters, I've already paid maybe around half of the total costs (materials, sculpting time, cost of master molds, two rounds of casting from the master molds). What's mostly left is the cost of making the production molds. Kickstarter is, after all, to a large degree about it being an affordable marketing platform these days. Another good example of a good STL kickstarter is The Price of Crowns, where the guy put out the kickstarter with just the basic line infantry battalion. It turned out very popular, which meant that he could set time aside to sculpt more parts of the army as stretch goals. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pianowargames/the-price-of-crowns lilljonas fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Nov 11, 2021 |
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Nov 11, 2021 11:06
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To add a little bit to moths' post above, another really fantastic bit about Chain of Command is the "Patrol Phase," a little marker-based minigame that you play up front to determine where each side's deployment points are going to be. You can play multiple games on the same map with the same forces and have them be very different depending on how the Patrol Phase plays out. It's magical.
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Nov 11, 2021 16:57
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So, Lasalle 2 turned up. Time to base some pandemic battalions.   Four battalions are already finished.
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Nov 11, 2021 22:52
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 Good grief that's a lot of FrenchmenI also finished up some models:  I'm not sure how useful they are, but the T-70 is adorable.
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Nov 12, 2021 11:22
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I don't get the outright hostility that seems to be coming towards Warlord for their new Waterloo range from some Forums and Facebook posts I've seen. Per figure it's what, 1/3 to 1/10 the price compared to others in the 15-18 size scale? They have to start somewhere after all. If it's successful enough (which looks like it will be) we'll get Prussian's next (after some Skirmish Rifle, Highlander and I'm guessing some Imperial Guard for the French. I'm surprised they didn't START with the Guard first). Are there other armies you can pass off by painting them different colours and giving a different flag to stand under? I would think another reason to go 13.5mm (as opposed to 18) is you can more justifiably do that, and the item costs are a lot lower. It's got to be a hell of a lot cheaper than the 28's and a lot more mass on the field you can fit now.
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Nov 12, 2021 11:34
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Comstar posted:I don't get the outright hostility that seems to be coming towards Warlord for their new Waterloo range from some Forums and Facebook posts I've seen. Per figure it's what, 1/3 to 1/10 the price compared to others in the 15-18 size scale? They have to start somewhere after all. If it's successful enough (which looks like it will be) we'll get Prussian's next (after some Skirmish Rifle, Highlander and I'm guessing some Imperial Guard for the French. I'm surprised they didn't START with the Guard first). First of all, the French can be fielded as several French allies that used basically the same uniform. Most obviously Italians and Swiss. There are also a bunch of smaller German states that used uniforms similar to the French, like Westphalen, where you'll easily be able to get it close enough at smaller scales. To understand the anger at Warlord, you have to understand that there's a general grumbling from lots of grogs about Warlord as a whole. So people knew that people would complain about this, pretty much no matter what. I think it has far less to do with the cost of the kits than some other things Warlord has done before and things this release represents. The first thing is that Warlord sometimes just get things wrong. This is more marked for Napoleonics than for, say, WW2, where they just sometimes do incorrect uniforms and then keeps on doing it. The French kits are overall pretty bad. The Hanoverians are wrong. Their Poles are wrong. And so on. Anyone can do that, but with their resources and contacts they should be able to do better QA. The other is that many grogs like to complain about their games. Warlord sprinkles a lot of pop history into their games. Sometimes I think it's valid for making simple beer and pretzel games, sometimes it's just... weird. So that adds more passive frustration from a certain part of the hobby. Finally WG has a few botched rules released behind them, where they stop supporting systems that don't get traction. Which means that some players are burned from that experience, while others are a bit suspicious if WG will really support their epic ranges enough in the long run. I'd say that suspicion is 50-50 regarding how reasonable and how hyperbolic it is. Finally, I think the scale of 13.5mm is seen as a "Game Workshop" move, more aimed at not helping other companies than for any other reason. You'll always see grogs complaining every time someone releases a range that is not in THEIR favourite scale, so there's that. But there's very little reason why they could not have gone with the far more common 15mm (it's almost the same, yet visibly different) or the slightly unusual but existing 10mm. Then people could both use existing ranges and they could complement the WG minis, just like most historical gamers do. Like say, my French above, where the bulk of the infantry is from Warlord, but the command groups are from Calpe. Choosing a completely new scale that is smack dab in the middle of two scales that would have achieved more or less the same thing just looks like a dick move in a niche hobby where manufacturers directly or indirectly helping each other is such a common idea. Rulewise, the main critizism I've seen is that the base width (60mm?) is too wide to reenact the kind of larger battles that you might want to do with smaller scale minis. Basically that it's just 28mm Black Powder with twice as many minis on each base. I haven't read the rules so I have nothing to say about whether that critizism is relevant. But basically 13.5mm can do a lot of things that 28mm can't do, but there's nothing 13.5mm can do that 10mm or 15mm can't. So the only obvious reason would be to lock out players who start collecting the period through this from buying from existing ranges from other brands. So to sum it up, I can understand why some people are pissed at WG about the scale choice, but I also think it's a tad overblown. E: poo poo I forgot the currency fuckery WG has been doing the last couple of years, which has also soured a lot of people on the company as a whole. Basically the've been running a hidden but substantial internal tax on non-UK customers on top of the actual expenses for shippping, VAT etc. through fudging the currency conversions. That's actually the part that made me stop buying from WG overall. But yeah, the anti-WG outbursts are not merely about the epic game system. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 11:53
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Funnily enough GW used to do the same fuckery when the people who founded WG were still there.
