Wargames Factory Painting Contest

I noticed Wargames Factory was running a painting contest to gather painted examples of their figures. I've painted up some of their Romans and Ancient Germans, and though they aren't the best examples of painting skill, I thought it was worth a shot to enter them.

Wargames Factory Romans. The shield decals really make these figures.

Wargames Factory 28mm Romans

Wargames Factory Roman Cohort

Wargames Factory Ancient Germans

My Tips for Warlord Games Celtic Warriors

Warlord Games Celtic Warrior build

The holidays did a whammy on my posting, but I managed to make some progress on a few of my game projects. I finally got a chance to build the plastic Warlord Games' Celtic Warriors.  I thought I'd pass on a few things I figured out while building them.

COMPONENTS
The box comes with three sprues: two warrior sprues with bodies, legs and heads, and a command sprue with the same components but swapping the heads for a standard and carnyx. There are also a few severed heads, 15 shields, assorted spears, swords and knives and a sheet of 15 shield stickers.  It's a good set of components, the sculpting is dynamic and sharp but there are very few "extras". With only 15 shields, but 30 figures, I opted to order an extra set of Celtic Shields from WG and some Little Big Man Studios decals as well. The colorful shields of the Celts is one of their biggest draws, so skimping on the shields is a little disappointing but overall this is a quality set.

Tip 1) Order extra shields.  

More tips after the jump.



CONSTRUCTION
I started by cutting and separating all of the bodies and legs. I noticed each body only paired with a few of the leg designs based on how the torso clothing was carried over to the waist area of the leg. Check it out:

Warlord Games leg designs

Tip 2) Match the leg designs to the appropriate torsos.

My original plan was to customize the bulk of the warriors by chopping and swapping arms and legs. I had seen the constructed models in photos on various sites, and always found the "arms thrown wide" pose used in several of the torsos a bit TOO animated for my tastes. It always looked like the Celt was giving a primal scream, but I think it makes them look like their primed to take a pilum in the solar plexus. As I was building them though, I found the torsos could be rotated so the warrior appeared to be preparing to deliver a swing of the sword, or holding it forward in a run. Overall the poses have a lot more flexibility than I expected, so I didn't need to do as much modding as I had anticipated.  I did make a few changes to one of the "arms thrown wide poses":

Customizing Warlord Games Celt Warriors

Tip 3) Rotate torsos for more dynamic poses, or freely chop and reglue limbs to eliminate odd poses.

Clipping and cleaning the torsos and legs took about two hours. Construction and preparing heads and weapons took another hour or two. That seems like a long time, but the quality of the casts, the dynamic poses, the ability to customize them and the low price of the entire box evens everything out in the long run. Honestly, I've spent the same amount of time cleaning flash from crummy metal one piece figures in the past. I'm really pleased with the Warlord Games Celtic Warriors, and will likely pick up another box in the future.

Hail Caesar Skirmish!

Hail Caesar Romans ready for battle

My buddy Mark was in town for the holidays, and with a handful of complete (or nearly complete) figures ready to go, we decided to take a shot at Hail Caesar to run through the rules, roll some dice and throw some barbarians and Romans together and see the sparks fly. Check it out after the jump...

Deployment

This was just a quick "skirmish" to figure out rules and the very basics. I ran the Romans (three units) who faced off against two units of German warbands and a unit of Numidian light cavalry. With so few units we played on very small table, with a scattering of woods on the left and right, and a hill in the center. I also didn't feel we needed actual commander figures so we simply incorporated the command rolls and ignored the rules concerning commander placement, or bolstering units.

I deployed two units in line with the third behind as a reserve. The barbarian hordes spread out to attack the Roman flanks.

Initial Deployment

Round 1
Having actually read the rules, I took the initiative and made my first tactical blunder.  Tempted by the +1 to hit bonus of fighting uphill, I gave my division the order "Take that hill boys!", made my command roll and then realized I had ordered the entire division, including my reserve. Doh! Oh well, I'd be able to back my reserve off the hill next round.

The hairy barbarians took advantage on my mistake.  The cavalry gained three moves on their command roll and moved into a position to attack the Roman rear (whoops! Second mistake was forgetting the proximity rule as the cavalry drew close to the Romans. I figured they were due a larger table and probably could have maneuvered into place so gave it to them).

The warband on the flank also managed to get moving, but those directly to the Roman front hung back, squeamish at the prospect of attacking uphill against their well defended adversaries (botched that command roll).

Round 1

Round 2

The Romans played conservatively in the next round, spending 2 moves to get their rear line turned around and in position to face the expected cavalry charge.

