Chen-song's 1/72 Scale Miniature Gaming Blog

Because there is an option for two types of battle cruisers, of course I magnetized the ship to be either. This is the alternative head with close range plasma weapons instead of the normal occulus beams.

When you put it next to the Basilisk, the resin/plastic combination model from the Kickstarter with exactly the same stats, the newer ship looks much larger.

Even here, next to the battleship, the Akuma looks like it's the same length, just quite a bit thinner.
It's a really nice looking model, and I hope it will be lucky in the tournament.

For the upcoming Dropfleet League game tomorrow, I painted up some more Scourge ships.

This game is going to be another skirmish, at 750 points. I heard that the Basilisk battlecruiser is quite good, so I painted up the one from the last post. Plus, I painted up a troop transport module and attached it to one of my cruisers to make a Chimera troop transport.

Even though the game will be too small for a battleship, I like the Scourge model so much that I painted it up. It will definitely be making an appearance for the following game, which will be larger. Of course, as I showed in the last post, the head weapons are magnetized. The above is the Daemon configuration.



This shows the relative sizes of the battlecruiser and the battleship.

Unrelated to Dropfleet, for the upcoming Tuesday night game, I'm going to run a game of Imperial Skies, with steampunk flying battleships on Mars. The miniatures are from a boardgame called Leviathans, which unfortunately is no longer supported.

In this game, German battleships are trying to take on British ships and forts. The above are British ships flying above their forts.

I finally managed to paint around 500 points worth of Dropfleet Commander ships, just in time for a game organized in St. Albert on Sunday.

I painted four of the magnetized frigates from the previous post.
This is the second Gargoyle, painted to the same scheme.

I also figured out how to magnetize the cruisers so the wings, cheek weapons, and the "crown" of the heavy cruiser are all removable. Here are the two I painted for the game, an Ifrit on top, and a Shenlong on the bottom. These are all convertible to other ship classes.

I also kit-bashed some Nickar corvettes, which don't have released models yet. These are just made from left-over weapons wings and painted in the same scheme. They are quite useful as troop carrier killers in the game.
Trevor from St. Albert organized the game on Sunday, and it was a blast. He brought out orbital gaming mats that really provided the proper atmosphere (pun intended) for the game. There were quite a few tables, mostly new players learning the game. This was my first time playing and I got hooked!

Carrying on, I'm building the next batch of ships right now. Here is a Basilisk battlecruiser, which I hear is quite good in the game. It's assembled with magnetized cheek weapons, and ready to be painted.

I also got hold of a battleship, which is quite a big hunk of resin. Again, I magnetized the head weapons so they can be swapped. This is the Daemon configuration with beam weapons.

This is the Dragon configuration with launch bays on the sides of the head instead.

I can't wait for next month's game, and I'll be bringing some new ships to it.

Last year, I bought into the Dropfleet Commander kickstarter created by Hawk Wargames. This is a starship combat game based on their Dropzone Commander universe. I ordered a basic starter set from both the UCM and Scourge, two of the main factions, along with a bunch of freebies (mainly extra ships) given as a part of the kickstarter.

Last Friday, I finally received my package.

Even though it's a relatively low level pledge, it still has a ton of stuff packed in there, with all the basics needed to play, along with extra ships from all existing faction.

I started building the Scourge faction right away, since I like their bio-mechanical design.
Both types of ships in the starter set, frigates and cruisers, have a variety of build options. This just begs for magnetization. The Scourge frigate is fairly straight-forward, with a common central body and several optional pairs of wings. I built up three types of wings (there are a couple more I haven't built) for four frigates, as seen in the picture above.

Here's the same frigate with the three options I have so far. The Djinn, a close-range attack craft, the Gargoyle, a troop carrier, and the Harpy, the basic ranged frigate.

Here are all four frigates with a typical fleet configuration - two Harpies and two Gargoyles. Unfortunately each sprue of four frigates only allows you to build two copies of each option.

I've built up the base of a cruiser (I have four total), but the cruiser's options are much more complex, and some of the places, like the mouth, are hard to magnetize for all the options. I'll have to think about how to do this properly.

