TYW Cannons & a new Hungarian project

I've been working through my lead pile while I'm between projects.  In my stack, I had 6 TYW cannons and gunners by Old Glory.  I bought these to port my Later Hungarian army into Field of Glory-Renaissance. As it turned out, FoG R in 15mm never got off the ground locally.  And more significantly,  I recently sold my Hungarians.  I painted these up for practice (and eBay) and I have to say, they're good molds.  For a changeup, I left the black primer in places for shadowing, separation and facial details.  It looks quite good in 15mm and I'll use this old school technique again.

I was happy to sell my Hungarians but felt a bit blue as I packed them up.  That was a bit odd since I'm not the sentimental type.  I found solace in the fact that the buyer is a skilled FoG tournament player in the US and International circuit.  As an added bonus, I got a commission to bulk up the army so one more time, for old times, I'll paint up Essex figures for Matthias' Black Army. The Hungarian word for forward is elore, so elore with the Hungarian project.  And one day, I do hope to hear how they've ripped it up on the FoG circuit.

One last thing...Mark and I started a Maurice campaign and we got our first game in at The Source.  The game was a blast, with loads of people stopping by to watch or comment.  It went right down to the wire but I don't want to say any more since Mark has the AAR up at his blog.  Its a great retelling of a great day of fun.  Check it out!

Field of Glory v2 - peeking under the hood

While the Field of Glory v2 rules are still pending, the major changes have been announced and tallied up in the Slitherine forum.  Brandt and I decided to play a match with as many of the changes as we could keep track of via a couple of printouts.  I brought Later Carthaginians because I wanted to test the new elephant rule where they get 3 dice per base at impact.  Brandt surprise me with an Indo-Greek army I'd never seen before. Apparently, he wanted to test the new elephants as well!  Almost everything in this Indo-Greek army shoots, with the exception of the elephants.

7 pieces of terrain ended up on the Indo-Greek side of the table.  If Brandt had been running his favorite Late Republican Romans, this would have caused havoc for him. Because he was running an army of medium foot archers with swords, it was no trouble at all.  D'oh!!!

It's been months since I played FoG and it showed.  V2 limit how many battlegroups a commander can command in a battle line based on the quality of the commander, making field commanders worth the extra cost in the early game.  I got confused over which of my commander was commanding which troops and allowed my Scutarii on the left wing advance by themselves.  That was a rookie mistake that would cost me dearly.  In FoG, you just can't let a unit get isolated by itself like that.

On both flanks, I advanced into a hail of arrows, underestimating the effectiveness of the Indian medium bowmen.  After impact, I found out these bowmen were packing swords. D'oh!!!

In the center, I got an early break when Brandt charged this elephants to drive off my skirmishers. Their variable charge move of 6 inches put them far ahead of the rest of his army.  A battlegroup of 8 bases of African Spear took his charge, with overlaps on both sides of the ellies.  I was tossing 8 dice to Brandt's 4 but to no effect.  The ellies took all the hits I could muster over 2 turns until  his phalanx caught up and charged home.  Once they went in, my own ellies went bust when I threw a 1 for their first death row.  Then my African Spear collapsed under the combined weight of the elephants and the phalanx.  In a single turn, my center evaporated.  I could still win on the wings, right?

On my right wing, Indian bowfire disrupted my elephants and Scutarii as they went into a charge. The Ellies had to pass a death roll.  DONT THROW A 1!  I threw a 1 and goodbye ellies.  Two death tests for ellies, two 1s.  I told Brandt I was imposing a self-ban from running any list that include elephants.  Sorry Jumbos, its for your own good.

On my left wing, I had small success with my last unit of Ellies but it was not enough. Center gone, right wing gone.  Chance of success...gone.  

Brandt played another skillful game.  He held his  bowmen in terrain and let me come to him.  I obliged and got shot to pieces on both wings. It's back to reworking my Carthaginian list.

I found the v2 rule changes to be uniformly excellent and I'll be a day 1 purchaser when they're released.  It was only a single test but my feeling is that games will be shorter and more decisive.  For example:

• losing at impact is an additional -1 in the cohesion test.
• -1 to cohesion tests for each 25% original strength lost.  
• broken battle groups at or below 50% strength cannot be rallied.
• additional -1 modifier for seeing the commander in chief lost.

