Battle Report - 03 May 2013 - WAB GT Day 2

The prize table, with generous donation from Warlord,
4Ground, Foundry and others.

Yes. I did win one.

Back at what-used-to-be-Maelstrom for day 2 of the WAB GT. Two games only today, which is probably a good job, since I think I'd have just crawled into a little heap and crashed after three. Five games in two days is hard work!

On the way up, I commented to Grahame that despite 20% of the entrants bringing Selucid armies, I'd managed to avoid any chariots, cavalry wedges or pike blocks.

So of course, I drew Mario Kkounnous in round 4, whose Selucids had all three! (And were also absolutely gorgeous - he does sculpt for Empire Models, I understand - and richly deserving of the best painted award). An absolute cracker of a game with a thorough gentleman of an opponent: it pretty much hinged on one reform test I had to make to get my cataphracts turned to face his Thorakitoi. If I'd made it, the result would, we both agreed, have been very different from the 28-4 thrashing it ended up it. That Parthian army is very brittle - the archers only have Ld 6, and do tend to run a lot: on a 6'x'4' table its quite hard not to wind up panicking nearby units when they do! Even so, I can stand losing all the horse archers without hitting break point. However, losing even one of the two units of cataphracts is almost certainly going to break it.

On the good side, I did manage to stampede one of Mario's elephants into the other., which led to the entertaining sight of them stampeding one after the other across the front of two stands of pike while the pike stood and waited!

So, last battle: bottom two, which turns out to be me and Simon's Carthaginians again! I'm about 14 points behind, which means, unlike last year, I can fail to come dead last if I beat him by enough. Simon's a thorough gent and a fun opponent, and we wound up on a fairly open table. On my first move, I managed (with the aid of the Nomad Horseman special move) to get forty eight shots in on his elephant. (C'mon. Big grey thing, standing out in the open, the size of a barn! What else was I going to shoot at?) For a total of one wound from twenty two hits. Which he made the roll not to stampede for.

For an encore, I got greedy and stupid, and paid the price. I was pretty sure the elephant was just out of charge range, so when it charged I elected not to do the thing my archers are good at. Run the $%^&*( away. And was it out of charge range? Nope. In by about a quarter of an inch.

Ever seen one elephant rout an entire army? Its second follow-through charge hit my general and cataphracts. To their credit, they lasted about three turns, but...

So. Once again, last. And, you know what? It doesn't actually matter. To quote what I just said on WABForum:

[A] massive thank you to Andy and Phil for the organisation, but as importantly to everyone else for coming, for proving that WAB isn't dead and for generally making it a great day. I don't (gee, you couldn't have guessed!!??? ) come to tournaments to win, I come because the WAB community in the UK is a bunch of thoroughly decent folks that it's always a pleasure to hang out with and sit/stand across a table from.

Long may it continue.

I'll leave Andy to announce the results at the pointy end on the official site.

Battle Report - 02 Mar 2013 - WAB GT day 1

Rocked up at Grahame's, Parthians painted, varnished and ready to rock, at 7.30am: we made it to what's officially now known as Maunsfield Games well before 9, so time for a tea and a natter with the rest of the arrivals before kickoff at 9.30.

The format is three games today (of which the middle one used the interesting scouting rules I mentioned last week) and two more tomorrow - have to say I'm very glad it's not three tomorrow, as I am already pretty wiped! For round 1 I drew Pat Lowinger (of Historical Wargames podcast fame) and his rather nice-looking Selucid army: an interesting battle, punctuated with much natter, and an agreement to meet up (with luck) when I'm in Seattle in a week's time. The Parthians once again proved to be an exercise in traffic management, which almost worked: my undoing was the opposition elephants.

Next up I drew Simon Pope's Carthaginians, which proved to be a very long drawn out fight that was called for time, rather than break point. I'd probably have got even closer were it not that my army has only two units that can hold table quarters! As it was, it was 14-18 to Simon.

Last up, I got Tony Stafford's Lydians - an interesting army in that its primarily made up of socking huge warbands. The mistake I made here was not letting him come to me, since failed warband tests would have given me a chance of breaking through his line - even then, it was always going to be tough, since my cataphracts were consistently outnumbered 2:1 or better, and thus his warbands didn't break despite losing combats by 5, nor did pouring 36 arrow shots into one do enough casualties to even make it take a morale test. Those things were huge.

So - so far? played 3, won 0. But having a blast, and not (I don't think) last.

Pre WABGT update: basing

Well, it's 11pm again, and I'm just done with this evening's painting. The Parthian cataphracts are done (if I was less tired I'd grab some decent photos of them for Curt's blog), and the horse archers have had all their headgear done, leaving me with leggings, leather, touch-up, ink wash, repainting faces and base decoration.