All the factions also have resin-only battleships. I don't have any yet, but here is a size comparison of a Desolator from Dropzone Commander with the Scourge cruiser. It fits the description of Scourge battleships as being around the same length as cruisers but much wider and thicker. I may proxy the Desolator as a battleship in games before deciding on whether to splurge on battleships.

I can't wait to start painting these!

It just goes to show that you never know what you're going to get. Just this Sunday, I went to a bits swap at a local game shop where I tried to sell my old Warhammer 40k Tyranid army. Possible deals for the Tyranids fell through, but I noticed something interesting among one of the bits piles being sold...


Here's a comparison with an Orca dropship (right) and a Devilfish APC (middle). This is a pretty big model. I'll have to think about how to paint it properly - there are lots of panel lines. Anyhow, this will be a great centerpiece for my upcoming Tau army.

This miniature is based on a Space Marine strike cruiser from BFG. The design is very similar but not quite exactly the same as the original, and it has somewhat less detail. However, the Frosted Ultra Detail material from Shapeways is quite nice and avoids most of the "texture" problems from cheaper materials. The clear material doesn't photograph well, but after getting painted it'll look a lot nicer.

This one is based on the original Forge World Grey Knight strike cruiser. Again, it's not as "baroque" as the BFG miniature, and it's missing some trademark GW items, like shields and swords on the fins. With some Warhammer bits, I think I can "Gothicize" it.

These are very small gunships that can be used as proxies for Thunderhawks in BFG. To give a sense of scale, the base is a Wargames Factory 20X20mm square. They have a lot of detail for their size and the FUD material really comes through.

This time, I'm quite impressed by Shapeway's 3D prints. The more expensive FUD material really makes a difference. I can't wait to get these painted.

I recently bought some old Forge World Epic scale Tau aircraft from a wargames forum I visit.  This is a game I played years ago, and I've always loved 6mm/Epic scale miniatures.  The Forge World resin models were also works of art, possessing extreme amounts of detail.  Far from just for nostalgia's sake, maybe this will get me into the game again...

This past Saturday I went to our local gaming mini-convention, Mayday, again.  This time the event had rather fewer people than past years due to some other gaming tournaments happening at the same time.  However, there was still plenty of fun to be had.

I ran a skirmish game using the Strange Aeons ruleset, but playing out scenarios based the X-Com computer game.  (Both old and new).  The Strange Aeons base game is a great Lovecraftian adventure ruleset, but my adaptation followed the X-Com plotline, with near-future soldiers fighting invading aliens.

I had two 2 X 3 ft. boards set up, one a rural UFO crash site, the other an urban roadside scene.  In both cases the human and alien players were simply trying to wipe each other out.

The miniatures I used for snakemen (old X-Com game) were from Critical Mass Games.  These are supposed to be 15mm aliens, but they fit quite well with my 1/72 scale ultra-modern special forces soldiers.

On the first level, the human player had a lot of trouble advancing against the snakemen's withering plasma fire.  He did poorly in all his cover save rolls, and ended up losing all his men to major injuries.
There were quite a few other games and displays running at the same time.  Here, Dave was running his Carpi campaign with late Western Romans using the Hail Caesar ruleset.  It looked very nice.

After my morning game, I participated in a DBA tournament.  There were only four participants, and we played three games each.  The theme of the tournament was elephants, and each player had to use an army with at least one.  I borrowed Dennis' Seleukid army, and faced off Dave's Sassanid Persians in the first game.  I lost 4-2, and lost my general in the process.

In the second game, fighting against Dennis' Numidians, I did better, winning 4-2.  My scythed chariot was the star player, mowing down one of his light horse and his general.

In the third game, I played Mark from Calgary and his Carthaginians.  This map had a lot of terrain, and we both maneuvered quite a bit.  The picture shows my pike block trudging around in bad terrain for much of the game.  The game ended in my favour with some bad rolls on his part.  Overall though, Mark won the tournament with the highest score.

In the evening I played in a Star Wars fleet battles game using old clix miniatures.  I didn't know a lot about the ruleset, but it played very smoothly and quickly with a large number of ships.  It seemed to be very well suited for the sort of large scale cinematic action a Star Wars game demanded.

