1:1 basing eats hobby time

 Been a busy week around the house here. Spring has well and truly sproinged and the garden was overgrown like you would not believe so hobby time has been heavily curtailed in favour of doing real world things. 

Crusaders

Almost there. Basically the last highlights on the metals and the final coats on the cloaks to do. I have one old metal one of these and the two that aren't Gotfred de Montbard are Finecast and honestly, just go back to metals please. I keep finding little bits of flash as I paint these. It's most vexing.

Catalina

I've finally finished the painting. I had an AWFUL time getting the cockpit glass to fit and it required a bunch of careful puttying around it to make it fit. 

So I'm waiting on the transfers to be able to mark her up as RAAF and then we'll be finished but I'm glad to have the painting done. I've really not enjoyed this kit the same way I enjoyed the AC-130 but it's a nice addition to the Australians.

Next Time

I'll hopefully have the roundels and the Catalina will be done done. I'm also expecting some new shinies for my Byzantines so the first attempts at replicating a 10 year old paint scheme will begin. 

You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a Traitor

We were supposed to have a 500-point Star Wars Legion event but the COVID restrictions on the club meant that it wasn't able to go ahead. So Pel, Scotty, Tank and I played a couple of 500 point games just for funsies! 

In my first game, I had a crack at Pel's rebels, lead by Han and Chewie. Three squads of troopers including one of Pathfinders, and the two Rebel Heroes. I had Darth Vader, a squad of Shore Troopers, a squad of Storm Troopers, a Mortar and a pair of Speeder Bikes.

Pel's Rebel Pathfinders infiltrated on my left flank before I had a chance to deploy anything to stop them.

Pathfinders finding paths...

 They spent most of the game in a firefight with the Shores in which the Pathfinders ultimately emerged victorious. For my turn, I drove Vader up the middle using his special order that improves his deflection capability (which did nothing but convince Pel not to shoot at Vader!)

Fear and Dead Men

 On the turn that followed, I dropped an order of Vader's that places 3 Suppression tokens on all enemy trooper units within range 2 when he activates. Pel's order choice could have made me pick another one, but he elected not to. Mistakes were made.

Speeders drop off the building and don't live much longer....

I threw everything I could at Han and got him up to 5 Suppression tokens. Pel recovered one and but it wasn't enough to stop him panicking and he headed for the base edge. That was a big win for me and was a surprising outcome as I hadn't considered Han was actually a trooper - I wanted to ideally just break the Pathfinders and the Rebel troopers in front of me. Han never really got back in the game.

 

I tried something else new on the third turn and gave Darth a 1-pip order to get him into combat ASAP. Vader advanced into Pel's Rebels and promptly rolled: 

Vader replicates the scene at the end of Rogue One

And then that Rebel Squad went away. I got to trip the power granted by the order and used it to lift Chewie into combat with Vader. In the following turn I had two cracks at killing Chewie and failed, much to my chagrin!

This was my last shot of the game:

Only Imperial Storm Troopers are so precise

Yep. Zero hits. So memeable. This game was also the game where my Shore Trooper mortar, having aimed and shot for 4 turns in a row rolled zero hits. Yup. Zero hits. That whole squad did a sum total of not very much except annoy Pel by making a bunch of saves against Rebel shooting when they should have been shot to bits.

In the end I think It was a 3 - 1 win to me having grabbed the objective with Vader in Turn 2 and then the Storm Troopers in turn 4. Vader is pretty disgusting on the small tables at 500 points and with a deployment like the half circle, he got a long way up the park to start with. I'm keen to get hold of Iden Versio and Agent Kallus as well as they'll be quite a lot of fun in these small scale games. Pel concluded tying up 200 points in Han and Chewie didn't really do what he needed either. While both are effective, they're better in larger games, where the Jedi & Sith are more self sufficient.

And then MORE REBELS

I had a crack at Scotty's Rebels in two more games both of which were staggeringly bloody. The first game was a 1 - 1 draw as Scotty managed to get one dude to my base edge as I managed to get a single Speeder Bike to his base edge. 

 The second game was a 'just kill the other guy' and this game was the first time I have ever managed to claim a bounty with Bossk.   It mostly had to do with dice rolls like this:

On top of the building, my attack roll from the Speeder Bikes at Scotty's infantry. On the basecloth, Scotty's save roll. Yup. That game pretty much went like that. 