A few useful discoveries: as you may have noticed on the one shot from Monday's game, I ran out of Renedra cavalry bases (they're my go-to guys for basing - basically my first batch of Warlord Romans came with a sprue or two of them, and I've stuck with them since), And then you discover you raided your Victrix base sprues AND all your Wargames Factory WSS cavalry for every cavalry base to make your El Cid army...

... and Warbases are on holiday (they're back now, relax)....

... and it's Saturday night when you realise the box of cavalry bases only contains doubles...

... and you need ninety-five 50x25mm cavalry bases, most of which are for individually based skirmish cavalry...

Only one thing for it. I had bought two GW modular movement tray packs from Hobbycraft (who I note have stopped stocking GW at all) in my last ever GW purchase, and the bottom pieces are neatly gridded on one side in 8x8 25mm squares. Out with the cutting board and ruler then: it's actually quite nice plastic - it'll snap rather like a bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk if you score it with a scalpel :D

The cataphracts have been based with Tamiya textured sand paint, which scores for being like a light filler with sticky PVA type properties, but is really NOT the colour I wanted (it's a very sickly yellow). However, dunking them in a Javis desert sand mix (essentially treating the textured paint as glue!) and then adding Army Painter dark grass seems to have done the job.

That's me done for tonight: I may yet get to not spend ALL of Friday evening painting.

Battle Report - 25 Feb 2013 - WAB2

Shhh. Don't tell Curt you've seen
this. They aren't painted. Honest.

Tonight I got to test out my mostly painted Parthians against Grahame's Syracusan (is that a word?) army down the club. Most educational :D

The WABGT tournament rules are 3000 points on a 6'x4' table - the 'typical' WAB2/Armies of Antiquity force is usually 2100, so as a startup that's a bit crowded. 72 skirmish order horse archers basically make playing a Parthian army an exercise in traffic management. On top of that, 2 out of the 5 rounds use scouting points: having lots of skirmish cavalry gives you deployment advantages, and boy do I have lots :D The trick is going to be using them properly.

One of my early battle reports included some very painful lessons learned about WAB2 and Early Imperial Roman armies: I'd like to think I've improved since then, but there's always more to learn. This time out:

• Cataphract armour save is really... really... really good. Make the most of it, because...
• ...You only get your rank bonus in round 1.
• Cataphracts are like ocean-going tankers. Slow, heavy, turning circle of several football fields. Make sure you put them in the right place first up!
• Charging a phalanx from the front isn't a good idea.
• Like I said, playing Parthians, or other 'nomad hordes' armies, really is an exercise in traffic management. 
• All the Feigned Flight in the world won't stop Ld 6 troops running away uncontrollably when charged by formed troops.

As an aside - I've been listening to more of the Historical Wargames podcasts in the car to and from work and club: a combination of that and the above, and thinking some more about context, means I think I have a pretty good idea what I'll be talking about in episode 2 of The Miller's Tale.

Gluing plastics

Meet Rogue.
Rogue is 'helpful'.
Rogue is also a certifiable headcase.

I've embarked on a massive bout of batch-assembly of plastic figures - specifically, six boxes of 28mm Wargames Factory Persian cavalry to stand in for Parthian horse archers. (That distant rumbling sound you can hear? Yes, that's a deadline approaching. For once, it's a whole two weeks further off than my usual!)

As it's <deleted> perishing out in the workshop, I've temporarily appropriated the dining room, which is great for being warm, but needs the door shut in order to both keep the smell of glue and paint out of the kitchen, and keep the cats from 'helping'.

On the left, EMA Plastic Weld.
On the right, Humbrol Precision.

This is the first batch job I've done in a while (since the El Cid army, I guess), and it's I think a slightly different plastic (Wargames Factory) to the one Conquest Games and Fireforge (and I assume, therefore, Renedra) use. Interestingly, this seems to mean I need to change glues.

Normally, I use Humbrol Precision, which comes in a nice yellow plastic bottle with a metal needle applicator. On the upside, it's very easy to apply precisely where you want it, and for the Renedra plastics it seems to just work. The downside is I /believe/ its base ingredient is methyl ethyl ketone, and in a closed enviromment like the dining room the fumes are enough I can only work on about a dozen figures before needing to take a break. Also, it doesn't appear to stick the WF plastics as well: this is fine for the horses, which have some pin/socket locator thingies to hold them, but is tricky when you're trying to attach arms,  heads and things like quivers that rely on the joint to hold them against the weight of the piece.

You may have seen me mention EMA Plastic Weld before - it's a different glue in that it comes in a bottle, and is applied with a brush. For some reason, it seems to work much better on the WF plastics than the Renedra-manufactured ones, providing an almost instant bond (10 seconds of holding the joint rather than a minute+). The Hunbrol is a bit slower to bond even on the Renedra/Warlord/Fireforge/Conquest plastics, but the ease of use tradeoff means I tend to use the Humbrol for those.