All in all, I had a lot of fun again this year, and I hope I can come up with some more interesting ideas for running a game next time.

I usually don't post anything about non-miniature games here, but this is something I really want to spread around.  There is a computer game called "TorchShips" in development, and they are looking for backing on KickStarter.  This is a hard SF space combat game that takes into account Newtonian motion and other realistic scientific concepts.  Since most of the math is handled by the computer, it should actually be quite fun.  Anyhow, if anyone's interested, you should check out the video and consider backing it:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/product7/torchships-real-3-d-space-combat

This last Saturday I hosted a Squadron Strike game at MayDay, our local gaming convention.  This was an interesting experience for me since I'd never hosted a game this complex before, and I had no idea how the players would adapt.  It all turned out quite well though, and we all had a lot of fun.

Initially, only two players signed up for the game, so I assumed this was final and emailed them links to the simple AVT/Squadron Strike introduction flyers on Ad Astra Games' website.  They actually read and understood most of it and went to the game prepared.  However, right before the game the organizers of the convention sent a couple of extra players my way.  When I started explaining the rules, one of the new players, a nice guy I knew from my 40k days, basically ran away. :(  To be fair, he wasn't feeling well and couldn't absorb all the information, and don't worry, he did have fun at another table.  His son, the other new player, was fine with it all and stayed.  So I ended up with three players for my scenario.

The scenario was set in the far off future year of 1985, where a North American Space Command (humans) squadron on patrol made contact with a hostile alien race.  The humans had relatively hard SF ships, with two small corvettes based on the Manned Orbital Laboratory design, and a larger Orion drive ship.  The aliens had bioships, two smaller corvette-sized vessels and a larger cruiser-sized vessel.  The human corvettes each had a beam weapon doing moderate damage up to 15 hexes, with a spherical all-around firing arc.  The alien corvettes each had two forward facing short-ranged beam weapons that did around the same amount of damage, but at a shorter range of 9 hexes max.  The bigger ships were more heavily armed, with the human Orion ship having two forward facing beam weapons of the same type found on the corvettes, a lighter weapon for point-defense, and a heavy beam doing a lot of damage shooting out of the rear arc.  (It was meant to simulate a bomb-pumped laser)  The alien ship had a very long range missile launcher with a spherical arc, and two forward beam weapons like the corvettes.  All ships used mode 2 movement, i.e. fully Newtonian.

The two human corvettes.
At the start of the scenario, only the two pairs of corvettes were on the board, approaching each other from two perpendicular edges.  You can see all the playing aids scattered around the table.
The human players understood mode 2 movement quite well early on, and they slid their corvettes side-ways to meet the aliens, placing their armoured fronts toward the enemy ships.

For the first couple of turns, the players mostly learned about marking ship orientation and horizontal/vertical thrust on the AVID diagrams representing the ships.

As the ships got closer together, they also got to learn about targeting and firing.

The human ships took advantage of their longer range to concentrate fire on one of the alien corvettes, and it was destroyed pretty quickly.  However, it and its wingman managed to do some damage to one of the human corvettes too.

As per the scenario, the side that lost the first ship had its larger ship arrive on board as reinforcements.  The alien player decided to let the ship cruise slowly and use its long-range missiles.

Here he was figuring out the range for placing missile markers.

The two human ships now concentrated on the one remaining alien corvette.

However, the alien destroyed the damaged human corvette with a close-range shot.

The human corvette was quick to avenge.  This was turning out to be quite a bloody game.

The larger human ship now arrived too.  The human player controlling this ship decided to go for a novel approach - he let the ship fly in backwards, with its heavily armoured rear plate (and bomb-pumped laser) facing the direction of travel.

In the mean time, the remaining corvette kept on shooting down alien missiles, so the cruiser closed in and destroyed it with short-ranged beam weapons.  Up until this point, the players had been flying as if they were in a 2D environment, but they gradually started experimenting with rolling and pivoting the ships, as well as changing their altitude.  Here the alien cruiser actually shot the human corvette from above.

The two big ships now faced each other.  The human player decided to use his front weapons after all, and turned around.  However, his shots were mostly ineffective.