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Arquinsiel posted:Yeah this has been a thing for decades and it makes just enough sense to be very silly. You are supposed to hammer the end flat and then file it into the shape of a period-appropriate pointy stick. I've seen a few tutorials around over the years and my general opinion is "gently caress that". Oh no that part is fine....except if I am going to do that myself why am I paying these guys 10$ for them to not do their work? Instead my solution is to make them out of sturdy but flexible plastic rods (either styrene or in the case of 15mm, bristles off a broom head). Not as durable, but has the upside of not causing bleeding.
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Sep 3, 2023 04:26
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I did exactly what Count Thrashula has suggested in terms of basing standards (albeit ignoring the number-of-figures-per-base thing , since I 'm not playing in a competition and I don't need anyone to be able to recognise them at a distance). Eventually I switched to a standardised 40x20mm base for infantry and cavalry with different numbers of bases for units.quote:Yeah this has been a thing for decades and it makes just enough sense to be very silly. You are supposed to hammer the end flat and then file it into the shape of a period-appropriate pointy stick. I've seen a few tutorials around over the years and my general opinion is "gently caress that". My favourite pro tip for this was to buy a broom or dustpan and brush and with appropriate thickness strands on the brush head, and then cut and use those - no stabbing, very flexible, and can be flattened with a pair of pliers in one go. TBH I wish my 10mm dudes had holes in their hands for pikes rather than lead, because holy poo poo it's like they're all holding onto pool noodles. My 18th century bits are still on the painting desk, but I'm on a bit of a roll with Chaos Dwarfs and Undead for Warmaster - lots of drybrushing and contrast so very quick and easy. The thread here earlier and in miniature-wargaming did make me realise of course there is ancients and medieval too. I'd given very short shrift to the whole WM series but it's pretty closely adjacent to the style and at the same scale of wargaming I do enjoy so I'm eager to try it all out.
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Sep 3, 2023 07:24
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My pikemen and spear armed dudes all have steel rod spears and yes I have eviscerated myself many times. It builds character
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Sep 3, 2023 11:55
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Endman posted:My pikemen and spear armed dudes all have steel rod spears and yes I have eviscerated myself many times. Metal spears or bust. My steel piked halfling units are more deadly to players than to opposing minis.
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Sep 3, 2023 12:53
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The 28mm Companion Cavalry minis that I own have tasted blood plenty of times too. I have a Celtic warrior I actually gave two metal spears too, that guy is deadly hah.
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Sep 3, 2023 13:09
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Springfield Fatts posted:I've somehow gotten chaos terminator shoulder pads embedded in my flesh multiple times over the years, I'm not loving around with a punji pit phalanx laying around my house for my dumb rear end to eventually lose an eye to or something.
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Sep 3, 2023 14:10
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Love it when googling things leads me to the miniatures page and I see such wonderful articles in the sidebar. http://theminiaturespage.com/workbench/?id=659811
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Sep 3, 2023 16:30
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Thats not like the worst thing on TMP but it's up there Unrelated, if I was dumb enough to get into Chain of Command in 15mm, what kind of terrain should I expect to get?
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Sep 3, 2023 16:37
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Au contraire, 15mm is the thinking gamer's choice! In my case mostly lots of trees, a few hills, and a bunch of fields, more or less all homemade (well, the trees themselves are bought cheap on amazon, but). I've started acquiring buildings, too, from various FDM printers and my own STL where it fits.
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Sep 3, 2023 16:47
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Yeah, buy some xps foam (cut it and put it under your terrain mat for hills) and some model railroad trees and you can make any sort of forest-fight. Add some fences/hedges/or stone walls, and a couple farm houses. And more hedges. So many more hedges. And boom you have Normandy Count Thrashula fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Sep 3, 2023 |
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Sep 3, 2023 18:07
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You can get great lasercut MDF for 15mm too, and it's dirt cheap.
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Sep 3, 2023 19:07
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That said, I feel like buildings are maybe the least important part of most boards - a good stock of trees, hedges, and hills will give you a basis for almost every board.