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Nov 12, 2021 15:39
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lilljonas posted:Rulewise, the main critizism I've seen is that the base width (60mm?) is too wide to reenact the kind of larger battles that you might want to do with smaller scale minis. Basically that it's just 28mm Black Powder with twice as many minis on each base. I haven't read the rules so I have nothing to say about whether that critizism is relevant. I have the ACW starter box and this is true, it literally comes with the black powder 2e rulebook.
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Nov 12, 2021 16:55
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Comstar posted:I don't get the outright hostility that seems to be coming towards Warlord for their new Waterloo range from some Forums and Facebook posts I've seen. Per figure it's what, 1/3 to 1/10 the price compared to others in the 15-18 size scale? They have to start somewhere after all. If it's successful enough (which looks like it will be) we'll get Prussian's next (after some Skirmish Rifle, Highlander and I'm guessing some Imperial Guard for the French. I'm surprised they didn't START with the Guard first). You have to keep in mind that the quintessential Napoleonic wargamer is a 60-year-old British man with very strong opinions about the hobby, most of which revolve around wanting to keep it what they are used to. Almost every new product that comes out, whether it's a new ruleset, plastic kit, or 3D printable set, is met with some amount of hand-wringing about how it's going to "hurt the hobby". Hell, there is still a sizable contingent of players who refuse to jump on the plastic miniature bandwagon. On top of this, Napoleonic wargamers are divided amongst a bunch of different scales using a bunch of different rulesets. The addition of any new set of rules or scale is viewed by many as just another splintering of the playerbase. Many also seem to view the hobby as a zero-sum game, that anyone who picks up a new scale/ruleset would de facto be pulling someone away from an existing ruleset/scale - a worldview probably stemming from long-term stagnation in the playerbase. The solution to the splintering of the hobby is, of course, for some company to put out a ruleset and line of miniatures that are popular enough to collect a critical mass of players around it. However, there is also widespread fear that one of the "big" companies will put their preferred manufacturer out of business. There has been kind of an amateur business-model in historical miniatures for a long time, where many manufacturers are just wargamers making casting metal models in their garage/basement and selling them by word-of-mouth or their 2000's-era websites. A lot of the wailing and gnashing of teeth revolves around a desire to protect these companies. This can get especially nasty when 3d printed is involved, with some wargamers referring to anyone who 3D prints models as "pirates" or "cheapskates" ruining the hobby! Of course they conveniently ignore that the 3D printing scene has probably added more new companies to the historical wargaming scene in the last two years than have otherwise joined the scene in the last 20. At any rate, I think the grumbling from grognards that Warlord's epic won't fit with their preferred vendor/existing collections is silly. The target customer for this product line are folks new to Napoleonics that might have been interested but put off by the price and hassle of collecting an army, not the venerable Napoleonic wargamer. It's designed to be a one-stop shop for players new to the hobby to get rules and the minis they need all in one place (obviously it's not quite there yet, but there is clearly more to come). The fact that the scale means you can't order compatible metal miniatures from another company's geocities website is not much of a drawback because their target customer isn't in the hobby yet because they didn't want to deal with that in the first place. Napoleonics was the first thing I started with when I entered historical gaming after coming over from GW games, and it very nearly put me off the hobby entirely. There are dozens of different rulesets, a bunch of different scales, and partial ranges spread across a bunch of different manufactures. Even just figuring out where to start is a huge barrier to entry. The only company offering a boxed starter set with rules and miniatures was Warlord Games. Even that proved to be a bridge too far, because after assembling my first couple units and playing some test games I realized I'd need to buy, build, and paint at least a hundred 28mm minis to play a proper game, which was just too much for me. So it all went in a box and has sat there ever since - it's just too daunting of a project for me. Warlord Epic might be more my speed. We'll see. Class Warcraft fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 17:40
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I am certainly their target base. I've been wanting to play Napoleonics since we first started doing historicals and this is a good entry point for me. I hope they expand it. I'm not too concerned about the black powder rulebook, because we can just use whatever rules works, but man I want to paint up some tiny Austrians.
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Nov 12, 2021 17:55
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Honestly Black Powder / Pike & Shot / Hail Caesar seem like terrible ideas to try in 28mm. I wouldn't want to deal with anything larger than the size of Sharpe Practice or Rebels & Patriots at that scale. Anything bigger in scope and you'd have to correspondingly shrink figure scale, especially if you're just starting the period or having to front both forces to garner interest.
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Nov 12, 2021 17:59
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Springfield Fatts posted:Honestly Black Powder / Pike & Shot / Hail Caesar seem like terrible ideas to try in 28mm. I wouldn't want to deal with anything larger than the size of Sharpe Practice or Rebels & Patriots at that scale. Anything bigger in scope and you'd have to correspondingly shrink figure scale, especially if you're just starting the period or having to front both forces to garner interest. It is a nightmare, there's a reason all the pictures in the rulebooks are played on gigantic tables. 15mm or really small forces in 28mm is the way to go, and if I'm doing small forces I'm just gonna play Sharp.
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Nov 12, 2021 18:05
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