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Guest2553 posted:I did a term's worth of postgrad assignments with a sleeping newborn strapped to my chest, you can probably do some nerd stuff under the guide of "bonding" and "giving your wife a break". My best friend did a bunch of painting with his newborn son strapped to his chest. It's certainly doable though he recommends a splash guard of some sort to protect wee heads from errant paint and glue.
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Sep 27, 2022 21:48
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Fearless posted:My best friend did a bunch of painting with his newborn son strapped to his chest. It's certainly doable though he recommends a splash guard of some sort to protect wee heads from errant paint and glue. I tried this and got a no-no from the wife once she found splotches of Squid Pink in the baby's hair.
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Sep 28, 2022 08:40
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I have built some of my first 15mm models, Churchill tanks for Flames of War! In some ways a lot simpler than the GW stuff I'm used to, but also quite opaque in terms of instructions. They have good online resources but I still got a couple minor bits wrong between their different make/models (MkIV and MkVII essentially). Looking forward to painting them, which should be blissfully quick once the actual paints arrive. I was a bit disappointed though to find they don't include unit cards with the rules any more. I have some from the starter set I got off a mate, and you can buy a faction pack, but according to their guide in the faction book, boxes should come with unit cards for what they contain. I emailed them and they say basically they stopped including the cards over the COVID period to simplify supply. Fair enough, I can still play using the book.
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Sep 28, 2022 09:47
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Sorry for the double post, but had my third game of Flames of War yesterday, first with being more familiar with the rules, and it was a blast! I fielded what I thought would be a fairly balanced bunch of British: 2 commando platoons and their hq, a Cromwell tank hq and one squadron each of Cromwells, Stuart recce tanks and Churchills. Supported by 2 m10 self-propelled anti-tank guns and a battery of 25-pdr artillery, as well as a universal carrier observation post. My mate's Germans turned out to be just 7 panzer IVs, 5 stugs, 2 tigers and stukas as air support. I was not expecting this! This was a meeting engagement, 2 objectives each, firs player to hold an objective in the enemy DZ wins. I went first, so I accomplished absolutely nothing in my first turn shooting. But I was moving forward toward the objectives, so the battle would take place in his table half. He struck back and wrecked a Cromwell, and bailed out 2 of my 3 Stuarts. In round 2, I was lucky and my recce tankers got straight back in their Stuarts. This set a theme for the whole meat of the game. My Churchills, firing at long range, took out a panzer, and then my m10s (only 1 was in position to fire) took out a tiger! This really brought home how with tanks, the whole game can hinge on a few rolls. I also destroyed another panzer with my artillery, but we subsequently realised I was danger close, so we cancelled that. In hindsight, even more important than lucky shooting was movement. On my left, I moved my Stuarts past the objective, and within 4" of it, so they were behind his Stugs holding it, so they couldn't really move forward, or they'd have given it up. At the same time my commandos advanced into woods near in front of that objective. On the other flank, my commandos moved into a streamed with hedgerows either side, again close to the objective and in cover from his panzers. My opponent sensibly realised the m10s were the big threat to his Tigers, and his stukas arrived again, so he tried to take them out, but unfortunately failed to range in. His remaining Tiger missed a Cromwell. His Stugs tried to machine gun commandos in the woods, and his panzers tried to machine gun commandos hidden behind hedges. In my opinion he underestimated how resilient infantry in cover are. I think he killed a couple teams in the woods on my left, but the platoon was still mostly there. In the stream, behind bullet proof coverz there was no effect. I'm not really sure what my opponent could have done to forestall my attack at this point. He was almost up against his board edge, and he had big units (2 tigers, units of 5 panzers, 5 stugs, and an hq of 2 panzers, so only 4 maneuver elements, plus his planes) so although they were resilient, he could only be in so many places at once. I think he needed some infantry or