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Arquinsiel posted:I used one of the old GW base colours for it, but I have no idea what the modern equivalent of Knarloc Green is I'm afraid. According to THIS insanity, the matching modern GW paint would be Loren Forest, although as the site itself points out, the compatibility between old and new Citadel paints is based more on GW's claims of such compatibility more than anything else.
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Jan 23, 2018 16:39
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 07:39 |
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Continuing a discussion in the Indie Style miniatures wargaming thread with Count Thrashula, I have been wanting to get for about two years now into getting some historical gaming going on, specifically set during the Italian Wars of the Renaissance. It's been a slow and kind of stop start process though. I want to start moving into smaller scale minis, both due to storage concerns and also time concerns, so I've settled on 15mm as for me it is the perfect scale between small enough to paint fast, but also has enough detail that I actually like how it looks. Except I don't own any 15mm scale minis appropriate to the time period, so it's been this slow process of finding where to buy them and only now have I started painting some test ones to see if I like them (I do!). The other main hangup has been rules system. I have Furioso, Landsknecth, Bad War, Never Mind the Billhooks and probably bunch of other stuff and...almost none of it really does it for me at least when reading the rules. Billhooks is the closest to sounding like it's enjoyable to play of the lot, but I've not had the chance to try it (since again, I don't have the minis) and also it feels weird when a block of landsknecht pikemen are like 24 people. I have looked at Lion Rampant with some additional rules for Condottieri and hand-gunners and whatnot, but Lion Rampant also feels kind of weird for having big blocks of units fighting each other. Thrashula suggested To the Strongest! which apparently has a supplement of medieval army lists going all the way up to the 1500s so that covers the Italian Wars, and I am intrigued by not having to bother with measurement and shifting blocks of troups by like 24 degrees for every half a movement point per command point or any of that other poo poo so many of the other rank and flank games insist on using. So I suppose the point of this post is - it is hard to do what you want, when you don't know what you want hah. I do know that I enjoy the look of that time period and I want to do wargaming in that time period. I also know I do not want to spend hours of my life trying to figure out what the gently caress the exact flags and composition of a specific battle was, because I have board wargames that already do that for me. So I suppose a question now would be - is To the Strongest! the kind of system that lets me play a historically-themed game in the Italian Wars without requiring me to actually waste more hours of my life on learning niche information I will never need? Or is there any other game that can do that?
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Sep 2, 2023 01:14
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Springfield Fatts posted:Check your PMs, and I'll confess to being a shill for the ruleset but I think To the Strongest is the best of both worlds. At 15mm you'll have the choice of base sizes as determined by your grid / table size. I do 6" squares at 80mm frontages on my units, but you could go bigger if you wanted more spectacle or smaller if you wanted a more manageable grid / play area. I don't know poo poo about the Italian Wars but from a modelling perspective it means you can cram as many or as few little men onto your bases. I also game in 15mm, so a unit of infantry for me is two ranks of 6 figures. Expanding that to army scale it would be way more models than needed for a game of DbA but not undaunting. Most pikemen are "deep" units but you can represent that by just an extra dude on each rank, or an entire third one depending on how many you want to paint. I will say that only two units can occupy one square at a time so you have to factor some abstraction into the game. Don't expect to micro-manage your tercio formations on the board or whatever, it's just one of the downsides of a rulesystem covering such a wide period. See that's the thing - I don't want to micromanage my tercios. At all. I just want to shove colorful dudes with cool banners against each other, because I'm a monkey and I like how colorful the Italian Wars are in terms of clothing and aesthetics. So honestly - for me that is a plus in favor of the system. I want it to have some of the feel of the period, but I don't need much. Count Thrashula posted:Glad to see you here! Yeah, getting into historicals is really confusing because there's no standard ruleset, no standard minis, you can't just walk into a hobby shop and buy a starter set (I mean, generally). It's very much a pick and mix personalized kind of hobby, which I really like. Yeah the confusion is real. Let me give an example from what I am doing right now and the relation between models and systems. I bought a set of French gendarmes and some armored landsknechts in advancing poses from Old Glory's Blue Moon line of 15mm Italian Wars. The sculpts are beautiful and the minis look wonderful (although I am mildly annoyed that their "wire pikes" are just a simple straight piece of metal rod with no shaping at all to make it into an actual pike, and when emailed they simply told me that this is how they've always sold them and I am the first person to ever complain. 'k.) but here's the thing - I am basing the infantry on 40x20mm bases and the cavalry on 40x40, because that's what I can easily find in plastic and I want them on plastic bases not mdf. The infantry pack has 30 figures in it, the gendarmes - 15. So okay, the gendarmes I'll put 3 on a base and it'll look awesome. But what do you do with the infantry? 3 look fine on a base, but 4 look significantly better and give you the feeling of an actual tight pike formation. But that in turn means I can either make 10 or 7 and a half bases. Like, yeah, I can just go with whatever I feel looks best for the army, but how many bases I need per unit kind of matters a lot depending on what system I am using. And if I don't have a system that I have settled on, that means I can't really make the modeling decision on how to approach the actual miniatures, which just...again leads to paralysis as I try and figure out if I even want to bother with this historical poo poo or just play Men of Iron 4: Arquebus and be happy with a boardgame wargame rather than miniatures one. For guys like the Yorkshire Gamer that have a 30+ years old collection of hundreds upon hundreds of 28mm scale minis this decision is a lot simpler. You pick a system you vaguely like and just shuffle some stands around. But for someone starting up, this can vary on whether I am going to be dumping 100 or 400+ dollars on tiny little metal men just so I can get 2 armies together to have a hope of actually playing a loving game at some point between now and the heat death of the universe. That's what I have noticed is the problem. You either start small with skirmish stuff, which I don't care about, or if you try and go for actual large scale battles you just have to dive head-first into nothingness and just hope that eventually the minis you are making will maybe be used for a game.