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Sep 3, 2023 19:10
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What I found really useful in my FoW days was little flat bits of MDF that had been made look like ploughed fields with crops sprouting in them. It gives a good visual indicator that it's open terrain that provides cover to infantry. It's also trivial to do with square-ish offcuts, a bit of pollyfilla and a tool to apply it in rough ploughed lines, and some static grass along the tops after painting it to match your bases. Plus it's just visually nice to have a farm that isn't composed entirely of empty pasturage.
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Sep 3, 2023 20:07
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spectralent posted:Au contraire, 15mm is the thinking gamer's choice! Oh the scale is good, the only thing I'm worried about is model availability, it's just another project I don't need. Also while I like a lot of the stuff in CoC there's also a ton of stuff that annoys me (why do some wargames have an ideological opposition to copy editing? I blame the English on principle.) I've tried it out once on TTS- would anyone be willing to run through a game there sometime (I'm free a lot of tonight and tommorrow)? There's just a lot of little rules I don't quite get (a lot of the specifics of how leaders move and attach to units in particular)
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Sep 3, 2023 20:39
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Arquinsiel posted:What I found really useful in my FoW days was little flat bits of MDF that had been made look like ploughed fields with crops sprouting in them. It gives a good visual indicator that it's open terrain that provides cover to infantry. It's also trivial to do with square-ish offcuts, a bit of pollyfilla and a tool to apply it in rough ploughed lines, and some static grass along the tops after painting it to match your bases. Plus it's just visually nice to have a farm that isn't composed entirely of empty pasturage. I like cutting up coir mats for fields, too.
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Sep 3, 2023 21:16
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Coir mats are great but they end up looking like autumn fields, plus they're harder to position figures in so that they don't look like they're all Crouching Tiger on top of stalks of wheat.
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Sep 3, 2023 21:29
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I don't know, we're talking about solders on bases in monopose, I'm not sure that them being ontop of the wheat field instead of between the stalks is the biggest compromise towards practicality we're making here? re: game size and scale in the Miniature Wargaming thread - I took a visit to Battle yesterday to see the Saxon/Norman battlefield and though also quite small, it was over 600 yards square - which got me thinking about my little 3x3 table - using most rules it's a very small space indeed. 150yds square if OHW Musket, 300 if half ranges. Absolute Emperor yields about 450 yards square and DBN about 1100. I had thought about using the figure scale (for me, about 1 figure per 20 real life soldiers) to bring it down more, but that's less important than musket range for the SYW-Napoleonic periods, right?
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Sep 4, 2023 10:34
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I'm not really sure, honestly, that scale actually matters that much. By nature, we're playing an abstraction, and abstracting so much that it's not going to be "realistic" either way. Far more important, IMO, to try and represent things that lead to you thinking like a commander of the period, and seeing something on a table that feels right. In most games, this involves some compression of the range.
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Sep 4, 2023 10:53
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Southern Heel posted:I don't know, we're talking about solders on bases in monopose, I'm not sure that them being ontop of the wheat field instead of between the stalks is the biggest compromise towards practicality we're making here?