something to repel my infantry. Now turn 3 was decisive. I realised that not only were my left flank commandos in easy assaulting range of the stugs, on the right they were in assault range of the panzers without moving, and they were in concealed positions. So if I'm reading the rules right, they could use the sneaking up on tanks rules and assault, and any tanks they actually contacted couldn't defensive fire? As it happens, that was all 6 of the remaining panzers. My opponent was definitely too close. Before the assaults even went home, my m10s blew up the remaining Tiger with more lucky shots. The Stuarts got a stug by shooting at rear/side armour, although the Cromwells and Churchills did nothing. I used my artillery to fire a smokescreen between my concealed infantry and the panzers. I think now that was redundant, as I could have snuck up on them anyway? But it seemed cool. Perhaps I could have done the same but on the stugs, which would have made the non-sneaky assault better. So I did the sneaky assault first and my commandos were lucky, or rather my opponent rolled poorly on his armour saves - I bailed out 2 tanks. The rest broke off, which meant I could simply consolidate into sole control of my right flank objective! So we didn't play out the other assault. Which honestly might not have worked, I think I would be facing 12 shots of defensive fire, hitting on 4s, so I probably would have been forced back? Anyway, really interesting to see assaults affect the game. Some lessons learned: - tank on tank shooting is very swingy. A lot of the time it will be 5-6 to hit, then single dice rolls to either bounce the shots completely, or lose valuable tanks. - infantry in bulletproof cover probably need an assault or real big guns to take out. His stukas would have been good at it, artillery with 2+ firepower rolls! But against machine guns they're well protected. Hell, even outside of bulletproof cover, if infantry are concealed you need a lot of machine guns to get through 5+ to hit and 3+ to save. That's an average 9 shots to take off an infantry team. - artillery is actually less useful if you're rushing the enemy objectives, because it's danger close. I was still able to use it to fire smoke. But I suppose in many games I would want to use fires in one part of the board/at the enemy force, and then assaults in another part. - my determined British infantry will force tanks to fall back from assaults quite a bit of the time, but actually the chance to actually destroy tanks rests a lot on 1-per-platoon PIATS, grenades are relying on any (close-topped) tank rolling a 1 to save. It's almost a dice-up to see who falls back first - he might kill 1 or 2 infantry teams per phase of the assault, I have a chance to take out 1-2 tanks. I was probably a bit lucky in my assaults. And if course I have some further questions about cover: - if I'm shooting, the target, say a tank, is in open ground, but the firer can only see part of it due to terrain between firer and target - but not close to either. Is it concealed? Or do you have to be IN terrain to be concealed? - so friendly units block line of fire, except for stationary infantry, got that. Can you ignore the tanks in your own unit when firing? This could apply in the shooting step, but also seems like it would be super important for defensive fire. - my infantry are in a woodblock, and they assault out of it, against tanks in the open. Are they concealed against defensive fire? I guess not?
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Oct 2, 2022 09:38
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Sounds like a fun game! You're definitely right, tanks can be very swingy, though most of the time tanks aren't on 6s to hit and often not even 5s; aggresive tanks in cover are only hit on 4s which isn't too bad if you've got stationary shots. A lot of things play into it.Genghis Cohen posted:And if course I have some further questions about cover: 1. A vehicle in 4e has to be COMPLETELY concealed by an intervening terrain piece, or COMPLETELY inside an area terrain piece. If you can see, say, half of a tank poking out behind a hedge, it's a clean shot and a bad day for the tank. Cover is generally a bit harder to get than in previous editions for these reasons. 2. Nope. Tanks can absolutely block each other's shots and this is often a huge issue in the huge soviet platoons they still get for stupid reasons, but also if you've lined all your tanks up in a row, and they charge you perfectly in the flank, you're likely only getting 1-2 machineguns off. 3. Nope; they're crossing open ground so they lose out. They keep it if the tank's in smoke, though, and also if you were concealed at the start of your assault and didn't move you're sneaking still, unless I completely misremember. It's been a few, er, years.