These and other changes will shorten melees, which can grind on and on.  With a combined 31 battlegroups on the table, our battle was shorter and more decisive than usual.  I think that's a good thing as I find it frustrating to spend 5 hours in a match without a clear winner at the finish line.

We really liked the changes that make skirmishers less slippery.  I especially like the change where a single level of armor advantage does not give a + POA if it would result in an overall ++POA.  That means barbarian foot are no longer a walkover for Romans. Two very big thumbs-up to the rule changes and gameplay under v2.

P.S.  I'm excited enough about v2 that I ordered up a pile of Xyston to build my first new FoG army in a year. As a hint, the army name appears in a song title on The Clash's London Calling.  Between that and Xyston's limited army list, this should be easy to crack!

Stomp, Stomp, Stompies!

Elephants:  4 new stompies for my Carthaginian army.  I put some effort into the blankets since they're going to see battle without war towers. You have to look good to feel good, even if you're a war elephant! I decided I'd made the tusks too large and trimmed them back a bit.  Then again, the North African Forest Elephants used by the Carthaginians are extinct and I could claim some artistic license.

In Field of Glory, the Later Carthaginian list allows 6 elephants BUT if you take a Numidian ally, you can field 8 in total.  Elephants will reportedly get 3 dice per base at impact in FoG 2.  We're ready to bring it, en masse.

 

Thureophoroi:  My Thureophoroi, based as Medium Foot, give the Carthaginians another unit to contest and fight in terrain.  They can be paired with a unit of elephants in a battle line.

Slitherine announced that version 2 will be published in paper and digital format after all. That's excellent news as an iPad/laptop only version would have scotched Field of Glory 2 in our club.  We've been reading the announced list of changes and we're quite anxious to give them a try.  So anxious in fact that a buddy and I printed out the list of changes and put them into a game with my newly painted Carthaginians.  I'll post the AAR next week with a few observations.  The short version is I'll be a Day 1 purchaser when the new rules hit the market.  Two years of tweaking and field testing has paid handsome dividends, in my opinion. 

Rebuilding my Carthaginians

Lately, I've been digging into a pile of Punic era figures to finish a long-stalled Field of Glory project.  I sold my Mid Republican Roman army last winter and in the process, I cannibalized my Carthaginian to build out the Romans.  I planned to paint up replacement battlegroups but then along came a gladiator project, 3 Impetus armies and my Maurice Ottoman army.  After 8 months delay, here are the replacements!  All Old Glory figure.

Numidian Light Horse:  My Carthaginian cavalry is generally outclassed or ignored in my matches so I'm going to try a different approach.  I'll max out on Numidian Light Horse (3 battlegroup) and take a Numidian ally which  allows a 4th BG.  That  should be enough to tie up enemy cavalry while sending one unit after the camp. Colors are variations on a brown theme but I do like the look of these fellows all massed up.  This time through, I deduced that the small blob at the bottom of some shields is a feather!

Cretan Archers:  I trimmed the red tunics with white but it had a Santa's elves meets Candy Stripers vibe.  I switched to sky blue but a darker blue would've worked as well.

Stompies!  The upside to painting figures a second time is the opportunity to change things up. I've been doing a bit of reading (a dangerous thing!) and learned that war towers were not used in the 1st Punic War.  In the 2nd Punic War, war towers were used BUT not on every elephant.  In fact, there is a line of thought that war towers were used infrequently.  This batch will be sans towers.  After filing away the ropes, I decided to use Green Stuff to make large tusks on 2 of the ellies.  You wouldn't think this would be diifficult but in fact, its quite fiddly in 15mm.  Oh, and I added a crash helmet for one of the mahouts.   

Thureophoroi: A unit of Thureophoroi is sitting in the painting pan. These guys will be tough to paint after the Xyston Thureophoroi I painted for my Pontic army. Even by Old Glory standards, these are poor molds.  Which begs the question, when did I cross over and become a painting prima donna?

Terrain for Maurice

I recently took a look at my terrain collection and realized I need to buff up my choices for Maurice. I made a trip to a big box hardware store and bought a 4' by 2' board of mdf (aka hardboard).  I'd been buying it from a local Blicks art store and paying dearly for it.  The cheaper stuff works just as well as the high priced product so unless you're loaded, grab your mdf from a hardware store.  The only downside is I don't have a table saw and it's a bit of work to chop up a large sheet with a circular saw. Going into this, I had 3 goals for my terrain:

1.  It must look better than a piece of felt.  Some people shoot for the stars.  I aim for the ground because I can hardly miss!

