The Greeks first battle!

After working all winter on a huge number of Ancient Greeks, it was time to get them out and on the table for a battle.  While the plan is to run a few story driven battles with everyone at Dallas's place, I really wanted to get a handle on the rules in a one on one game before attempting a big multi player game.

So, last week with Dallas away and no regular game booked, Greg and I got together to hash through the "Hail Caesar" rules and make a go at a game.

The protagonists were made up of a group of allied Greeks (Athenians and Thebeians) vs a smaller but more elite force of Lacedaemonians (more commonly referred to as the Spartans).   The battle field was made up of a lot of open desert area, with a well blocking part of one flank, and a few fields scattered around the edges.

Here are some of the Allied Greeks.

And here are some of the Spartans.

The rule set we used is "Hail Caesar" but most of you will be familiar with it in it's many other incarnations as: Pike & Shotte, Black Powder, or originally as Games Workshops Warmaster!


The game started with a lot of manuever failures on the side of the Athenians, with several units just refusing to follow orders. Eventually though after about 2 turns of minor move and adjust, both Greg and I went "Screw this!" and slammed our forces into each other.

 

 The initial hit, shattered an Athenian unit and sent it running right off the bat!  I suddenly worried that the game would be over in 30 minutes flat and that I would need WAY more units for a viable game.  However, it turns out that was a fluke, and things settled down after that with the push and counter push (literally) that phalanx combat was known for.

 Down the huge battle line, things went good and bad for each force.  In the center we fought forever back and forth, on the Spartans right flank they pushed through, and on the Athenians right flank, they pushed through.

The Spartan push on their right flank went well to start and then due to a number of bad rolls for them, and great rolls for 2 small skirmish units, they got held up for a large number of turns.  They finally routed the 2 small units but were too late to help elsewhere by that time.

On the Athenians right flank, they pushed forward, but then got pushed back 3 or 4 times all while shaken and disordered!  Amazingly they never ran and held several units in check for most of the game!  They finally did route near the end, but by then it wall in in the center for the game.

The center of the battle tied up at least 3 units on each side and was back and forth for a long time.  In the end both sides were battered, bruised, and shaken.  The deciding factor ended up being both of us throwing our generals in for a few extra combat dice, and units deciding to run due to being shaken and having to test on tied combats.

There were a lot of tied combats since phalanx units count anything that is a loss of up to 2 as a draw.  This meant that until they were shaken and had to test moral on draws, units just stood and took it!  The Spartans even more so, since they can reroll a failed armour save each turn so took far fewer casualties.

In the end, it was a blood bath with I believe 4 units left on the table!  Greg and I had a blast with it though, even though we made many mistakes, but figured them out along the way and corrected most of them.  We now both understand the rules much better and hope to have these figures out for a Thursday night game sometime soon!

Byron's 8th through 10th enties to the painting challenge

Well, once again I have fallen behind in posting my entries, so I will get up to date with a brief(ish) post that has a picture or two from each of my last few submissions and links to the actual blog entries over on the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge site.

My 8th entry was a group of 6 30k Death Guard scimitar pattern jet bikes from the Horus Heresy era.  I fell in love with these when they were released a few years ago, but the price kept me from buying them until recently.  I didn't want to do a small squad of 3 since they would get wiped out too quickly like that, and I wanted them to have some staying power, so I did 6 of them.

The bikes are supposed to be mounted on the normal GW 50mm clear round flying stands and come with those along with 30mm tall mounting posts.  I thought both of these looked like crap with them, and the normal pill shaped bike bases are way to short at 50mm long for these behemoths.  So, I custom laser cut some 32mm wide (the new standard marine base size) x 100mm deep bases.

My 9th entry was some long discontinued GW forgeworld terrain that I picked up at a Baltimore Games Day 14 years ago that has sat in their boxes since then!!!
 

 

 I also included in that a unit of Greek slingers to add some range to my Greek forces.

Next up was a theme week entry for BFG (Big F!$%'ing Gun) where I did a pair of Siege-Automata for my 30k Mechanicum force.

Not only is the gun on this thing freaking huge, the whole thing is!  To give a sense of size the base is a 120mm x 92mm oval base and a marine barely reaches to his knee! 

Overall, I am very happy with how they came out, and I placed tied for second that week in the voting for best theme week entry. 
 

My 10th entry was an Archmagos for the 30k Mechanicum force and some more Greeks.

The Archmagos Prime on Abeyant for my 30k Mechanicum army now makes it an actual legal force to play with an HQ, so expect it to hit the tabletop soon.

Now that it is a valid force, I have also provided an overall picture of the army so far.  This is in-fact all that I bought initially to do for the force, but I have of course fallen in love with them, and more are on the way....

