Funny how...

...just when you thought it was safe to tip out the white spirit jam jar there are seem to be several more loose ends unravelling.

• repaint a few spare German cavalry figures into Allied mounted couriers (they are going to need them with their comms debacle)
• superglue rocks onto Carrier & Recce platoon leader figures
• base up 25mm AT gun crews that somehow keep falling through the net
• paint & flock 13.2mm AA integral crews & bases (Scotia Micromodels)
• paint the drivers of approximately 25 Bren Carriers which have been taunting me for years
• base up, paint & flock another French cycle infantry platoon
• file Adrian helmet down into a beret on French infantry which were painted slightly wrong colour but usable as Chasseurs Ardennais infantry & repaint beret in a darker green
• separate the French infantry that was painted the wrong colour many years ago; repaint, rebase & flock
• a few strips of figures requiring boots, binoculars, etc to be painted
• put tiny Belgian utility tractors on bases big enough for the 25mm AT gun to sit temporarily at the back when being towed
  
• slosh a bit of Humbrol 26 on British infantry which were painted wrong shade many years ago
• fix a sliver of tin/lead onto bases of Boys AT rifles and paint as ammo crate to distinguish them from Bren guns (same prone pose)
• gather up spare British figures to make up engineer sections

This lot just completed. Next up: a few part painted aircraft and a couple of dozen resin buildings.

Engagement Distances

The ground scale in my rules has always been 1" = 100m, which is a throwback from the WRG rules I used for a number of years back in the day. It is nice to get more than a square kilometre on one terrain tile but there is compromise between 'getting more area on the table' and units and elements being a bit too close together for convenience, not to mention aesthetics.

Mark Luther's Hannut

In this Hannut game, the ground scale for larger figures (possibly 28mm) was used in an IABSM game with 6mm miniatures and the effect is undeniably realistic-looking. I know I don't think too often about how the real life battlefield translates to the wargaming table or consider what a target 500m away actually looks like but this is easy to do in your own local area.

If I look across the fields to the lane on the horizon, vehicles there are pretty much tiny specks among the hedgerows. Comparing the view on Google maps tells me the T-junction over there is about 1km away, almost the maximum effective range for most small calibre tank guns in 1940.

Another location where I first did this comparison was Harlow Common, which is an open bit of land bordered by country lanes and houses. I sometimes looked across and wondered how it would translate scalewise onto a wargaming table. Calculations indicate that the width is around the extreme end of rifle fire effectiveness.

My direct fire chart goes all the way out to 2,000m for anything over 75mm, although even at 2286m, the 88mm apparently could still penetrate 6" of armour but when you look at ranges in the real world landscape you can understand why it can be a 2% chance to hit. 

Bases: Infantry Unit Identification

I may have mentioned how Lloyd Nikolas' identifies his Crossfire infantry units using the terrain on the bases.

French Infantry Unit by Nikolas

Essentially, different base detailing differentiates between units: a type of bush, fallen log, boulder, etc. I do use a boulder to denote any command element, be it platoon or section but each foot unit has a different initial paint colour on the base and different type of flock added, which is what I've been working on this week.

Differing bases for each platoon

There are twelve German platoons altogether, including cavalry, Fallschirmjager, Schutzen, cycle, motorcycle, motorized & foot. The cavalry has mounted and dismounted figures but no riderless horses (yet!). Cycle infantry have a few token chaps on bikes. Assembled together like this it looks a bit of a motley collection but on a fully terrained-up tabletop with it's various muted shades, the bases fit in and as intended enable easy differentiation.

Elements which do not move about in units much or risk getting mixed up with others (support weapons, artillery, dispatch riders) have a default 'makeover' of Humbrol 150 with a 'grass' mix of flock added. That being said, artillery troops and heavy mortar sections are going to have an identifying sprig of lichen, tuft of reeds or fallen tree trunk, as are their corresponding spotters, to indicate their parent troop.

I may have to slosh a bit of matt varnish over the figures in the photographs...

Lead & Resin Molehill

Looking forward to The Joy of Six show in July, it occurred to me that I had better get the stuff painted that I bought last year before the inevitable happens and more is added to the relatively small pile that has been languishing in the other half's tupperware pots since then.

German, French & Fallschirmjager Platoons; aircraft & buildings

I spent half a day trying to work out what all the LMG, AT rifle and extra Heroics & Ros strips of standing or kneeling gun crews were supposed to be once painted and based up into what.