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Sep 2, 2023 04:21
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Wowshawk posted:Yeah, you want Billhooks, it has the feel, and you can use dice on your pike blocks instead of individual figure removal. It's a fun system and no reason not use 15mm if that's your jam. Definitely. My plan is to get enough figures painted to play that while I get more bases done to actually play something larger scale which is what I want. I figured I can initially still count figure and use a die to count off casualties, then as I get more bases use one base to equal one figure, and just go back to "figure" removal hah. Southern Heel - I do get that. I am aware that, in general, how many miniatures on what size base you use is mostly irrelevant for most historical games, and that's one of the things drawing me to it. However that sort of broad usage is, again, great for when you already have the figures. I don't yet. And my main concern here is mostly balancing aesthetics (4 people per base simply looks better and more correct than 3) with balancing how much it's going to cost me to then get enough bases to play anything with them. Also, huh, I didn't know there was a mashup of Pikeman's Lament and Lion Rampant. I should check that out, thanks! EDIT: lilljonas posted:Lol we're at the same spot in our club. We're off for the Italian Wars after many years of build up, but there are no perfect game for us. At least two of us are big fans of Lasalle 2, so we're working on a hack of Lasalle that would work for italian wars. Basically we keep a lot of the movement and activations rules, and are reworking the combat and shooting to be more in line with late medieval/renaissance instead of early 19th century battles. We're... partly there? There's a lot of elbow grease left. But yeah, the sum of this story is that there's no golden ticket for early renaissance rules and you'll either have to adjust something that you kinda like or make do with the parts of a ruleset that you think is decent enough. Ah this showed up just as I was posting hah. Yeah I am aware that hacking something together is probably my best bet to make something I actually like, however as you just described - it is a non-insignificant amount of work. And while I enjoy miniatures wargaming as a hobby, I don't enjoy it as much as other hobbies I have so there's unfortunately a ceiling to how much work I am willing to put into it. I already do heavy house ruling and hacking with the weekly RPG game I run and I even hacked together, created and printed a board game wargame for my previous campaign. But hacking together a miniatures ruleset for a thing I only mostly enjoy rather than really enjoy is just way more than I willing to put in. Plus, there's the simple time constraints. I want to play some Italian Wars miniatures gaming where I shove colorful dudes with long sticks against each other. And having to build my own loving system while I am also painting the miniatures is a good way to basically not do that hah. I will have to check out Tercios though, as I keep collecting systems for this drat period, or at least anything appropriate enough. Jenx fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Sep 2, 2023 |
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Sep 2, 2023 13:18
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This mostly seems to align with what I've seen as well. However I am explicitly making a point not to base these guys on pdf or other type of flat bases, instead opting for plastic ones so I can put magnets on the bottom for ease of both storage and transport. As such I am going be doing cavalry on 40x40 instead of 40x30. Honestly at 15mm it makes the gendarmes look much less cramped, and for me the aesthetics is a primary draw to this time period and conflict. Thank you for the recommendations and suggestions. Rules-wise - I refuse to touch any DBA or derived game. I have Hordes of the Things, and until Barker learns how to write like a human I am not dealing with his poo poo. To the Strongest is very tempting since it seems to also cover the earlier Hussite Wars which are also something I am interested in (mostly due to how batshit the entire conflict is really) and so that'll be a potential future use for them too.
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Sep 2, 2023 19:34
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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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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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Speaking of asking for 15mm miniatures - I got a big big order of Italian Wars stuff, however one thing I am missing is cannons. I got artillery crews, but no artillery for them to crew. So, any suggestions on where to get some good 16th century cannons?
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Sep 12, 2023 01:51
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On the topic of the appeal of historical wargaming, for me probably the biggest thing is that it just "makes sense" on a fundamental level. I know what a spearman does. I know what a horse archer can do. I know what a guy with a machine gun can do. I have no idea what a Darkomened Dickbaggler with a Third Eye of Har'zzargharth can do by just looking at it. That to me is the single biggest advantage historical games have over others - that poo poo is real and you know what it does, even if you might not know the particulars. And sure, the particulars can vary, to some they are more important (see above ongoing conversation about uniform colors), to others less so. For me I basically like historically-flavored without being bothered by the actual history too much, since that just sounds like work I don't have the time to do.