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Sep 4, 2023 11:09
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Played my first game of General D'Armee on Saturday at my local club. Six players in total, three new (including me), played for around six hours and got through about five or six turns I think, so pretty slow going but one of our players kept wandering off which didn't help. We played one of the battles between the French/Allies vs Prussians/Russians in the run up to the Battle of Leipzig (1813) in 15mm. Overall I liked the system. Once we got into it movement and shooting was pretty snappy although there are a lot of tables and modifiers as is common in these games. I think it's a nice complement to Lasalle which plays more quickly but more abstractly. Seems like GDA is able to remain reasonably playable (particularly with fewer players I expect and with experienced players) whilst also giving a bit more nuance. The table behind me were also on GDA and managed 15 turns in the same time so I think we were just going slow. There were some bits I disliked. I think having two different ways of inflicting casualties is a really bizarre choice. For those unfamiliar, artillery and line infantry roll on a fairly standard combat results table, whereas skirmishers just roll "casualty dice" looking for a 4+. This is already a bit weird but then it gets even more confusing because some modifiers to the cannon/formed infantry allow them to roll these casualty dice in addition to their CRT roll. I feel like they should have just picked one system or the other. Once we got our head around it it worked OK but as new players it took a while to get used to. The other major issue was with charging and melee. As with many rulesets this is where everything comes a bit unstuck and resolving all of the interactions takes forever. I would say easily 20% of our time was spent figuring out the results of charges. Again I'm sure if you played a few games in a row it would become more routine but I've yet to see a set of rules where charges and melee doesn't bring the game to a screeching halt. Even Lasalle has some of this although it's many times quicker than GDA and is potentially unrealistically a bit "all or nothing". It's particularly unfortunate because as I said above, once you get the hang of shooting and movement the rules are actually pretty simple and intuitive so I feel the charge rules let the side down a bit. I'd also never played a game with activation rolls before (where you roll to see if a brigade can actually move or not) which I thought I would hate but it was actually quite cool! It definitely changed the complexion of the game quite a lot as my units were very eager to get stuck in early, but I had a series of terrible activation rolls later in the game resulting in a set of lancers caught at close range to two artillery batteries! (Writing this now I've just realised that going Hesitant still allows you to move away from the enemy, not that my opponent thought to remind me). I think it also made the Aide de Camp decisions really interesting late in the game as well, as you really start to feel the squeeze on activations (similar to Lasalle). I'm keen to play again at some point and it's also made me more curious to try other games with unit activation rules (I think Black Powder might do this? And Warmaster/Warhammer Ancients?)
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Sep 4, 2023 11:48
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Does that one have rules for Swedes by any chance?
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Sep 4, 2023 16:25
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Ataxerxes posted:Does that one have rules for Swedes by any chance? My impression is that units are fairly generic, in that it treats "line infantry" as basically the same regardless of nationality. I don't know if there are special rules for different countries though I'm afraid
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Sep 4, 2023 19:17
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Love it when googling things leads me to the miniatures page and I see such wonderful articles in the sidebar. TMP is a bad place and should be avoided.
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Sep 5, 2023 16:45
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Cessna posted:TMP is a bad place and should be avoided. its a loving cesspool and i don't understand how something similar hasnt taken its place
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Sep 5, 2023 16:49
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surely the fact every page takes like four hours to load is a drag, even
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Sep 5, 2023 20:00
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I've never really ventured into TMP. It is so unintuitive to use that I don't know what it really does. Is it a forum?
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Sep 5, 2023 20:26
