Last figure of the year

I guess my feelings for Space Marine Librarians as pretty much the same as those the Space Marines themselves have of their Librarians: while I don't really think the use of psychic powers (magic) is honourable, the fact that my enemies use them compels me to adopt them myself. Having a psyker allows me a chance to negate the psychic powers of enemy psykers, and with Adrian and Thomas both fielding psykers... let's just say I didn't start this arms race.

Anyway, once I decided to paint a Librarian figure, the next question was what wargear to field him with, and after that which exact figure to use.

While the Turmiel figure would have been an obvious choice, I wanted my Librarian to be in Terminator armour but I didn't like the ones available. The figure I eventually chose was this one of a Space Marine captain in Terminator armour. The figure came with a storm bolter in the right hand, but as the Librarian has a psychic shooting attack, I didn't want him armed with a shooting weapon he wasn't going to use; instead, I wanted him to have an open right hand like the Turmiel figure, as if he was casting a spell. So after all that, I ended up buying a Turmiel figure just to cut his right hand off to graft onto my Librarian's wrist - the Turmiel figure then had its Dark Angels insignia removed and a hand holding a plasma pistol glued on to its wrist, and will become a Librarian for Adrian's Ultramarines...

Anyway, here's my Librarian.

"I find your lack of faith in the Dewey Decimal System disturbing..."

I painted him blue instead of dark green as the rest of my marines, because of this article. I think he turned out fine, and the blue does set him apart from my other Terminators.

With him painted, I now have three options for my HQ choices.

The Chaplain, the Captain, and the Librarian.

2012 in Review

It's still a few days till the end of the year but as I will be busy with non-gaming matters this weekend I thought I might as well do this post today.

We played a total of 12 games this year, which isn't as many as I have hope for, but at least we now have more players and armies compared to a year ago.

We didn't play all the games we wanted to for one reason or another though: the Dystopian Wars project is delayed as Spartan Games decided to work on their Dystopian Legions line instead of the promised Ottoman forces, and we never got round to doing the Warring States China campaign.

On the plus side we now have a few games of Age of Eagles under our belts, and three armies too. On the Games Workshop side we are gaining momentum with both 40K and Fantasy Battles. Other than these two games we hope to get the figures and rules sorted for the Macedonian War project, but as hundreds of figures are yet to be painted, this may take a while... Also in the pipeline is a Dux Britanniarum campaign between fg and myself, using mainly LOTR figures. Strandhogg, my previous 28mm skirmish favourite has seen less action in the past few months, so hopefully DB will give the boys a chance to get some fresh air.

That's the hope-to-do; now on to the to-not-do...

Now I am not one for New Year resolutions, but I do plan to buy and paint the minimal of figures in the upcoming year. I still have around 60 28mm figures on the painting list, but that's all - after that, I will have enough (haha) for 2000 pts GW games. The only thing I see myself buying in 2013 in a big way is an Ottoman fleet if Spartan Games decide finally release them.

Those are the plans. Let's see how they survive contact with 2013 then...

15mm Attalid Pergamene completed

Painted, based and flocked.

These four Impetus units represent my contribution to our planned Macedonian War campaign; they can also double as the Attalid Pergamene under DBA, being 1 x Kn, 1 x Cv, 1 x LH, 7 x Ax, and 2 x Ps. I never play DBA these days, but somehow the vestigial Barkerist inside me compelled me to make sure my little contingent would be DBAble.

With these figures done, my painting commitment is much reduced - but more on that in my next post, I think...

Battle of Busaco

With Martin free to play a game on Sunday, I decided to do another Peninsular War scenario.

Problem with most Peninsular battles is that even with the scale of age of Eagles, we still don't have enough figures and tabletop area for a full battle. After some reading, I decided to depict only the southern half (or two-thirds) of the battlefield, pitting the French II and VIII Corps against the Allied 2nd, 3rd and 5th Divisions.

I gave Martin the option of deploying hidden behind the crest of Busaco ridge, which would oblige the French players (Thomas and Gerard) to approach the ridge blind. Martin chose to deploy at the crest of the ridge, and the French decided to attack the the two ends of his line...

The Allies deploy along the length of the ridge. The cork and bits of turf mark the rough ground.

The French approach, pushing their guns forward.

Line vs. column... well, supported lines, actually.

Panorama of the battlefield, showing the French attacks at both ends of the Allied lines.

After much to-ing and fro-ing, the French managed to occupy the highest points on both ends of the table, and even managed to haul their guns up to the crest on the southern end.