The barbarians had better luck, the cavalry and flanking warband charging into contact, while the barbarians to the Roman front still hung back with a failed command roll. The initial round of combat found both sides inflicting hits, but with no conclusive outcome, but the Romans in a much weaker tactical position.

Round 2

Round 3
I wasn't quite sure if the Romans being attacked from the flank could change position, and after a quick scan of the rules without luck decided to force them to stay in position and fend off their hairy, naked adversaries with half dice due to the flank contact.

Round 3, recoiling cavalry just before being driven off.

In the ensuing combats, the Roman rear guard managed to drive the light cavalry off the table, but the German warband crushed the right line and swept up the hill falling just short of contact with the remaining Romans.

Round 4
With the screaming hordes closing in on them the Romans withdrew off the hill, the rear guard failing a command roll to turn and get into position and managing only a single move backwards because of their Elite quality.

Round 4, Romans

The Germans charged down the hill, the flanking warband having to move into a support position behind their brethren. Combat found the Romans taking the worst of it, but holding strong.

Round 5
The Romans finally got the rear line into a rear support position, but the tide had turned. The next round of combat saw the Romans suffering an additional 6 hits (!), putting them at 10 total and forcing them to withdraw to the very edge of the battlefield.

Round 5, recoiling to the very edge of the table.

The Germans swept down after them and the final round of combat broke the Roman front line and saw the support unit fail their break test and flee off the table.

The death blow

 So, a resounding victory for the barbarians, but a fun game for all.  It was great to finally get some dice rolled, and I just need to do another review of the rules to check the bits I wasn't sure on.

I need to finish off a the cavalry and german bases and paint up some damage and disorder counters and a "winning side" victory marker. Looking forward to my next game. :)

My First Ancients, Finished and Based!

Finally got my first Ancients completed. Still have many, many figures to paint up, but this is an exciting milestone for me. More photos after the break.

Ancient Germans
First up are a whole buncha barbarians.  I picked up a number of Foundry Ancient Germans years ago. Most were clothed or bare chested, but there a pair who were naked. I bought a second hand lot of miniatures including a number of Celts, Germans and Picts.  I used them to flesh out a few Ancient German Fanatics bases. Also hand painted the shields based on the designs I worked up in a previous post.

Foundry Ancient Germans.

Foundry Ancient Germans

The shields are fairly basic geometric designs. I wanted to keep them simple to provide a contrast to the more intricate shields I have planned for the Celt warbands I'm going to put together.

German Fanatics

Most of these are actually Black Tree Designs Picts, with a few Foundry Germans.

I worked out a pretty quick method for painting these fleshy barbarians.  I primed them with Army Painter brown, and then gave them a quick coat of Army Painter flesh from a high angle to preserve darker tones in the undercuts out of the flesh spray zone. A basic Vallejo medium flesh tone to block out the major muscle groups, and a highlight of Vallejo light flesh finished off their skin.  After painting hair, eyebrows and any furs or capes I gave each figure a wash of Army Painter soft tone which really helped pull the entire miniature together. I was originally skeptical of the Army Painter dips, but now I find them essential.

Wiener Parade

Wargames Factory Romans
Next up are a few bases of Wargames Factory Romans. The detail is a little soft, and the command figures are pretty wonky, but overall I think they paint up rather respectably.

Wargames Factory Command

Wargames Factory Romans

I really liked the shield transfers that came with the set. They went on fairly easily, Wargames Factory provides extras, and they look nice.

Basing Trial and Error
Sadly, I did run into a few hiccups. These were the first really large bases I'd ever worked on, and with my first few attempts the results didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped.

R to L: Bad Base, Good Base

With the first few bases I started with a burnt umber, followed by a drybrush of yellow ochre, then a drybrush of gray and finally a very light drybrush of white. That didn't look to bad without flock, but once flocked the base looked dark, mottled and unrealistic.

I switched to a base of yellow ochre for the remaining bases, with a drybrush of yellow ochre + unbleached titanium white, and a final pass of straight unbleached titanium white. Once flocked I prefer the dry, sandy look of the base that provides a strong contrast both to the figures and the flock.

All in all, pretty happy overall and looking forward to rounding out a few more ancient Germans before moving on to either more Romans or some Warlord Games Celts.

Romans, Germans, Numidians - Progress Mid-December

"You're gonna need a bigger box."