This time the Greek unit was more unarmoured Greek hoplites that I did as a support unit of mercenaries or militia for either side that I am working on.

This brings me back up to date as of the weekend, but there are 3 more entries up this weekend so expect another update early this coming week.  

Now we just need to setup a game to blood in the Mechanicum force!

Byron's 7th Post and Flight theme week entry

7th Entry

For a 7th post last week I painted up more Greeks and 30k Mechanicum.  First up this week are 4 more Castellax Battle-Automata, these ones armed with the much more basic mauler bolt cannon.

The gun is essentially an upgraded heavy bolter, so not great, but not bad either.

Also painted last week was another unit of 16 Greek hoplites.  Once again these are the very poor Warlord (Immortal) figures, but I have been forcing myself to work through the pile of these before going onto the better Victrix and Foundry figures that have been arriving from various orders, as I don't think I could force myself to come back to these things after working on better figures.

This batch I painted up in white and blue in various patterns and am picturing them as an Athenian unit.  I realize that most units would be more mixed with colours and styles historically, but am choosing to simplify at least a few units so that they look like units and are easy to keep straight on the battle field.  I know, not very historical, but I play more for the look and tactics than any real historical recreation reason, I don't have a burning need or desire to be 100% accurate.

 

Theme Round - Flight 

For the first theme round this year I picked something that I have wanted to paint since I got it almost a year ago, but kept delaying as I was not sure I could do it justice until I had some more practice with my super fine Harder & Steenbeck airbrush.

 

Well, I've had some practice the last few months with the airbrush so, may I present my take on the Dropfleet Commander UCM Beijing Battleship.  Now, it's not the normal version, this is the kickstarter exclusive all resin 2-up version.  Meaning it is not playable in game, and is bloody huge, measuring a whopping 11"+ long, 5" across, and 4"+ tall!

Once the base colours were setup, I went in with a 0.15mm H&S airbrush and worked each upper hull panel up to a lighter grey in the center, careful to leave the edge of each panel dark.  This took a while as I put the lighter colour on as a glaze of probably 1 part paint 4 parts glaze medium and then thinned down and applied with very low pressure. Once all the panels were highlighted, I masked off the ones to be white and gave them a few coats of flat white.

With the airbrush work all done, I went to the bottom of the hull and used a brush to glaze highlights onto each little bump and part.  I didn't want a chalky drybrush look so had to do it this way which was time consuming but simple.  I then clear coated the model for handling and the next step.

With that done I used thinned down black oil paint to create a pin wash.  I did it this way for two reasons.  Firstly, a thinned oil paint wash wicks through the cracks and details 100x better than any wash I have ever used.  Secondly, Greg showed me a great product that is essentially a hardened q-tip used by Japanese mecha modelers, that you dip into thinner after the wash is done and then wipe it over the model.  It cleans up anything that comes out of the details instantly and completely (assuming you clear coated first).  This has made doing models like this far less stressful than using a normal wash.  I don't know that Greg has ever actually used the product himself, but I LOVE it and have used them MANY times to great effect.

After the wash I clear coated again so that the oil paint was sealed away and then went to more detail work.  I added some sparse metal work areas (mainly pipes and pistons) and then painted a few hundred (at least is seems like it) blue lights all over the model.  These were done with a simplified gem pattern of only 4 colours (dark blue, med blue, light blue, white) due to being so damn small.  Of course that hardly shows in the images, so it was not really worth the effort, but oh well.

 

So there you go, a huge spaceship that is not even usable in a game, all done just for fun.  That said, I bloody LOVE the scale and wished they had done more than just the UCM and a PHR ship in this scale.  Surely it isn't just me that thinks that it would be amazing to do a fleet battle on a gym floor with ships like this!

Oh, and just for comparison, the small ship in the last picture is a normal DFC ship that is 4" long on a 50mm base.

All the work was well worth it on this model, as I ended up winning the Theme week with the most votes!  A pretty damn good way to start the theme challenges off!

Byron's 4th, 5th and 6th Painting Challenge Submission - Greeks, Death Guard, and Mechanicum

I promised myself that this year I wouldn't fall behind in keeping up the cross posting to my home blog here for the painting challenge, but have once again fell behind anyway. So, time to catch up with everything...

The 4th entry I put in this year was more 30k Death Guard to expand my force so that I can contribute more to our groups rather large number of 30k battles that rage at least monthly.

I have a pile of figures to get done for the 30k version of the Death Guard this year, including several transports as my force so far has been almost exclusively foot based with little mobility.  However, before getting onto that, I needed to get some more infantry done (mainly due to the fact that I want to do all the vehicles at once and ran out of chipping solution so am waiting for it to arrive).