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Virtual Russian posted:I've never really ventured into TMP. It is so unintuitive to use that I don't know what it really does. Is it a forum? It is (among other things, such as a dead blog) a very unintuitively structured forum with tons of subforums upon subforums. Like, there's a subpage for historicals, then a subpage for napoleonics, and then a subpage for 54 mm napoleonics and one for 6 mm napoleonics and not for any other range but one for napoleonic swashbuckling (?) and one for the Empire ruleset and for a handful of others. And a "Napoleonics discussion" and one for "Firearms". Then you understand that the subforums are completely random, made by a fickle admin upon the requests of fickle users. Also 90% of the posts are filler. The admins are Philippino women who live on money given by the owner for... administrating a grognard forums? And if you have a minis business and dare to talk about it without being a paying advertiser you will be expelled. Any topic even being close to the modern era will be filled with the worst toxic takes you can find online. And when you say "why the hell does this exist in 2023?" you stumble upon a five pages long detailed discussion with tons of useful info on a very niche uniform question that you've been looking EVERYWHERE for. And you scratch your head, say to yourself "Huh. drat. Mutherfucking TMP" and keep it in your bookmarks. For now. It's an insane place. (E: the prouser way to TPM is to just google the question and hope it'll find the useful gems among the trash. I've found tons of useful stuff for napoleonics there, for example) lilljonas fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 20:53
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Fighting sail is a game which has been on my radar for some time after watching the Joy of Wargaming reports of the game. He transitioned away from FS towards a more detailed game called Blood, Bilge and Iron Balls which had all of the bookkeeping which I felt took me out of the game with Grand Fleets 3. As a result, I was eager to try this Osprey ruleset and see how it panned out. I bought my ships from Tumbling Dice, they are 1/2400 lead models - and I got the Napoleonic Starter Set which contains a sizeable fleet. In my case, I split it in two with four average (3rd-rate) ships up against a combination of large and small (2nd-rate, 3rd-rate and 5th-rate frigates). I set up my board i.e. grey PVC tablecloth with a 3x3' space - slightly smaller than the 4x4' recommended but more than enough for the bounds of the game I played. No terrain to speak of, just the vagaries of wind and firing arcs to deal with. I whipped up two fleets: a British Royal Navy fleet of three 3rd rates (Vesta, Juno and Ceres) against a Dutch fleet of a 2nd rate (Amsterdam), two 3rd rates (Rotterdam, Delft) and a 4th Rate (Nassau). The Dutch were fighting with roughly a 10pt disadvantage.  Shortly after the squadrons are sighted, the battle lines form Fighting Sail has a hybrid IGO/UGO system - each player sails, then each player fires. The first player on each turn is determined through dice roll. Early in the engagement, the RN had the initiative and were able to manouvre their smaller squadron in a more tight formation, presenting a devastating broadside.  HMS Juno and Ceres pulverise ZM Delft, sinking it The damage rules in FS are a little odd - damage inflicted ticks down a morale counter for your entire army, even if that damage is repaired or ignored. As a result, unless something catastrophic happens (as above, when Delft was smashed to smithereens) your ships pretty much do whatever they want. When they have an anchor (movement penalty) they can only move on 6's and when they have a damage token they fire/board at half strength - but these are rallied off after movement each turn. Unlike the English, the Dutch faired terribly with the wind - they had the initiative half the time, but their turns were either becalmed wind (only move on 6's) or gales (move on 3+ but downwind fire is at half strength).  The wind dies, and most ships are floundering with slack sails The Dutch were able to cross the tee of the british ships, but unable to capitalise: rolling pitiful damage, and when successful the British were able to shrug off the hits. I gave the Dutch one last chance ignoring their penultimate morale decrement - they seized the initiative but were beset with a calm again. Despite all three Dutch ships firing at close range into the British Flagship they were unable to cause enough damage, and a lucky shot by HMS Ceres on the Dutch frigate Nassau saw the morale collapse, and an end to the engagement.  Ceres lands the killing blow on the 4th rate Nassau, ending the engagement The result was 9/16 morale for the RN, versus 0/16 for the Dutch KM. Though the game mechanically was fairly simple, I'm not sure at all that it actually felt very thematic at all, aside from the need to steer correctly with the wind. Some of the mechanics felt very vestigial - the need for example, to roll at least one '6' on as many D6 as your discipline (typically 6-8) to rally off a damage and then anchor token. It was a simple and robust game, but there was almost no flavour - like eating ready salted crisps in a white bread sandwich. Maybe I am being too harsh, but like any red blooded Brit I've dined out on Aubrey/Maturin for years and this was more an in-house Channel 5 documentary than Master and Commander. What felt particularly anaemic was how the battle hinged completely on an abstracted 'morale score' which was disconnected absolutely from the actual board state. If you took lots of damage then your morale goes down - but you rally it off and are operating in tip-top shape and in a dominating position it doesn't matter at all and (as in the case of my game) a pot-shot ticks your morale down to zero you insta-lose. The morale system is pretty closely integrated into the game, so I don't think it's an easy swap to something else. Overall while I enjoyed the game I'm not sure I've got any desire to play it again, maybe the Joy of Wargaming was onto something by switching to BB&IB? Maybe I just didn't have enough ships on the table to sustain lots of losses and damage before the morale factor ended the game? Any thoughts? Southern Heel fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 22:31
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TMP actively supports white nationalist posters. The moderation team protects them and encourages them. It's the legacy of boomers in historical games.