2.  It must be light.  Since I rarely host a game in my house, I have to drag my 6' x4' canvass terrain mat, a box full of terrain and my armies on the road.  It's quite a load and the more terrain I make, the heavier my terrain box becomes.  So this time, I'm not putting loads of water putty onto the mdf. 

3.  It must be versatile.  My current collection of terrain was bought or made for Field of Glory.  The terrain I'm making here is for Maurice.  As time goes by, there'll be more rules and systems to play so ideally, I want this to work under multiple rulesets.

First up was a marsh. You're thinking that right away, I violated Rule #3.  It's hard to pretend a marsh is anything other than a marsh but I made so it's sized to work under both Maurice and Field of Glory (if I push all 3 pieces together).

I mixed up a thick batch of water putty, smeared it on the mdf and dropped bark in to give it visual interest.  Then I covered it with a dark brown basecoat with dark green in the low spots where the  Woodland Scenics Water Effects will go. After it dried, I put a wash of diluted brown ink over it to muddy up the water.  Then some flocking and I've got marshes.  

British Dragoons for Maurice

I've been thinking of painting up a 2nd Maurice army to serve as a loaner for my friends who game only Ancients.  I'm thinking this might tempt them to game in the Era of Gentlemen and Philosophers, even though these fellows can hardly be mistaken for gentlemen.They're hard-pressed to put on a pair of pants before venturing into public, such is their love for the Gauls. Coarse as they are, my ancients-loving friends might one day be persuaded to serve as bayonet holders for my Ottoman army.

As I was looking at the options for Seven Years War armies, it dawned on me that I'd never painted a tricorn hat.  And wasn't that #22 on my bucket list?  Good lord, time to stop procrastinating and get my lace on! My friend Mark was working on his British-inspired ImagiNation army so I asked if he had any units I could train on, er, paint up.  As luck would have it, he had a dandy SYW British Dragoon unit in the wings.

The beauty of painting outside your comfort zone is that, well, it's outside your comfort zone. The downside is that there are probably ten good reasons why it's outside your comfort zone.  For me, I haven't read much on the Seven Years War and I had no reference material for the armies or era.  I sent Mark a text asking if he had any inspirational material for his British Hussars.  Oooops. Wrong word.  I learned that Hussars and Dragoons don't mix, unless it's on a battlefield.  After a bit of bumbling out of the gate, here are the results:

These Old Glory figs are crisp and loaded of detail. To my surprise, I discovered that each Dragoon carried more gear into battle than paratroopers took into Normandy.  A brace of pistols, a musket, a sword, three separate ammo packs and a bed roll.  They were Death on Hooves. If I do paint up a SYW  army, I'll be ordering it from OG.

Next week, I'll try to turn this mdf board into terrain for Maurice.

Maurice Ottoman Army finished!

I wanted to do Janissary in black.  Of course, black by itself would have left the figures looking like I'd primed them and put them on the tabletop. So it was black, dark grey highlight and a lighter grey highlight after that.  In other words, not too black when you're finished!  Here and now, grey is my new black.

And the inspiration.

No matter the continent, century or cut of cloth, combatants always look crisp in crimson.  I think it holds true here.

Inspiration:

9 foot, 4 cavalry, 3 irregular foot and 5 cannons-the Maurice Ottomans massed up.

That's enough to give me plenty of options in my campaigns so I'm calling the Ottoman Project bitirdim (if you guessed finished, you are a clever lad or lass).  In retrospect, I could have build this army to more closely parallel its 18th century counterpart.  I'm embarrassed to admit this didn't cross my mind when I started out down this road. I didn't realize OG carries a Seven Years War Ottoman line or that the SYW figs are in marching order.  What I've done is painted up an army and at the finish, realized that technically, I'm on the Imagi-Nation road.  It was a short drive and I rather like the view.  I'm now ready to get a campaign going so all is good.

As is my habit, we'll exit the brief Ottoman Project with The Pogues "Turkish Song of the Damned."  Here's hoping Mark's British army will be doing the two step off the table's edge when they meet my Ottomans in Maurice!