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Sep 13, 2023 23:25
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Those are absolutely adorable and I do really like how they've turned out! Also, I will use this change of talking about cannons to again ask if anyone can recommend me some 16th century(ish) 15mm cannons that I can get without artillery crew.
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Sep 18, 2023 23:16
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spectralent posted:Yeah, it might just be my particular scale of broke brains but I can't quite work my head around what smaller scale black powder games are meant to be, exactly. For post-machinegun stuff, small groups hitting objectives with a few items of support makes sense as a narrative event in my head. For pre-modern stuff, small armies might be fighting because, hey, no time to gather the troops for fending off a raid/it's almost winter, nobody's answering the call. But for eras where armies were tens of thousands of guys and they near exclusively fought in formations of like a thousand, shoulder to shoulder, what are the lines of twenty guys meant to be? It's clearly not skirmishers fighting ahead of the army because they form squares for some reason, and also because you can usually take separate "skirmishers". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecUAFQH6AzM this is a good overview for an earlier period, but in general small skirmish engagements happened all the time, it's just not something you write big books about. Like 10 of your guys running into 12 of the enemy's guys while trying to get some stuff from a nearby village isn't really something that gets historians writing 1000+ page books about, but it still happened.
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Oct 19, 2023 17:01
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Cessna posted:Sure, you get that sort of thing. But as spectralent points out in reality this sort of skirmish isn't a recreation of a big battle on a smaller scale with proportionate types of troops and formations. For example, a regiment of infantry form a square to defend against cavalry, but you wouldn't see a group of twenty guys in a square; it just doesn't work like that. Also, a force of skirmishers would be entirely of the same type; i.e., you'd run into a unit of all voltigeurs or all dragoons. You wouldn't have mini- combined arms battles with a group of line infantry supported by a dozen cavalrymen and a single canon. Ah I must have misunderstood the topic in question then. No, I agree, that kind of stuff is silly and makes no sense.
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Oct 19, 2023 20:23
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There's so much other stuff to it too! You get to paint your little toy soldiers, and play games with them, and make flags for them and build little houses and trees for them to fight amongst. loving great hobby. So yeah, lol at your buddy and his mother in law.
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Oct 21, 2023 01:55
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Count Thrashula posted:The trouble is the 1500 cutoff for most of the rulesets I want to use in 15mm. To the Strongest covers WotR, Hussite Wars, 100YW, etc., but ends before the Italian Wars and then I would have to bolt on some custom stuff from For King and Parliament. Same end date for stuff like DBA and Triumph. With To the Strongest! I know Simon Miller is working on a Renaissance army list book, so presumably that'll cover the Italian Wars, until then I'm just painting minis and building up numbers myself. So hopefully by the time it shows up I have enough for at least two smallish forces so I can rope people into playing it with me! As for basing - man I keep eyeballing those larger multi bases, and they look so pretty, but I have decided to go with 40x20 for infantry and 40x40 for cavalry and just stack bases in whatever formation is needed since I hope that way it'll let me cover a bunch of systems.
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Jan 21, 2024 16:43
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It was very interesting to see the Hussite Wars represented in NMTB Deluxe! Mostly because it is a conflict that is weirdly underrepresented (I imagine because it was centered on Bohemiam, with little to do with the US and the UK, so most British and American game designers instead seem to be content simply rehashing WW2, the Wars of the Roses and the American Civil War over and over and over and over again). However I still am not entirely sure how actively useful the conflict is from the standpoint of wargaming. After all, one of the big elements of it were the novelty of the tactics and the inability of the crusaders to stop just charging into fortified locations filled with guns. So from a gaming perspective, it always feels to me like you need the player playing the anti-Hussite crusaders to actively be making bad tactical decisions, because that is what defined those battles. On the other hand, I have also been recently thinking about historical-flavored games that don't necessarily try and lean too hard into the actual history. Partially because I realized that while I love the period of the Italian Wars I have a very low tolerance of caring about specific people and their flags and who was or wasn't at a specific battle, so I am starting to ponder simply making generic "Renaissance" armies to bash against each other. So I suppose one could do that with the Hussite wars too.
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Mar 9, 2024 06:21
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lilljonas posted:Yes a lot of armies were mostly mercs and melted away when they were not paid anymore. So you can definitely make just a bunch of mercenary units and divide them in two armies. Oh absolutely true, but it's more that I like flags and I like having loads of them, but trying to think of who's flags go where is just infinitely dull to me. So far my two options I've settled on is 1. Make vaguely appropriate fictional flags and just go with that or 2. Just don't worry about it, slap whatever flag makes sense on a given base of units, and history be damned.
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Mar 9, 2024 21:44
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I want to thank you for leading me down the rabbit hole of looking this guy up and I am now watching a 2 part interview with him on YouTube and he just looks like a genuinely sensible person, a mythic beast rarely heard of in the ranks of "Gamers".
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Mar 14, 2024 21:27
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