Next Time

It's a public holiday weekend and the weather forecast for the Monday holiday is very bad so some painting time should be in the offing. I've got a final wash on the Catalina so she needs some highlights and to have the rest of the canopies fitted. I'm looking forward to getting her done. 

Does watching TV count as hobby time?

I have decided yes as I have finally started watching 'The Expanse' as our RPG group will be taking a bit of a break for a bit. I'm on the fence about the story at the moment, but I will make my way through to the end of season one and decide then how much further I'll take it. It has been good to better understand the universe and I do really really like the universe. Did I do anything else? Yeah....

Flames of War

I finished the Jagdpanzer IV/70 assembly. I really, really like this kit. It's superbly well designed, goes together like a dream and I think they might have some of the crispest seams and joins. I haven't had to break out the plastic putty at all and I've very pleased about that. 

 

I'll get these in the primer with the Hummels and organise a game in November to give me the gentle nudge to get these all painted and have the insane 80 point Jagdpanzer IV/70 list I wrote earlier in the year on the table. 

Limited Palette Wizgang

One more for the crew. I think I'd said I'd paint this with a green palette and honestly, once I put the base green down, I realised it was just all leather other than the kind of bodysuit. So I decided that I'd use the dark green base and see if I could find a complementary brown palette to sit on top of it. It's a mix of browns and highlighted browns, with off whites and bronze for the metals. I kind of like it.  

 

 There's still 10 more models in this little line so I'll keep plodding on with these as a bit of a project. 

Warhammer 40K 

Crusaders! I've had one of these for ages and have since managed to acquire three more. The base work is done here: 

 But there's still lots of detail work required to get these guys finished. It will potentially be a prompting to get the Guard out again. I'm also still working on an OP Leman Russ but that's stalled while I wait for parts from the UK. 

Next Time

I think I'll get the Catalina done just so it can stop sitting on the back of my painting desk looking at me accusingly. I think I'd like to get the Crusaders finished, which should be pretty straightforward, and I'll be painting a new model to use in Expanse.

First game of ADLG

 And it was glorious. Somehow my horsey army was caught at home by the Seleukid menace and they invaded the Byzantine mountains! There was quite a lot of chicanery with impassible terrain and steep hills that left a smaller frontage but still wide enough. 

The Seleukid pike deployed on their right flank, cavalry in the centre and the elephants and medium infantry on the left. Facing them, the Byzantine Skutatoi and Varangians, deployed in an inverted V and the Kataphraktoi in the centre with the Tagmata and light horse on my left. 

 

The Seleukid pike advanced agressively and their Skythian mercenaries exchanged arrows with the Tagmata. We learned a lot about how bad we were shooting at each other when one side is LH and the other is 1/2bow. While the Byzantine light horse did a merry dance with the pike while, in the course of a couple of rounds of combat, the Tagmata destroyed the Seleukid cataphracts. There wasn't much to the Seleukid centre so while the pike finally turned the Byzantine flank, the Kataphraktoi started causing merry hell on the flanks of the Seleukid left. 

Blogger Scotty was forced to split his MI / El line in two to fight my Varangians on one side and my Skutatoi on the other and the net result was me having overlaps on both ends of that line and a base of Kataphraktoi into the side of his elephants. 

 There were a couple of rounds here where Scotty couldn't roll better than a 2 or a 3 and while I was all over the shop in that photo above, I think I had a net +5. And we both rolled 1s. And he still exploded. And then rampaged over the top of the Varangians.

It was a tough game for Scotty - his dice were just consistently bad and he noted that as someone who played a lot of DBM back in the day, I've still got a few tricks up my sleeve that work as well in ADLG as they did back in the old DBM 3.0 days.

Flames of War

Otherwise, I've not been up to much. I started assembling BF's lovely Jagdpanzer IV/70 kit and I'm really enjoying it. They are a beautifully crisp kit that is going together like a dream.

I'm looking forward to getting them painted and literally covering them in foilage. With a bit of luck, I'll get a game in with them before the end of the year. 

Next Time

See last week? I'm more in a mood to paint at the moment so I should get some more shinies off the to-do pile. And I want to get through re-polyfilla-ing the Byzantines and getting the rest of the weapons glued back in and the army based so I can go through and touch up all the paint that needs doing too. 

Getting back to Byzantines

 As Blogger Pooch alluded to earlier, we've moved on from IMPETVUS to L'Art de la Guerre and as such, those of us with existing 28mm armies have started the arduous process (leaving aside Scotty and Tank both smashing theirs out over our recent lockdown) of rebasing. Getting my Byzantines off their bases was....arduous work as every weapon is in an open hand and I broke off SO MANY spears. 