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Sep 6, 2023 02:56
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alg posted:TMP actively supports white nationalist posters. The moderation team protects them and encourages them. It's the legacy of boomers in historical games. Is lead adventures the only alternative? Dakka dakkas historical forum didn’t get much traffic. I guess this thread is Goonhammers version.
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Sep 6, 2023 05:01
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Southern Heel posted:Overall while I enjoyed the game I'm not sure I've got any desire to play it again, maybe the Joy of Wargaming was onto something by switching to BB&IB? Maybe I just didn't have enough ships on the table to sustain lots of losses and damage before the morale factor ended the game? Any thoughts? Yeah, that doesn't sound at all right. Glad you had fun, but I wouldn't bother with those rules again. I don't have a better suggestion, but there have to be a lot of alternatives to that.
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Sep 6, 2023 05:19
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Comstar posted:Is lead adventures the only alternative? Dakka dakkas historical forum didn’t get much traffic. The alternative imho is facebook (again, community is OLD), but facebook is poo poo for finding old posts. But st least you quickly get answers to questions.
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Sep 6, 2023 05:59
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lilljonas posted:It's an insane place. It's also a great place to go if you want to read hundreds of posts about how slavery wasn't all that bad, really.
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Sep 6, 2023 15:17
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StashAugustine posted:There's just a lot of little rules I don't quite get (a lot of the specifics of how leaders move and attach to units in particular) Leader movement is pretty easy - a leader can expend a single Command Initiative to roll up to 3 movement dice, with the total distance moved being the sum of those dice. The way this one is written is a little confusing, because it's your choice how many dice to roll (1 to 3). This only really matters in a couple of cases, but it's important to note that because of the way movement works in CoC, unless you have some specific landmark on the board to aim for (e.g. "up to that wall and no further" or "to the edge of the building") you MUST move the total distance rolled on the movement dice. But practically speaking, leaders are generally moving from one unit to another so most people accept "to meet up with 1st Section" to be sufficient as a "landmark" and in that case you're almost always rolling the full 3D6. The exception to this is if you're trying to get cut and move in such a way as to keep several units all in your leader's command range. Then, in the absence of a landmark you might elect to only roll 1D6 (if you only needed to go a short distance). Just be aware that you could roll for crap and not get to where you need to be, which is one of the joys of CoC The only other time it makes a difference is if your leader is making a crazed, probably-suicidal solo charge into close combat (which is crazy, but sometimes works). In CC, the defender gets dice based on how far (i.e. how many dice) the attacker used to get into melee, so the number of dice you're rolling is important. You may want to roll fewer movement dice in order to give your opponent fewer fighty-dice, but you have to balance that against the risk of rolling for poo poo on your movement roll and coming up short (which usually leaves you with your dick hanging out in the open waiting to get shot to hell). One final note is that leaders never generate or carry Shock, so your leader can move 3D6" without taking a point of Shock (unlike a team, which will gain 1 point of Shock if they run 3D6"). In terms of being "attached" to another unit, generally speaking if you are within 4" of a unit you are considered part of it. In future phases, the leader can then move with that unit if it moves during its activation (though not in the same phase, as that would see him moving twice in the same phase, which is prohibited). If you end up within 4" of two (or more) different units, you can rally Shock off any of them, but recall that you are also liable to take a hit if any of them comes under fire. And finally, if you're within 4" of multiple units and one of them breaks and falls back, the leader can choose whether to fall back with that unit (which is sometimes useful but extremely dangerous to your Force Morale if the turn ends and he's still with the Broken unit) or to remain with one of the other units that didn't break.