In its basic form, AoE doesn't really confer a "historical" advantage to the British Line vs. French Column match-up. The various scenarios that I looked at had different ways of dealing with this, but all seemed to give too much advantage to the British. I guess I will have to study this aspect again before our next game.

Second Game of 40K

After reading through the rulebook several times, I felt confident enough to play a larger game of 40K with Thomas, this time with walkers and vehicles.

We played a 1765 pts game, with the "capture the flag" scenario: my forces have to capture the bottle of green paint on Thomas' side of the table, while he has to capture the bottle of red paint on my side (yes, we are working on making some proper objective markers...).

Thomas' Rhino lights the way. My Thunderfire cannon sits comfortably in a piece of ruins.

Squad mates cheering Brother Lucius on as he took aim at the enemy dreadnought. He missed.

A meeting of dreads.

Assault troopers face off.

The command squads from both sides face off as the battle reaches its climax.

We still made some minor rule errors, mostly due to unfamiliarity with the stats and some special rules for the weapons, but I think we've got it down more or less.

40K is rather unforgiving in a rock-paper-scissors way - if you haven't got something that can defeat vehicles, you are pretty much toast if the enemy brought some.

Now that we have got a tournament style game done, I am hoping to try some scenarios and see how that works out. Meanwhile, I am slowly painting up new recruits for my force...

WOTR Artillery

"Espy thou yonder Elven Mage? Confound him and everyone near him!"

While I wait for figures and bits to complete my Attalids and round up my Space Marines forces (it's a never ending process, isn't it?) I decided to get back into the saddle up painting the stuff I already on hand.

With the four figures from Front Rank painted, my artillery corps is now complete: two guns (counts as great cannons under Warhammer rules) and a volleygun (counts as Helblaster), all that I plan to field in my WOTR/Empire army.

The crew come from three different companies: Perry, Mirliton, and of Front Rank, who provided the Master Engineer. The guns come from Perry, Mirliton, and Artizan.

I know artillery crew were "civilians" during the WOTR period, but I have chosen to depict them as a "professional" body, with more a more uniformed look than my other units.

Let's see how they perform then...

Vexillia does it again!

Allow me to go in a roundabout, rambling fashion as I did last time...

After last weekend's game of Warhammer Fantasy I decided to read more about my army... and I realised that I have completely missed the fact that The Empire has a new army book/codex. That's right, despite the new griffon models the size of a real pigeon and the ridiculous telescope and planetarium on wheels, my mind did not make the connection that: hey! new models = new rules = new codex!

Anyway, that made me decide to get a copy of the new army book (which Adrian got for me yesterday - thanks, bro).

Truth be told I don't actually like the list that much, since I model my army after the WOTR period, and all the shiny bits that make an Empire army powerful - the magic, the priests and fanatics, the monsters - don't really gel with my fluff. I am not even allowed to field massed ranks of longbowmen (although this has always been the case)!

I reckon to hit the points I need I will have to fill out the ranks with foot-sloggers, perhaps another box of Perry plastics, and to give my infantry more bite I will need to bulk out my unit of Greatsword - fully-armoured knights/men-at-arms with two-handed weapons. Now unfortunately the Perry plastic boxed sets only come with 4 of these per box (out of 40 torsos), and they only have 6 attack poses for the metal ones. After some browsing, I settled for the Mirliton figures, which I have used and which fit with the Perry figures, and sent an order off to Vexillia earlier this afternoon.

When I came home from work, I found an email acknowledging my order and telling me the figures have been dispatched, and another email from Paypal telling me that Vexillia has made a partial refund on my order as the actual postage is less than what their site calculated.

That's probably the first time I received a partial refund for postage.

Thanks, Martin.

First Game of Warhammer Fantasy 8th Edition

Adrian and I managed to play a game of WHFB 8th Ed this afternoon.

He also brought over the X-frame which he made for our tray table.

Finally, we can reach our beers without getting up from our chairs!

The game itself was a small 600 points affair, with no magic, but it allowed us to familiarise ourselves with the turn sequence and the phases of combat and shooting. Adrian learnt that his cannon missed more often than it hit, and I learnt that the dwarves' Toughness of 4 makes them, well, tough.

The Empire battleline move towards the dwarven line.

Mostly though the afternoon was a chance for us to catch up over a few beers and get our figures out and place them on a terrain table, hence this last photo:

Dwarves sally forth from a Mage Knight tower.