SAGA AoM: The Lords of the Wild

I finally finished my second Warband for SAGA Age of Magic, my first was Masters of the Underearth and was based on the Goblins from the Games Workshop collections for LotR and the Hobbit.

The Lords of the Wild faction is also based on Games Workshop figures but this time on the Elves, aside from a few additions. I really had a lot of fun putting together this Warband, many had been painted by my son many years ago which I touched up but there are some additions by myself.

The warband is as follows:

Base Force

Warlord

Lieutenant (figure cost)

Sorcerer (1)

Titan (1)

Creatures (flying) x2 (1/figure cost)

Hearthguard (1)

Heavy Weapon Armed Hearthguard (1)

Bow-Armed Hearthguard x2 (2)

Warriors (1)

Bow-Armed Warriors (1)

Specials/Legendary Units

Bow-Armed Ranger (Lieutenant)

The Hunter and the Great Hunt Warlord (1)

As you can see, the maximum points fielded here can be up to 10. I would like to add some Levy eventually as well as some Shapeshifters. I already have on hand a Mounted Warlord and Mounted Hearthguard. They are a little back in the painting queue.

The Hunter with his 2 companions

Flying Creature One....

....and Two

These are great figures.

Anyway, I hope gaming resumes soon but I suspected I will be trapped in the USoT for many months yet, so I will have to be patient. Next up will be some more figures for another Studio Tomahawk game.

Adventures with Virtual Wargaming

I just noticed I only posted once in June, certainly have slowed down but not with wargaming. The last month has been a real plunge into setups for virtual wargaming and after several weeks, I still do not think I have hit the ideal solution. I have however finally hosted 2 games on my own both with the Rommel ruleset. I felt this would work well as it is a grid based game so there is no measuring. The playing pieces are pretty straight forward, as you will see further down from the photos. Played my first game with Adam last week, who has played the the game before, and then I played this Monday with Pierre-Yves, who had not played before. Both games went relatively well but I suspect it was a little difficult for the 2 remote players to see the actual pieces. They can see the overall view but it is very difficult to distinguish what each base actually is and to which side they actually belong.

For the 2nd game, I got an Amcrest IP camera. It was a bit of a challenge to get it connected to Manycam but I did get it done. I also had 2 iPhones connected, one as a mobile camera and one on the dice tray. I wish the resolution was a little better especially on the overview camera. I do have the ability to zoom in using Manycam but the resolution is pretty poor, so I really have to rely on the mobile camera which is OK but certainly as you will see below, it is nowhere as good as direct photography.

Anyway let us have a look at the photos.

Screenshots from the MacAir.

Manycam

Overview from iPhone

Mobile Camera

IP at night

IP in Day

iPhone

IP zoom

iPhone zoom

As you can see the resolution is not good, but you can see the marker strip on the bases to assist with combat.

Direct Amcrest Images

This is the image through the web portal without using Manycam

The above zoomed using Amcrest, I am not sure if the resolution is much better than when it has been fed through Manycam.

Direct Photos with iPhone

Deir el Tarfa

Played this game with Adam last week. All my Rommel pieces are for the North African theatre.

Operation Brevity

Played this game with Pierre-Yves this week.

I cut down the grid to 9x6 from 12x8

I did have fun and I am really appreciative of Adam and Pierre-Yves for being guinea pigs for my first 2 hosted games. There is a lot of work to do but I found it well worth it. I just still have to keep researching cameras, I believe.

I would also like to note that there is a Facebook group devoted to Virtual Tabletop Gaming, the people there are really quite helpful and if interested in this side of the hobby I can strongly recommend them.

General Quarters

My friend Pierre-Yves recently convinced me to have a game of General Quarters, a WWII Naval Combat game. I was quite reluctant as my only experience with WWII naval combat was Naval Thunder. I had a few games of this with my friend Adam a couple of years ago and although I bought a British armada; I found the rules, especially the movement and firing, somewhat clunky. If I have to do a lot of thinking especially in respect to movement and at whom I can to shoot, the game will just lose me. There are a lot of great things about Naval Thunder, their spreadsheet to generate ships is great, although maybe a little over complicated.

I had watched a very laudable review of General Quarters on Little Wars TV, and although it was one of their top recommended games, the rulebook with over 180 pages of closely written print was putting me off. I was also not a big fan of naval combat in general, but after playing Black Seas which is a lot of fun, I was open to trying General Quarters.

We have played 2 games over the last 2 weeks and I have to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed the ruleset, the movement and firing mechanisms are very simple but have at the same time a lot of depth. I especially appreciated this last night when we increased the complexity markedly in just our 2nd game. 

Our game last week was a replay of the Battle of the Denmark Strait, we played this with 2 ships aside and played with just the Flank Speed (a simplified version) single sheet of the rules. We decided not to play with torpedoes. It was a lot of fun, here are a few photos.

Last night we played an encounter between the USN and the IJN with 6 ships aside. We also added in the torpedo rules.

Again a lot of fun, it was a specially interesting in that I decided to keep all 6 of my ships (USN) in a single formation while P-Y had 3 separate formations. The rules handled this remarkably well and in the last turn of the game we had to check for multiple collisions which was also quite fun. I think it will take a bit of practice to get torpedo aiming right but I suspect we will get there.

I should note that all the ships you see were printed by P-Y on his Prusa Resin Printer, I believe they are all at around 1/3000 scale.

Tiny Planes

I finally got around to taking some photos of some 1/600 planes I have painted for my Early War North Africa project. The planes come from PicoArmor and Tumbling Dice. The PicoArmor planes were much nicer than I thought they would be, the photos on the website do not do them justice. The Tumbling Dice were nice but I bought over almost 200 planes from them and they were in unlabelled bags with no identification. This was a special pain as I am completely new to this area and it took several hours to get things sorted. The Pico Armor planes were beautifully packaged.

I bought a campaign booklet from Chris Stoesen called the Falcon and the Gladiator which has an encapsulated history of the war in 1940-41 between the RAF and the Regio Aeronautica It also has excellent orders of battle, as well as a campaign system for Bag the Hun or Check Your Six.

I thought I would paint planes in order of the campaign, but the PA planes came much before the TD ones, so the RAF Lysanders and the Wellington bombers got painted first. Sorry about the quality of the photography, I usually do not photograph with shadow but I sort of liked the look.

PicoArmor

Westland Lysander

Vickers Wellington

Tumbling Dice

Bristol Blenheim

The 2 in the dessert camo are Mk IF

Fiat CR-32

Maybe a little easier to see!

Well there is a lot more planes to paint but I should have some 18th century sailing ships up next.