I wanted to document my progress on my various ancient armies as I've made some headway since this Summer. Just a quick snap from my iPhone for now with better photos to follow when they are complete. I need to finish off the bases of the infantry with static grass and tufts, and decide on a basing scheme for the cavalry, and then I can get down to rolling some dice! I'm still sorely lacking in actual elements and missing generals for each army, but at least there will be some figures I can push around on the table.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program...

Wow, that was quite a break since my last post! A dead computer, work stress, and a quick diversion into rereading the Lord of the Rings put Ancients on the back burner for a bit. I've returned to painting now and hoping to get in some games over the winter holidays.

 To get back into the swing, I was catching up on some Meeples and Miniatures podcasts. Episode 77 was a review of two rules sets, Hail Caesar and Clash of Empires. Neil, the host loses some energy during his lengthy review, and I've always felt his enunciation seemed a little fuzzy, but he does give a pretty good overview of the rules. I've always found it difficult to explain new games to the folks I play with, so I thought the podcast might be a good alternative without requiring them to pick up the book themselves. The Hail Caesar overview starts at about 15:30.

Ancient Germans & Romans - Progress Mid July

Despite working on my Ancient Germans and Cesarean Romans methodically over the last month, I haven't taken the time to record my progress.

Foundry Ancient Germans, painted and ready for basing.

Wargames Factory Romans awaiting bases.

There are roughly 80 figures on my work table being based now, hopefully enough to run a few more tests of Hail Caesar without resorting to proxies.

Historicon 2011

This awesome Antietam board was but one of the many ACW games this year.

Scheduling a full four day wargame vacation wasn't in the cards this year, but I did manage to make a one day excursion to Historicon 2011. Despite only having a limited window of time on site I still had a great time. Pics and a brief report after the jump.

I had a very specific set of goals heading up to Valley Forge for the show: hit the vendors to pick up more terrain and figures for my growing Ancients armies, get in a game on some beautiful terrain, and take a quick spin of the various games to gawk. Failing only to bring my camera (doh! I had to resort to my phone cam!) I managed to check off everything from my list.


The Games

There was an astounding number of games going on at any one time. The majority were ACW and WWII but I did find a handful of ancients games. Lots of DBA and FoG, a few Clash of Empires, and another rules set I didn't recognize. Sadly I didn't see any Hail Caesar games going on, but I did check out a Black Powder scenario involving a Union / Confederate clash in the swamps of Florida.


An Uncivil War
Lucky me, I managed to get a spot in a pair of demo games of Architects of War new ACW skirmish rules, "An Uncivil War". I've been an admirer of the AoW terrain and blog since hopping back in wargaming, so it was a real treat to get to play on some truly beautiful terrain with Ernie and Les.

"Uncivil War" skirmish game

The scenarios we ran appear to be typical for An Uncivil War, and i found them particularly unique. The combat rules, morale, and weapons are all detailed as you'd expect in a skirmish game but AUW adds an extra lair of strategy by including on table "loot" that can be collected towards each scenario's victory conditions. I really enjoyed the tactical decisions required in trying to collect or protect loot, while also engaging in combat. Uncivil War also stresses a "Hollywood" sense of fun that is present in the rules and scenarios: vengeful Southern belles wielding frying pans, hungry and desperate Rebs chasing chickens and goats about while dodging gunfire, and the straying eye of the Southern belle's suitor which could see him dashing out of the player's control should he find himself too close to his lady love.

The game was a lot of fun! I played in two scenarios, one in which my Southern messenger was attempting to bypass a Union party who were raiding a local farm, and another in which my Southern constable and his posse were rounding up Confederate deserters. A nearby table with four players had a larger conflict involving infantry, cavalry and the hunt for spies. Talking to the AoW guys it seems Uncivil War can handle up to 100 figures on the table. As someone considering getting into ACW the thought of a skirmish game that's playable with less than a dozen figures but scales up to one hundred is great. An easy way to try out a period while building up troops for games that require hundreds of figures.

Larger "Uncivil War" skirmish game.

I also thought there was a lot of potential with Uncivil War rules to expand into campaign play (with loot gathered effecting the next scenario played) or as the basis to reskin into other periods (I'd really like to take a shot at using the rules to run the inter-tribal war the Celts engaged in). Fun game, neat ideas, lots I think you could do with it. Looking forward to the full rules being published this Fall.

The Haul
Finally I hit the vendor hall. I checked out the Architects of War stall and was really drawn to their desert terrain. I started thinking about games set in North African between Carthage, Numidia, and Rome or Caesar in Egypt.

I love this well and donkey wheel.