Needs filling, painting & flocking

My infantry command groups (officers, or other section leaders) are formed into groups of a leader plus 3 of the other ranks, like the groups of 4 other ranks which they lead. This rifle group thing is a carry over from my use 35 years ago of the WRG 1925-1950 rules which conveniently obviated the moving of individual riflemen by grouping sections on one tiddlywink base. I liked the lumping together of the combat effect of a section. After all, I am not concerning myself with the minutiae of a 54mm skirmish game! Platoon LMGs, AT rifles & 2" mortars are based separately in teams.

I use a bit of artistic licence with my artillery observers in this respect as well. In the excellent "Return Via Dunkirk" by Gun Buster (aka Richard Austin, I believe) the battery spotter author is invariably alone atop some church tower or chateau rooftop skylight but mine as a matter of course include a figure usually with binoculars, radio operator and the luxury of two grunts on lookout. That way they could at least get off some effective fire before scarpering from advancing enemy  recce units, if it came to that.

Anyway, that is why I have all these standing or kneeling gun crews holding shells painted like rifles, or erstwhile Panzerschreck operatives disarmed by X-Acto blade into wielding small Nelson-esque spotting telescopes, if such things were even used in this way in 1940. (It doesn't matter to me if spotters actually used telescopes: I just need to know it is an observer element). Also the Heroics & Ros PIAT strips contain 3 prone operators and 2 marching figures so all these are being painted as German MG34s as I need an extra bunch of these for Fallschirmjager and Motorcycle platoons.

+ kneeling guncrew

I have a bit of a mish-mash of various poses and methods of distinguishing between AT rifles and LMGs. For instance, early H&R infantry only had prone Bren or MG34 teams so for the Germans, prone MG34s have an ammo belt feed on the model which is carved away for the PzB38; for the British, Brens are converted into Boys by filing off the curved mag and fixing a bit of plasticard with an angled top to resemble the Boys mag but the differences aren't easy to spot on the table. Later castings had marching figures with a weapon over the shoulder and assistant carrying ammo cases. But it turns out for the Germans I have the exact number of the converted PIAT/kneeling spotter teams as I have Panzerbusche. That's the Germans sorted then, all of the German AT rifles will be in that configuration and all the others will be MG34s.

German Cavalry Group

The painting standard is alright for my purposes, skill, patience and eyesight and the samples here are just a random selection. There may be better (or worse!) examples. Another get-out clause for me is that a lot of my miniatures were painted when I was younger and could have cared less about detailing, not that the internet was invented then and I was unaware of what could be acheived. To repaint earlier efforts would lose much detail so a little drybrushing of highlights will have to suffice. I'll update when this batch of figures (and Matilda Is, Morris ACs and probably a lorry or two) is painted & based.

Imagining battle activity for me is less about micro detail and linked more to unit performance, luck and the unfolding narrative.

Heroics & Ros new website

Featuring search facility, account login and shopping cart, this is quite an improvement over the Acrobat catalogue we had to pore over previously.

I look forward to more model images being added, the "image not available" avatar appearing against most of the product lines, unfortunately.

For a better idea of how things will look, do a search for 'Renault' as there are quite a lot of WW2 French tanks with images already uploaded or browse the WW2 French tanks, artillery or other vehicle categories.

Char 2C

"If It Ain't Broke" Scribblings

Analysing Hit Probabilities

Some time ago I was trying to work out a way of having simpler range brackets, by the looks of my jottings here, as well as the possibility of going over to D20 dice. As it happens it became a thinking out loud on paper exercise into deciding I didn't want to change anything after all.

As it stands, I measure the range, go to the combat chart, get the penetration %, adjust the % for the usual reasons, then roll the dice. As you can guess, very few guns are similar enough to group together in such a chart if you look at their stats closely enough but three categories of weapons did fall into line with each other somewhat: small arms; 13.2mm-47mm; & 75mm-150mm.

Don't get me wrong, I am reasonably happy with the eight range brackets I currently use (Point Blank, Close, Short, Intermediate, Medium, Long, Distant & Extreme). The WRG WW2 rules I used to use felt wrong when either side of a certain range gave a vastly different hit probability. I just wanted to see if I could work out a simplification without increasing the probability steps noticeably or bending the penetration data overmuch by using Point-Blank, Short, Medium, Long and Extreme ranges.

Having not quite ironed out very many of the wrinkles in that idea I then wanted to see if I could devise a way of rolling a handful of D6 for however many attackers were firing within these simplified range brackets, getting back to a long-abandoned group suppressing fire concept I toyed with a few years ago. I am sure it has been done in other rule sets.