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Oct 3, 2022 21:02
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spectralent posted:Sounds like a fun game! You're definitely right, tanks can be very swingy, though most of the time tanks aren't on 6s to hit and often not even 5s; aggresive tanks in cover are only hit on 4s which isn't too bad if you've got stationary shots. A lot of things play into it. Thanks! So great to know about Q1 there. That makes a huge difference. We've been playing tanks that are half-obscured behind low cover (walls, fields etc) as Concealed. If a tank is completely inside a low cover area, does that make it Concealed? Q2, that makes perfect sense, good to know. Q3, yes, that sneaking up rule was vital in my other assault. But to sneak, you need to have not moved either during that whole turn. And in fact I had moved my infantry to be within 4". I guess the canniest move there, taking that bit of the board in isolation, would have been to move to the edge of the woodblock, within 4". Then my opponent would almost have had to move back, or risk being attacked without reply and forced back off that objective next turn. My commandoes weren't likely to do that much to Stugs in assault, but I believe they've got poor Counter-Attack rolls, being SPGs, so wouldn't be able to fight it out in assault.
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Oct 3, 2022 23:45
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Threw together some 1/2400 WW1 ships to play through a few different rulesets and see which I like the most. These guys are super quick to 3d print and paint up, all done in an afternoon. 
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Oct 4, 2022 21:35
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Ships seem like the ideal use of 3d printers.
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Oct 4, 2022 23:29
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  Finished my German Panzergrenadier Platoon and continuing my work on 15mm terrain.
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Oct 5, 2022 00:39
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Arquinsiel posted:Ships seem like the ideal use of 3d printers. Some of the ships for Black Seas are like 50 bucks each, so yeah, I super agree.
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Oct 5, 2022 02:12
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SpaceViking posted:
Nice! I love the sign
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Oct 5, 2022 06:15
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SpaceViking posted:
Cool! Where are the models from? They look a bit different to the FoW stuff I've seen. Squatter bodies, different arrangement on bases etc. Great painting though, I like your unit-marked bases.
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Oct 5, 2022 10:21
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SpaceViking posted:
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Oct 5, 2022 12:25
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Genghis Cohen posted:Cool! Where are the models from? They look a bit different to the FoW stuff I've seen. Squatter bodies, different arrangement on bases etc. Great painting though, I like your unit-marked bases. They're March to Hell STLs from 3dbreed. Arquinsiel posted:I never thought of orienting my platoons that way on the bases. Might have been easier to organise a company on the table that way. Is that a Warbases radar dish? The Radar dish is from Sarissa, and I started to do it that way to cut down on machine gun overhang, but I like it this way as it turns out.
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Oct 5, 2022 15:52
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I've got a box of Nazis in Africa from Perry lying around and I'd like to paint at least some of them. However, I don't really feel like doing the whole "wrong green" routine with the reference books and research, so does anyone have any four-colour pulp comics handy? I'm thinking some kind of cartoon villain thing might be fun.
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Oct 5, 2022 18:56
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Paint 'em with pure white clothes and just claim they washed everything in petrol. Happened often enough TBH.SpaceViking posted:The Radar dish is from Sarissa, and I started to do it that way to cut down on machine gun overhang, but I like it this way as it turns out.
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Oct 5, 2022 19:04
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Siivola posted:I've got a box of Nazis in Africa from Perry lying around and I'd like to paint at least some of them. However, I don't really feel like doing the whole "wrong green" routine with the reference books and research, so does anyone have any four-colour pulp comics handy? I'm thinking some kind of cartoon villain thing might be fun.
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Oct 5, 2022 19:25
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Siivola posted:I've got a box of Nazis in Africa from Perry lying around and I'd like to paint at least some of them. However, I don't really feel like doing the whole "wrong green" routine with the reference books and research, so does anyone have any four-colour pulp comics handy? I'm thinking some kind of cartoon villain thing might be fun. I mean... I could pull up some random swatches for actual paints if you wanted to just gently caress around with colors.
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Oct 5, 2022 19:28
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SpaceViking posted:They're March to Hell STLs from 3dbreed. Well looking good dude.