Architects of War stone wall

 With elephants being a key feature of the Carthaginian army I'm working on, I've been keen on finding a good north African elephant. I've been leaning towards Aventine's, even though they specialize in the elephants used by the Successors, but I happened to stumble on a manufacturer I hadn't noticed before, Sgt Major Miniatures.  I only managed to snap this quick phone pic, but I really like the weight and energy of their "Numidian Elephant".  I'd ditch the crew and add a howdah, and it's probably larger than a true north African ellie, but this model in the flesh was just what I was looking for.

Leaving the pachyderm for another day, I picked up some Celts, a few generals for my ancients, a foam cutter, piles and piles of bases, and a few bonus sprues in the Historicon goodie bag. Oh. And some loot pigs :)  All in all, a fun day of wargaming stuff.

Historicon 2011 haul

Wargames Factory Romans, First Set Painted Up

Fella on the left just saw 10,000 naked gauls come charging out of the woods.

I managed to finish of the first two groups of Wargames Factory Romans I've been working on this weekend.  I've never completed any mass, assembly style paint jobs on 28mm miniatures before so this was an interesting test of getting good results out of repetitive painting.  I can see room for improvement, but I'm fairly satisfied with these wargame level paint jobs.


When I was researching manufacturers and paint schemes for Romans I relied on other gamer's websites.  Scott Macphee's in depth review of the WGF Romans was particularly helpful. I thought I'd add on a few more comments and provide some comparison shots for anyone in the same boat.\


Roman Infantry

The box set comes with two styles of bodies (one crouching, one upright) and several varieties of arms (gladius at the ready, gladius upright, pilum preparing to throw and pilum upright).  There's also a single style of shield arm. Based on Scott Macphee's difficulties getting both the "gladius at the ready" to look right and the troops to rank up, I took care in positioning the arms. I found that the gladius at the ready only worked when it was stabbing over the top edge of the wielder's shield, which required the upright body. To help with the issues of ranking up, I positioned the shield arms with the hand as low as possible so that the shield was held close to the body.

While I was successful with the striking gladius poses turning out well, in my test positions of the finished legionnaires I'm  having trouble ranking them. I think it's going to take some finesse to get the multiple poses to rank up well.

Although the detail is soft on the infantry poses I thought they painted up well enough. There was enough detail present to pick up drybrushing on the armor, or to allow an Army Painter wash to flow around the raised areas of the flesh or tunic. On the other hand, the command figures were a bit rougher.

Roman Centurion

The centurion was the highlight of the command group, but the sculping on the single officer body seemed quite a bit "squattier" than the rest of the figures.

Roman Optio

"I lahk them frinch fried pertaters."

The only part that differentiates the optio from the centurion is the head, and sadly it's a step down. The optio's features are exaggerated into a cartoonish scowl. I gave it a quick highlight over the basecoat, picked out the eyes, gave a wash of blue/gray to imply stubble and filled in the gaping mouth with a bit of black.  I could've continued detailing the face but I didn't think the weak sculpt was worth it.

Roman Cornicen and Signifer

The cornicen and signifier are the weakest of the poses, primarily because of that weird left are with it's flipper like hand that doesn't quite fit with the other pieces of the figure. After struggling to get two of the signifers to hold their standards with both hands I think I'm going to switch to signifers holding the standard with one hand and a buckler in the other.  Having just started in the ancients period I don't have any on hand so I'll need to keep an eye out for an extra or create one from card.

Messing with Hail Caesar

Testing out Hail Caesar with 20mm proxies

It's been a very busy few weeks for me but I did manage to get in some work on my ancient armies.  I was still fretting about basing so I took some of my shelved 20mm ancients, quickly glued them to bases with PVA and started pushing them around a table while testing out the Hail Caesar rules. Playing solo, it wasn't much of a game since I was simply trying to see if I had grasped the rules and wanted to get the feel of moving multiple bases around to see how fiddly they felt.  Despite spending most of my time looking up rules, not having enough elements on the table, playing myself with only the most basic strategies, I actually had fun. Really looking forward to playing a real game.

Some thoughts from my first test

• There were a lot more counters on the table than I had anticipated. Towards the end of the battle, nearly every unit had at least 3 wound counters.
• Perhaps it was only because I was playing both sides, but I forgot which side was due the "winning" bonus from round to round of prolonged melees. I'm thinking of making a small marker (like a flag or standard bearer) to mark the winning side of a round.

Production line painting

I'm also making encouraging progress on my figures. I've got a 32 man unit of Germans that just need basing, 32 figures of Caesarian Romans ready for basing, and various other minis being cleaned and primed. And next week : Historicon!