Imagining that hit probabilities tail off rapidly towards the end of a trajectory's arc and increase alarmingly at point-blank ranges, I surmised that there might be a largish section in the middle where although, percentages are changing, they are more gradual than at the extremes. Not being a ballistics expert, this was going to be something which was merely required to work in a gaming context, not give very silly results and make everything simpler.

Having decided on PB, S, M, L & X range brackets for the three categories of direct firing weapons and that the M bracket was going to be some kind of norm where, in theory, most of the firing would occur, that left the extremities just needing some adjustment factors and eventually some new adjustments for other combat factors (cover, movement, etc).

All well and good but although the possibly easier to remember range brackets might have resulted in slightly less range table checking there was now going to have to be a roll for penetration, something I did not really want. It could never be factored into the one dice roll, not without, off the top of my head, probably a hit chart for every gun.

Quite an enjoyable bit of noodling about with ideas, nevertheless, if only to conclude I like things how they are.

Having a go at World of Tanks

I'd been given the heads up about World of Tanks a few years ago by my brother-in-law who probably assumed I would be in there in a flash as the game is naturally tank-related. I'd watched my son in Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Player vs Player (PVP) games of Minecraft and as much as I came to enjoy the biggest Lego game on the internet for the building and exploration aspects, getting hyperactive and knocking players out of the game was never really my pint of beer.

Fast forward to 2015 and my son had started playing World of Tanks with a school friend, initially on the PC. Bless him, he had abstained from borrowing my laptop for the best part of a day while the game downloaded so all that was left for me to do was register.

The upside of starting WoT is that the initial tank availability is at the lower end of the power scale and that means at first having to use pre-war tanks or those from the early campaigns. Result! The German start tank is the Leichttraktor, after that you can go down various tech tree routes via the Pz 1, Pz 2, Pz 35t, PzJgr 1 or something I seem to remember resembling the Neubaufahrzeug. The British & French tree starts with the Vickers medium 1 and FT17 respectively. One thing a wargamer has to get his head round is that you have ahistorical combinations of tanks on a battlefield, even Brits vs Brits or Japanese vs French. I think there used to be a historical mode but that got dropped due to player pooling/server issues.

Straight out of the starting blocks, a new player is "destroyed in seconds" (as the say on the TV). Repeatedly so in game upon game. I gather many quit at this point. The controls aren't that complicated but with incoming rounds from unseen opponents it is easy for the beginner to panic or lock up. Either way your tank will be disabled in one or two rounds and destroyed in one or two subsequent hits so there isn't much of a chance to analyse what is happening. "Where's the fun in that?" you may ask.

This is just one problem I have with the game. I understand that it is an arcade style third-person-shooter and not a simulation, so the fact that Pz 1s can dart up and hose your Matilda to oblivion with MG rounds is silly but is just part of the artistic license of the game.

However, this business of being "one-shotted" gets a bit irksome after a while and I used to wonder whether I was forever being pitted against opponents that bought premium gold rounds for real money but it is doubly annoying when one is taken out by one extremely accurate artillery round. (Apparently, even experienced players hate 'arty' where in the higher tier matches it is even more prevalent.) I believe other platforms are somewhat easier to get along with, perhaps only because, for instance in the tablet version, there are no SP artillery as yet, or player-aid mods.

World of Tanks is completely free and many players play for nothing and never buy upgrades, special ammo or restricted tanks for hard currency. It has great graphics, nice gameplay features and if you have good internet, you will be able to install player-aid mods to help your win rate on the PC. And it has A9 Cruisers, FCM36s and CharBs to name a few.

It is very addictive, though. After quitting (for the second time) it took me 3 days for the urge to reinstall to subside and another 3 days to stop going on the WoT forum, so on balance I am glad I have decided it is not the game for me.

It has served its purpose on one level, however. I have been going through Horne's "To Lose A Battle" again, harvesting potential scenarios for games and will do the same with Goutard's "Battle of France" after that.

I have also been figuring out the usage & allocation of StuG3, SiG33/Pz1, PzJgr1 & Bunker Flak units in the campaign, so prepare for more games or modelling photos.

Long live miniatures gaming!

The Joy of Six, 2014

As you can tell from the absence of blog posts it's been a while since I've lain awake at night, thinking about game mechanisms.

That ended last night after attending the Joy of Six show in Sheffield yesterday when, in spite of having being up for 36 hours and coming off a night shift, I finally got to sleep at about 3am.