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Oct 5, 2022 20:36
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Arquinsiel posted:Paint 'em with pure white clothes and just claim they washed everything in petrol. Happened often enough TBH. They have good stalingrad bombed out buildings, if I ever decide to dive into the eastern front I'll definitely be grabbing a bunch of those. Genghis Cohen posted:Well looking good dude. Thanks!
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Oct 5, 2022 22:36
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I mean... I could pull up some random swatches for actual paints if you wanted to just gently caress around with colors. 90s Cringe Rock posted:Wolfenstein 3D sprites.
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Oct 6, 2022 11:51
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Siivola posted:I'm not opposed to just loving around, but I want something that scans as "bad guy" while also giving making dedicated hobbyists go "what the". Such as: Just let me know what nation you want to pull from and I can get some colors going, if you want.
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Oct 6, 2022 11:59
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I painted up the Rorke's Drift character pack from Perry Bros last night and am pleased as punch at how they came out.  Lt. Bromhead, Robert Jones, Lt. Chard, Chaplain Smith, Hook  Color-Sergeant Bourne, Surgeon Reynolds, Commissary Dalton, Corporal Schiess NNC, Hitch
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Oct 6, 2022 19:07
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Those look great! I've got a big pile of Zulus I really should work on.
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Oct 6, 2022 19:35
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Those are some lovely models, and I appreciate the more historically accurate take on the men involved rather than just a reproduction of the film 
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Oct 6, 2022 23:01
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:bunch of pics i was working on a terrain system made up of a base layer of interlocking hex tiles with finished terrain hex tiles on top. 100 mm across, fully modular. i was playing battletech with my group on it, with the plan to eventually play historicals on it. the only problem is that it takes loving forever to make the tiles, like way longer than i expected. and the modularity requires compromises in aesthetic quality. so i'm flipping my plans to instead make much larger tiles. 2' x 2', with plans to make a 4' x 4' table for battletech first and then a 4' x 8' table for blitzkrieg commander. made up a little prototype tile to test some new modelling techniques, this is 12" x 15" so a lot denser than production tiles will be. i like this diorama style a lot better than the hexes i was making. bad phone pics incoming     these trees come off. a neat way i saw online of doing a forest  plus some shots of some unpainted 6 mm tanks    some things for the production tiles: use the right resin for the water (i used some super fast cure stuff that i use as an adhesive because i was too lazy to go buy the right stuff lol). make the hedgerows taller and maybe sprinkle some flock in there to make it a little more dynamic. give some definition to the crops like in rows or something. and no super glue on flock, dries white for some reason lol. overall i'm happy with how it turned out tho (also i will be getting my buddy to paint the buildings next time. i did these for prototyping and i hate painting tbh haha)
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Oct 6, 2022 23:25
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BattleTech is so abstract that you're really better off just using mapsheets, or if really want modular 3D terrain just buy a fuckton of Heroscape tiles. On the other hand, if you're using the Alpha Strike rules then just ignore hexes entirely and let mechs fight over Normandy.
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Oct 7, 2022 02:31
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we're using the tabletop rules conversion and it works great actually. basically 1 hex = 1". the hexes were just an aesthetic and mechanical (in terms of modularity, better than small squares) choice. otherwise playing on an ordinary tabletop board is what we've been doing
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Oct 7, 2022 07:43
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Ah, you've scaled down so. A hex should be 10 CM across if you're scaling it at ~1/300 like the figures. The old miniatures conversion rules I have floating around somewhere just rounded it to 3". Alpha Strike is pretty nice and fast, it shouldn't take too much investment to give it a whirl.