I now have a small collection of spears, bows and javelins (as apparently, way back in the day, I had the foresight to clip the javelins about 10mm shorter than the spears!) that need an awful lot of superglue scraped off and, TBH, while many are still attached, I suspect rebasing these will remove that particular problem and I can do another phase of the project, putting all these spears back in with 2-part epoxy!

I've also found the last of the shield transfers I used in this project and, while I need some more, it's less than I thought so that was a nice bonus. I'm still thinking on what the basing might look like, at the moment I think a lot of flock and probably some flowers and stuff as this army is relatively discrete, I don't mind wandering from many of my sort of stock plans.

Palette Projects

The painting desire has been largely absent this week, I spent a lot of my hobby time scraping glue, filler and MDF off of Byzantine miniatures but I did add two models to the palette projects Frostgrave / DnD collection: 

On the left, a fighter with a predominantly blue palette and the barbarian using almost exclusively browns. The blue fighter was a bit of an exercise in painting a kind of mithril silver armour with a very gentle blue wash over it which was only moderately successful. I don't hate it, but it didn't come out the way I thought it would. I'm much happier with the barbarian which only used two shades of brown (Vallejo Tan Earth and Vallejo German Camo Medium Brown) some brass for metals and a bit of GW Ushabti Bone for highlights. As much as it's a bit 2000BC fur bikini, it's a cool model.

Flames of War

I decided, on a whim this week, that while there's unlikely to be a FlamesCon this year given the lockdownness of Auckland, I'd try and do the army I was thinking I'd like to take anyway so I've ordered some Jagdpanzer IV/70s for that and assembled these:

A purchase from Blogger Scotty, who decided that maybe he didn't need six Hummels after all. They are quite, quite silly but they add in an interesting element to the mix.

The Catalina? 

No pics this week but progress has been made. I snapped the wing off in a bit of a rage about it not being level and re-levelled it while also fitting new struts under the wings. Doing that exposed a couple more gaps that need attending to (ZOMG) around where the wing meets the hull and around the engine cowlings and exhausts. I should get me some shares in Vallejo with the amount of plastic putty I'm going through! 

Next Time

The finished Catalina? Maybe. I really enjoyed doing the two Reaper adventurers so I think I might do a couple more. I have a ranger that I think will be either be a sequence of greens (too predictable, perhaps?) or maybe an autumnal palette that would be like the palette I used on Saskia but different. I've also got a rogue-y thief and I'm quite tempted to have a crack at an effectively grey-scale palette. If the model looks elfin enough I might even go Drow and that would really be a thing....

Pooch's September update

Wait, September is gone already? How did that happen? 

1. Finish a table of terrain

No progress of any note here....

2. Play a game a month

Another month, another game of Victory at Sea! McZ shared his side of the experience, this was the only photo I took of the game too!

I am really enjoying Victory at Sea, it's proving to be a really fun game that only gets better the more that we play it.

3. Finish a 1,500 point 40k army

Do you remember how I said "next time will be more sisters and a rhino"?

Hopefully not, because I didn't do that. I did progress those things, but couldn't get them to the point of being finished disappointingly.

Rhino hatches, heads and stormbolters.....

Instead, I finished the last of the Execution Force!

Dial 555-ASSASSIN for when you really, really need something assassinated.

4. Finish armies that I have part started

Well, I started another Flames of War army. I'm putting it in here, because well, I am not sure where else to put it.

This time, I am testing myself with the airbrush, using multiple layers of airbrush, chipping medium, airbrush varnish and oil washes to paint up DAK Panzers!

And I am really happy with the effect it has created.

5. Buy, build and play a new game

Ok, so this one goes under the "it's someone else's fault". The other nerds have been looking for a game to play with their Impetus armies. Me, being the magpie that I am had consistently built and sold off my Impetus armies, so didn't have quite the same need as they did.

That said, once they did find a game they liked, it was only right for me to trawl through my boxes to see if I had something suitable. Which I found in a rescue Celt army I got given a long time ago. This month I have been stripping it back, and beginning to work through the repainting. There are a lot of them (handy, because I need A LOT of them), so will be a work in progress for the next couple of months.

The army so far....

They are apparently hard to photograph however....

But progress is going well!

Three months to go, and plenty still to do....