LittleWars1913

 

Three 3d printed isobloc W240 buses used by the French and Germans.  These are from a file on Thingiverse.

 

 

 I have been thinking for a while about upgrading my 3d printer.  I bought the Cubicon Style 9 years ago when I wanted to design and print Toy Soldier terrain and vehicle parts in ABS plastic so I could mould them in metal.

The Cubicon was expensive  but worked straight out of the box which meant I could spend time learning the software, rather than rebuilding the printer every time.

Technology has moved on and I have been keeping an eye on Bambu printers as a possible replacement as they have a good reputation and are a lot faster than the Cubicon.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that Bambu had a sale on so picked up the Bambu A1 printer for about 20% of what I originally paid for the Cubicon.

The printer is easy to put together (just 10 screws or so to attach the two halves, plus some cables to plug in).

One of the reasons for wanting to upgrade the printer was that I was finding the 150mm cubic bed of the cubicon limiting on what I could print.  There is a lot of very good 3d printable terrain pieces now and I needed a larger printer to be able to print them - the A1 has a 256mm cubic bed.

In particular I have been looking at getting some French houses, etc for my WW2 setup and this enabled me to buy the 3dprintterrain WW2 buildings which I really liked the look of.  For £58 you get a huge number of very well designed buildings - I bought the 80th anniversary Normandy set.





The buildings print much faster than on my other printer - typically 4-5 hours for the main building and 2 hours for the roofs.  I am printing them at 0.2mm quality in Matte grey PLA which gives a good effect and minimises the print lines.

I have started painting them and am pleased with the results so far,



I want to make a number of town/village bases for WW2 games so I can play through the Blitzkreig scenarios in the Rapid Fire scenario book which require a fair number of buildings.  Most of the WW2 building I have are ruins rather than complete buildings.

I am also looking at printing some bits and pieces for my Gangster city (such as water towers for the roof tops and a train carriage to go with the existing train and tender) and some starship corridors and rooms for Star Trek skirmish games.

 

 Played an ACW Game this morning with Anthony, my regular opponent, using the Osprey With Hot Lead and Cold Steel rules and my 20mm collection. Enjoyable game - we had to call time but the Union were slightly ahead at that point.

We haven't played the rules in quite a while so it was slightly slow as we remembered exactly how they worked, even with the 5 page synopsis I had typed up after our last game.

We both like the rules - they had a fairly easy order system, use initiative so it isn't quite Igo-Ugo and have the ability for units to fire back if shot at and they haven't fired that turn.

The units shift down in size and abilities as they lose bases and the morale tests are fairly tough so once stuff starts to run it can be difficult to rally and it can sweep the rest of the brigade along with it.

 

 

 Anthony and I played our second game with these new Osprey rules last week.  In our first game we got a lot of rules wrong ad misunderstood how the unit sizes worked but felt they were worth another try.

The second game went much better and we only got a few small things incorrect (Tiny units failing a morale test are removed, morale tests for units nearby if a unit runs, etc).

The rules seem to me to combine the best bits of Pickett's Charge and Black Powder while allowing you to play much larger games than Pickett's charge with several brigades a side.

They use a similar order system to Black Powder, but if you fail to roll enough for 3 moves, but pass the 2 move roll you can still move 2 moves with a brigade.  This makes the game move along as you don't fail to do anything that often.

Firepower is VERY bloody once you get close and units remove a base for every 6 hits which drops them down a size, so Large->Average->Small->Tiny with a similar drop in their abilities.

This means that the game moves quickly and you get a result with Brigades breaking at 50% losses.

Units can be rallied and come back to the fight but they don't regain bases (something that the Neil Thomas ACW rules have which means the game never ends!).

I like the use of ADCs to let you bid for the initiative roll and to help with brigade orders and I like the fact that units can return fire when fired on during the opponent's turn.  This stops the problem with initiative based games where one side can potentially fire twice before the other side returns fire.

Like most of the Osprey Blue Books they need several read throughs to make sure you have understood all the rules and found the exceptions, etc in the places they are mentioned.

I have typed up a QRS which steps through the stages of a turn in order which should stop us forgetting things next time.

So far they seem a very promising set.

 

Managed to finally finish 5 Hovels 15mm ACW buildings for my 20mm ACW collection.

I prefer the smaller reduced footprint of going down a scale for buildings in mass battles.

They are based to fit in with my Hex terrain.

 I spent two days over the weekend at Warfare running the Guildford Club Demonstration game  "Guildford 1940" - a sealion game in 20mm using Rapid Fire Reloaded rules and (mostly) my 20mm early war collection (including a lot of Airfix figures).

The game board was 2' by 12' and represented a slice of surrey countryside very close to where the club meets and was brilliantly put together by Martin Burford. It is based on an attack in on the GHQ line in a book about the sealion invasion that sees the germans coming up through Guildford.

We had a force of germans entering from the south, a recce group coming through middle and paratroopers landing at the far end (opposed by home guard).

We won the Most Innovative Demo Game award and talked to a LOT of people - my voice is quite croaky today.

Here are the very few pics of the game I managed to take first thing on Saturday.

Warfare seemed well attended and they had more through the door on the Saturday then last year.  I spoke to some traders and they seemed happy with takings. There were a few of the normal trders missing such as Colonel Bills (Stu is no longer doing 2 day shows). Plastic Soldier Company, Peter Pig, etc but I think this is a reflection of traders getting older and attending fewer show, and people's mail order picking up and staying strong during and after lockdowns.

There were plenty of newer traders who I hadn't seen before - mainly scenery and 3d printing companies - there does seem a lack of new figure companies breaking into the market.

The only comment I would make is that the demo games could have been better spaced out with larger gaps between them for people to move and stop and chat.  It all felt a little cramped at times.

But, all in all, an enjoyable weekend. 

We have been asked by a couple of other shows if we would take the game to their shows next year and we are discussing that at the moment.

 

 

 

The Guildford Club are running a Sealion style game at Warfare in November in 20mm and this has made me finally put some paint to some new figures.  I am about the only person in the club with early war 20mm ww2 so it looks like we will use quite a lot of my collection.
 
I have almost finished the Raventhorpe Home Guard characters set and knocked together a van from a Frontline Wargames Delivery Van - its a bit rough but will probably pass muster...

Just need to tidy up, varnish and then properly base them