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Oct 7, 2022 13:50
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it's 2" according to this but we've been using some of the dfa wargaming houserules instead. also alpha strike is pretty boring imo, way too abstracted to really be battletech, it basically becomes warhammer with mechs. we use flechs sheets to do all the heavy lifting anyway, very little dice rolling required at our table, so that cuts way down on all the 80s game bullshit chart lookups that bogs down classic battletech. games are as fast as AS but still with full flavour. anyway, i mainly posted here to show off my first crack at a real terrain board (since this style is for ww2 wargaming). actually, i never looked to see if there is a terrain thread in TG
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Oct 7, 2022 14:09
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There is a megathread but it's kind of long-running so a lot of the earlier posts are just links to stuff that doesn't exist anymore: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3570772.
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Oct 7, 2022 17:54
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That terrain is really cool and that forest is quite clever
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Oct 7, 2022 21:15
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Does anyone have any advice on getting into Team Yankee as the Soviets? I know there's a new book on the horizon with Red Dawn but i'm just sketching out some ideas on how to buy. I'm trying to consider between a T-80 or a T-64 Battalion and this is my first draft:
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Oct 7, 2022 23:27
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I would probably go for four shilkas over two tunguska, just because the tunguska can't actually use both weapons like we thought since the errata. Otherwise the list seems fine; I might pull the grenade launcher or the missiles off the BMPs and take missiles off one lot of T-80s, and instead swap the frogfoots (frogfeet?) for 4 hinds, but that's about it.
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Oct 7, 2022 23:44
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Yeah I was wondering about the infantry upgrades, I wasn't sure if I wanted more feet on the ground vs more air assets on that one. I've no idea how one AGS or SA-13 would perform to be honest.
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Oct 7, 2022 23:58
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Anyone here have recommended links for Cruel Seas houserules? A buddy goon brought over a starter box yesterday and we played through a couple scenarios, but ran into a few things that seemed wonky through outright broken. Torpedoes: the activation of them feels really gamey and arbitrary. Is there a better system, or unforseen problem, with just making them all move at the top of the round in a torpedo phase? Any good fixes for how fiddly and easily disrupted they are on the table (beyond use a better mat with good grip)? What about tamping down the extreme swinginess of their pile of rolls? Planes: WTF warlord, aircraft can't strafe coastal boats, just drop bombs? And the rules say you can shoot them with 'flak' guns but no guns have flak nor do the rules say which guns counts-as, and while it's clear you can use MG weapons can you react fire if you used them earlier in the round (we houseruled on the fly NO, because the FAQ doesn't have any of that which just further confused us). Movement: so you turn the same no matter what speed which seems real weird from my own reasonable amount of experience with small boats. Surely there's some more interesting movement mechanics out there to use, right? Overall we had fun with Cruel Seas, but not without reservations.
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Oct 9, 2022 14:18
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Thinking of how to paint up Saga dark ages cavalry: - From poking around seems like English warhorses trend more brown/black and French ones more white/gray? -Thinking about how to distinguish the "Breton Horsemen" special mercenary unit from generic Norman/Breton warriors- thinking i might do them as Basque light horse? Not sure what models or equipment they'd use -Any general tips on how to paint horses quickly without contrast? Seems like I'm gonna have to get good at drybrushing/highlighting
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Oct 10, 2022 20:18
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StashAugustine posted:Thinking of how to paint up Saga dark ages cavalry: My go-to way of painting horses is to use a simplified "faux blending" method. Basically paint the base colour, wash it darker, then reapply the base colour and while that is still a bit wet, blend in some lighter shade with the base and apply a highlight. Repeat this blended highlight maybe 1-2 times with lighter shades depending on your ambition. It sounds like it takes a lot of time but since the areas are so big, you can get the whole horse done quite quickly in one go.
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Oct 10, 2022 21:11
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Does anyone know if I have to wash Battlefront Miniatures (ie Flames of War) models? Not the hard plastic, which all tanks/guns and some of the infantry are, most of the infantry are single-piece sculpts which look a bit like resin, but I understand from their advertising are thermoplastic. Do they need scrubbing to get rid of mold release agent?
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Oct 11, 2022 18:25
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Most miniatures can do with a rinse in soapy water. It's not always necessary, but man when it is and you don't do it you'll be a sad panda.
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Oct 11, 2022 20:13
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