 

My 5th entry was a continuation of my Greek project, with another unit of Warlord (Immortal) Greeks, as well as a command stand of Spartans.

The command stand is made up of a pack of metal Spartans from Warlord and the quality is much better than the plastics.  Even though they still managed to get the arms wrong.  The arms are once again in a throwing motion, rather than an arm over spear for thrusting motion.  Oh well...  since I am painting a lot of the figures that have leather armour as if they had bronze armour, I probably shouldn't complain that much about things that most people wouldn't notice anyway.

I spent a lot more time on these, doing more blending and more highlights, which don't really show up in the pictures, but show up in person.  My thought being that the command stands will be looked at closer than the mass infantry units and should therefore get a bit more attention.

I then moved onto a second unit of Greeks, that are un-armoured.

Once again since they are meant for mass effect on the tabletop, they got a fairly basic treatment.  I blocked in colours, washed, then highlighted.  I then went over the shields and painted various colours and then applied decals.  After that is was a simple matter of basing them and they were done.  Not fancy but effective I think. 

So another 18 Greeks done, only about 200 left to go...

My sixth submission was more Castellax Class Battle-Automata and a transport for my 30k Death Guard. The Castellax were armed with multi-meltas, flamers, and close combat saw blades this time around.

The bases are hand made using liquitex, cork board, cut up sprue, guitar wire, and copper pipe bits.  I tried to give them an urban rubble look without going overboard as I find a lot of cast resin rubble bases have too much on them and you wonder how the hell the model is moving through it.

I also kept with the blue glow as a colour accent to keep in theme with the last batch, even though I tend to think of melta as a red/orange glow.  My thought being that it just would look like more of the same base red armour colour if I did that.

Next up is a Death Guard Anvillus pattern drop pod that I had started doing up for this weeks "flight" theme just in case I didn't get the piece that I really wanted to get done completed.  I did though, so here is the drop pod as a regular submission.

The drop pod was painted the same way I have been doing all of my Death Guard vehicles, making heavy use of Mig products.  I base coated it black, applied chipping solution, painted the off white colour with an airbrush and then once dry wet it with water and started chipping the paint off.  It gives a completely random and organic look to it, you just have to give up control though as you can go light or hard on the brushing to control it a bit, but sometimes it just comes off in big sections and sometimes it sticks and you can't get any chips, so you just go with it.  I then apply decals and clear coat it, then come back with Mig streaking products and oil brushers and make it a mess with multiple different browns, blacks, and rust colours.  Apply a bit of each, let set for a bit, then use thinner or white spirits to spread it around and cause the streaks, or to clean up areas that got to much.

There we go, a whole pile of stuff off my painting shelf, but I already have it filling up again as stuff comes in to replace it.
 

Byron's 1st Painting Challenge Entry

Here is the first entry from this years Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge.  A Nurgle rhino and a pair of Tohaa from Infinity.  The painting process on the Rhino was pretty slow on due to the large number of washes involved.

First up is a Nurgle Death Guard rhino for my 40k force.  The rhino started out as a used kit from a friend that no longer wanted it, so it was already painted for Khorne.  That didn't matter a whole lot as anything being used for Nurgle needs about a metric tonne of green stuff before its ready anyway.

Here are some photos of the green stuff work done after ripping off the doors.

I was trying to make this match an older piece so that it fits with the army I painted probably 5-6 years ago, so it has no fancy chipping solution or grime solutions added as I started doing that all after painting this army.  The base colours were all done with an airbrush and went super fast.  I think it was less than 20 minutes to get the green and all the shading done, then the slow part started.

What took so long with the rhino was the fact that all of the pustule areas are just painted bone white and then layered with sepia, green, red, yellow, and blue washes in various areas to build up the sick looking colour shades.  Each layer had to sit and dry before the next, making it a slow process.

Next up are two Infinity figures from the Tohaa faction, affectionately known as the Artichoke heads, and I think you can see why.   These two are Sukeul Commandos, and I have been needing at least one of them for a long while. 

The one with the rifle is yielding a K1 rifle, which has a special type of ammo that can hurt anything 60% of the time.  No matter if it is a weak base trooper or a mighty TAG (Dreadnought) it is always a 60% chance to hurt them, which is damn strong since a normal rifle in the game has a less than 20% chance to hurt a TAG.  Since to many players have been fielding TAGs lately, I needed something to help out against them in my force.

I took her to my game last night, and off course, basic rifle troops did more damage to the enemy TAG than she did..... figures, right?

Both the Rhino and the Tohaa were fun little starter pieces for the challenge, but now its onto some of the larger projects.