21 April 2010

Wiz & WAB

I repainted one of my oldschool wizards for my Marienburg army.

The big news seems to be that WHW has announced they will have WAB2 at Salute. I'm glad to hear that it's finally (hopefully) hitting the market, and the price isn't as bad as the other Forgeworld books. I'm disappointed that it's only available direct, though. I like to support my local game store, and I was hoping to get some interest in the game there.

19 April 2010

More Empire WIP

Some more work-in-progress shots of my current project. More of the Marienburg "Armoured Company."

The stock Steam Tank still needs to have the blue on the hull smoothed out a bit. Then I'm going to try painting a nautical "mural" on each side. Or maybe "mural" is the wrong term. But "nose art" doesn't sound exactly right either.

The War Wagon aka non-Steam Tank is almost done. I plan on putting a second crewman in there. He's got a blunderbus, representing the "steam gun" on the stock steam tank.





Here's a pic of the "tank" bits removed from the War Wagon. My plan is to have three removable insterts for it. This one, one for use as a War Altar, and a third for use as an old-school War Wagon, or something resembling it.




Yes I had a few problems with the lighting. Click on the pics to enlarge, as always.

12 April 2010

Burgundians vs. Scots

Sunday evening I dusted off my Burgundians & headed down to my friend Rich's for some WAB medievals. Initially I thought I was going to be facing Low Countries, but it turned out to be an invasion of Scotland... the (in)famous "Battle of Twinsborough." All the same to me, really. (Well, not really.) One is a bunch of pike armed rabble supported by a bunch of guns, the other is a bunch of pike armed rabble supported by some even more unruly sword wielding rabble. ;)


Since I recently painted up some more gendarmes, I added them in, substituting them for their dismounted equivalents from one of my last used lists.

In the photo below, Burgundians are on the left. From foreground (Burgundian right flank) to background we had... Coustilliers followed by Household Gendarmes, skirmishing Archers behind a low stone wall, a block of formed Ordonnance Archers, Ordonnance Pike, and a second block of Archers. Beyond the central blocks was a unit of Crossbowmen with pavise. In the (ruined) farm were some skirmishing Handgunners, and on the far side of the farm were some Gendarmes.

The Scots, on the right, had three screening units of skirmishing Archers across the bulk of their line, then from foreground (Scots left flank) to background the main body of troops consisted of two warbands of Highlanders, two Pike Schiltrons, another Highland warband, one more Schiltron, and some camp followers. Behind the ruined farm were some Border Horse and one more group of skirmishing Archers.





The Burgundian left was a disaster. The gendarmes easily chased off the border horse, but were ambushed by lowly archers and destroyed. The handgunners shot off several rounds before losing combat to the camp followers who came into the ruins to fight them.

On the Burgundian right, things were a little different. The coustilliers chased off the skirmishers, and broke through the the rear of the Scots line. However, one of the bands of highlanders had panicked due to heavy casualties from bowfire, and had fortunately rallied in a position to keep the coustilliers from taking advantage of their breakthrough.

In the center the Scots rushed forward through a storm of arrows and hit the Burgundian line -- but not hard enough. The Burgundians held long enough to allow the crossbowmen on the left and more importantly, the household gendarmes on the right to swing in on the flanks. The Scots resisted panic from the initial charge itself, but the casualties from the Gendarmes were great enough to crush the first schiltron in front of them and send almost the entire center fleeing.

The victory was just crushing enough to save face for the embarrassing defeat against the underhanded commoners on the left flank.

10 April 2010

APR WIP





I'm working on a pile of things at once. Not all of it mine.

But here's a peek at one of them...



Scorpios Rising




I've added two small scorpios to my Romans. These are from Old Glory. This is 1/2 the pack. I'll paint up the rest after I've got some more Roman infantry done.

History



Before I embarked on my (rocky) current career, I studied and received a degree in History. It was a gift to and indulgence for myself. Historical wargaming is a bit of an extension of that.

But the story starts long before that. Tonight was a little flashback for me...

If I had to try to name a start for my interest in history, there was a seed planed much earlier than college, and before the dark days of the repressive education of high school. When I was about 10 or 11, just before middle school, we had to do monthly book reports. Most of these were done on little pre-teen novellas or whatever. I don't honestly remember most of mine. But there is one that sticks out far more than the others.



Instead of choosing from the usual shelves of books that were set aside for our age group, I headed off into the general reading shelves of our school library and walked out with Rifles for Waite. In its simplest description (and for as much as I can recall almost 30 year later) it's the story of a 16 year old kid who gets pulled in to the American Civil War, and ends up experiencing life on both sides of the conflict.

Strangely, I stepped away from history after that, barring a minor, temporary obsession for the War of 1812 that comes from living on the shores of Lake Erie, and camping on "The Islands." We used to visit local sites like Perry's Monument, and Fort Niagra -- neither of which, in hindsight, are really that impressive.

While I was studying History at my hippy liberal arts university, I took quite a few film classes to fulfill some of my elective requirements. One of the most influential films (on me) that we saw was Clint Eastwood's (much more common) "Unforgiven."

Westerns, as I remembered them from childhood, were a shallow, stereotyped genre played on local UHF channels on Sunday afternoons. It was trash cinema and boring television serials. Unforgiven changed that, and I quickly ate up Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood films. Tonight I watched (again) "The Outlaw Jose Wales" on AMC.

At any rate, back from the babbling, Lone Waite, one of the (amusing) characters from Josey Wales reminded me of Stand Waite, the historical character from the book mentioned above, flooding my memories with bits and pieces of the (also) above mentioned book bearing his name.

Bringing this back to wargaming... I've done a bit of ACW gaming, mostly as a participant in others' games. But never really that seriously. I studied a lot of ante bellum history, and have generally been more interested in 18th century and earlier, both in my reading and my wargaming.

However... every once in a while... I get to thinking about ACW again...