The venue was the Workstation across the road from the station, which had 3 large conference rooms for the games and traders, a small meeting room for the seminars and a small snack bar at reception at our disposal. I believe it was sponsored by Bacchus and Wargames Emporium. The front windows were pushed back for some welcome breeze for players slaving over red hot gaming & painting tables. Unfortunately, I have scant imagery of the day as I wanted to travel light on the train from London after work so was relying on my mobile which decided to have a secret seizure on the day. There I was happily snapping away, unbeknownst to me that only a few would escape corruption and even then at naff resolution, so as I don't have much of a visual aide-memoir to help my sleep deprived brain recall as much of the various games as I would like, I am going to refrain from what would be a half-baked, incomplete and superficial show report and leave that to other blogging visitors. official show report here.

Show Floorplan

The miniatures of all games were all excellently painted and thanks to the universal 6mm scale, most games were representations of entire battlefields which enabled an appreciation to be made across the different periods, without the distraction of 28mm skirmishes.

One highlight of the show was finally meeting Andy Kirk of Heroics & Ros, whose stand was also manned by Ian Armstrong.

Andy & Ian

My first 6mm purchases were from the original H&R owners (down in Beckenham, I think), then when they were with Tony of Navwar in Seven Kings (that was a good day out at the shop, hard to drag oneself away) and had bought from Ian as well before his range was incorporated into H&R.

I lurked a great deal around the Kalisz 1706 table hosted by Wyre Forest Wargamers club mainly because they had decided to playtest some rules put together at short notice by Nick, who is the Polemos Northern Wars author. The figures and terrain (which were excellent) were provided by Per Broden. There was a good deal of quality handout material provided for the game.

Per Broden and Dan Wharton

If my addled brain absorbed the concepts correctly, the majority of the very little dice rolling is for unit reactions. There is no casualty recording or shooting per se. If opposing units are in contact it is assumed that melee or shooting is occurring and any nearby enemy, terrain and General figures also contribute to reactions, if I've got it right. This means the game is more concerned with the situation the units find themselves in, if they will obey orders and if the units react and force something unexpected on the gamer. Whatever criteria the rules use and however simple the mechanics are, it seemed to work, producing realistic-feeling action (in this type of warfare at least).

It's going to be an interesting journey to work out if I can reduce my somewhat micromanaged combat into something simple, elegant and as workable as the Kalisz 1706 game rules.

Battlegroup Generator

Continuing with my new quest for impartial solo game set-ups and taking certain decisions away from the solo player, I have knocked up a table for selecting random units from my armies.

This is a sort of follow-on from Dale's solo blog where he ruminates over how the turn sequence might effect a player's strategy (or is it tactics?). It set me off pondering on how a solo player, without any external input, could get stuck in a tactical rut during games, end up using the same old favorite units (the French D2's with snazzy camouflage in my case) or setting up the same types of scenarios, almost by default.

So here we have a screenshot of it at work. It doesn't bring the unit up, I have to read it off the chart using a Mk1 Eyeball and for the human touch I will be rolling dice for actual games anyway. It's not going to be accurate in terms of distribution (I notice already that Pz 1s & 2s need boosting and Pz 35t's & 38t's need reducing) or whether particular vehicles fought side by side but it should spit out some playable combinations, possibly some unbalanced ones but hey, war is hell! I have tried to keep the infantry components as prominent as I can and I expect I will tweak it a bit but to be honest I do like to see tanks rumbling across the fields.

On-Table Unit Reminders

To cut down on record keeping during a game, I write the unit morale level and other details on 16mm green tiddlywinks and place the marker next to the unit in question. No need to consult a notepad now and the morale status of a unit doesn't have to kept secret as I play solo!

The notation {8/13~65} means the unit has a current level of 65%, that there are 8 elements in the unit and the loss of one element will cause a drop in morale level of 13%. For the 8/13 part I use a fine permanent marker as this does not change but a water based pen for the morale level which needs updating at times. The counter stays with the unit when it goes back in the box.

Green was my colour of choice so as not to distract from the overall appearance and this works well. (Incidentally, the exact same tiddlywinks are used as bases for all rifle sections and other foot units). My next purchase from the very helpful people at Patriot Games in Sheffield was a pack of smaller 12mm multicoloured counters (they left out all the green ones at my request and put extras of the other colours in) which I will be using for various on-table unit reminders and any morale reactions in force on the unit. Again, this does not need to be kept a secret from the solo player and it will be a lot easier to remember which units need retesting next turn, whether a particular MG is on AA lookout, orders arriving soon, etc.


The counters are available in the colours here (and another shade of green) in 12-48mm diameter, 50 per pack for smaller sizes.