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Sep 6, 2023 22:09
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Okay cool that makes sense, just needed it all laid out. In terms of rules I'm still not really clear on how to decide cover; what happens if part of a team has open shots? Also, what is usually classified as hard cover apart from buildings? In terms of tactics I tried out (solo) the basic UK/US/USSR rifle platoons attacking a German rifle platoon, using the delaying action scenario. My first game with the UK I completely screwed up the patrol phase and a bunch of other rules. The general tenor of the games was usually the attacker advancing until they got close enough for a German squad to hit them at close range (shout out to Soviet scout support, they seem really good at this bait role) and then a gradual back and forth of bringing on reserves as the initial platoons weaken. That said it wasn't until the last game with the Soviets that I realized how good covering fire is, and I havent really got the hang of team level fire and maneuver or of assaults. (Side note, seems like grenades have a pretty tiny range band where they're both reliably hitting and you aren't close enough that you're in assault, especially if you're trying to throw them into enclosed spaces?)
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Sep 6, 2023 23:36
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Assaults are wildly deadly in CoC so there are many reasons to stay near but out of assault.
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Sep 7, 2023 08:04
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alg posted:TMP actively supports white nationalist posters. The moderation team protects them and encourages them. It's the legacy of boomers in historical games. Amicalement Armand 90s Cringe Rock fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Sep 7, 2023 |
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Sep 7, 2023 08:14
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StashAugustine posted:Okay cool that makes sense, just needed it all laid out. In terms of rules I'm still not really clear on how to decide cover; what happens if part of a team has open shots? Also, what is usually classified as hard cover apart from buildings? Cover is too tricky for me to give a clear answer since I haven't played CoC since pre-pandemic. But heavy cover, except for buildings, could be stone walls along a pasture, thick piles of brick rubble or stacks of sandbags. Usually the norm is to simply agree with the opponent on what cover is what level when setting up the table. I.e. "those stone walls are pretty low, should we call them light cover? Yeah, sounds good". And yes, grenades are not a big part of the game IMHO and I usually forget they exist. The exception is in urban combat, as you should keep in mind that assault triggers when you're inside range AND have LoS and an unobstructed line between them. If a LMG team is sitting on a second floor porch and you're under it, you're not in assault even if you're within assault range. So in urban environments you are much more likely to get rather close without being in assault, and then chucking grenades into buildings can be a thing. But in more open terrain you're unlikely to use them. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 09:23 on Sep 7, 2023 |
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Sep 7, 2023 09:18
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On the obsession with Germany/German armies - GW's Death Korps of Krieg is one of the most stupid names ever for an army, it's not even like Krieg is a word that's rare in the anglophone world - it absolutely doesn't have the same tongue in cheeky humour as earlier names, nor is unique or cool enough to stand alone. IMO it sits with the same grouping as the retcon that the Land Speeder and Land Raider are not called such because they speed over, or raid land, but actually because they were invented by a dude called "Arkhan Land"  Speaking of Land Raiders, I promised myself this was just a silly print because I had some space on my build plate, but after making some slightly over-sized bocage-scale hedges as terrain....  mllaneza posted:Yeah, that doesn't sound at all right. Glad you had fun, but I wouldn't bother with those rules again. I don't have a better suggestion, but there have to be a lot of alternatives to that. Someone has unironically suggested Warhammer Historicals: Trafalgar for Age of Sail but I just wonder if there can be a minimum interest in a pure age of sail game which DOESN'T have the kind of paperwork and sheet referencing which drags it down to a net-zero fun quotient? I think I can just about give Grand Fleets a pass despite its wonky one-dice-roll-for-everything firing mechanic.
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Sep 7, 2023 09:21
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Southern Heel posted:
I'm an unapologetic Trafalgar proponent. On the paperwork side it's mostly dotting damage boxes, so slightly less than say, Battletech. Which might make you go "yay" or "ugh" depending on your feelings for Battletech, but it's not a groggy game. It is, ironically though, probably way more fun when you have say, 4-8 ships in total on the table rather than, well, a full scale Trafalgar. Age of Sail combat, with the right game, is pretty fun. I like the combination of sluggish movement that requires you to think several turns ahead, combined with a mostly slow, attritional firefight where you're rarely knocked out of the game in a single volley. It's one of those things I want to get into again at some point in the very far future. lilljonas fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Sep 7, 2023 |
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Sep 7, 2023 09:27
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