The Plastic Weld fumes also aren't quite as noxious in terms of light-headedness, but it is dichloromethane, which is supposed to be slightly worse for you (category 3 rather than 2 safety risk) with prolonged exposure. You also can't apply it quite as precisely, as it needs a brush. Its other downside is that it's very easy to knock over if you're a klutz like me! The short fix? Superglue (using the new Army Painter superglue I picked up at Hammerhead (thanks, guys from Warlord!), which is just awesome in terms of speed of bond) a beermat to the bottom of the bottle.

WAB Armies of Antiquity 2 Parthians

Just spent my lunch break working out a Parthian list as a possible candidate for next year's WABGT.

Man, am I going to need several more boxes of WF Persians (and probably some more Numidians for conversions/heads etc)! 3000 points buys you 72 horse archers and 22 cataphracts, plus some assorted scummy skirmish foot for annoyance purposes.

The WAB GT

So I let Grahame from the club talk me into entering this year's WAB GT at Maelstrom this past weekend.  To be fair, it didn't take much persuading :D

Arrived Saturday a.m. with Grahame (to whom thanks for driving us both days) and AndyB from the club, in time for a sausage sarnie and the first of many mugs of tea. For those who haven't been to the Eye Of The Storm before, it's an old mill that's been converted into their shop and webstore distribution warehouse, with a downstairs bar and an upstairs pretty much devoted to about seventy five gaming tables. We were off in one end of the upstairs area, with 10 double tables (2 x 6'x'4' end to end) between the 16 of us, which made for plenty of space to dump everyone's collections of Really Useful Boxes (seriously, they looked like the second or third biggest supplier to the assembled company!).

I'd taken a British Tribes list from AoA2 representing the Brigantes under Cartimandua, basically four warbands (one fanatic) each with a chieftain, a group of chariots with the army general (Queen Cartimandua herself), some cavalry and a few skirmishers. A fair chunk of it was painted last week - as I've said many times before, I'm not the best painter, but they looked pretty decent as a seething mass from a couple of feet away! (Yes, Curt, I'll get you a photo or two this week :D)

So, first up? David Johnson's EIRs - nice looking army with a couple of units of Maccebean allies to add interest, on a rather fun table with a long stretch of broken ground and trees diagonally across the table from one edge of his deployment zone to the opposite one of mine. I have to confess that the precise details of the combat are lost in a haze of time, tea and overstrained brain, but suffice it to say I hit army breakpoint sometime after I'd managed to rout a couple of his units off the table, and the end result was a 27-5 win to him.

Next up after more tea and lunch (and a quick raid on Maelstrom's store with competitor discount) I ambled back upstairs, having idly commented 'with my luck, I'll get Grahame...'.

I got Grahame.

Grahame's tournament army was Late Imperial Roman, with, as is something of a trademark for him, lots of skirmishers. He's a master of the art of being very very irritating with them, something I need to learn :D I'd faced this army on Monday at the club, and learnt a few things not to do (charging his legion in shieldwall for one). Kind of a one-sided battle, this one, sad to say. I didn't get outmanoeuvred by his skirmishers, at least, and my cavalry (with feigned flight) did manage to lead his a merry dance on one flank, but in the end a number of crap dice rolls and a couple of really badly timed failed warband tests led to a mass exodus of my entire army and an 0-32 drubbing. A consolation was that I did make good use of a long skirmish line to protect the warbands from incoming missile fire for a couple of turns.

Final game of the day (after some very nice apple pie and more tea) was against Martin "the man who wrote the supplement" Gibbins, also fielding a Late Imperial Roman army, but rather different to Grahame's - fewer skirmishers, no cataphracts, no rear-rank archers in the legionaries. We got the table with the crocodile swamp, which we both basically ignored, and ... well, I lost. I'd probably have lost less if I could estimate the difference between 10" and 8" better, as I basically let two warbands get charged that I really shouldn't have, and (stop me if you've read this before) that led to a mass exodus of my entire army and an 0-32 defeat,

Warbands. Gotta love 'em. Your best laid plans get scotched by that one failed test that pushes you into range to be charged, and once they start down the slippery slope of breaking, they're kind of hard to stop, as you just lost all your rank bonuses to Leadership.

Sunday morning dawned way too early after the amount of brain I'd expended on Saturday (including some late night trigonometry that gave me a useful mental 8" and 10" ruler!), and we arrived in time for more sausage sarnies and tea, before...

...I drew AndyB's Dacians.

He'd taken the reverse approach to warband to me: no characters at all, some noble cavalry, and 5 10x4 warbands (four armed with bows as well), which pretty much fit the full width of the deployment area (44" including 1" gaps between units!). Surprisingly, unlike Grahame, I've never actually played his army at the club, so this was a welcome chance to do so. I have to confess that this was the one defeat I was actually cross with myself about, as I missed three charges which would probably have turned the battle my way - certainly would have cleared out Andy's right flank. And by missed, I mean got caught up in start of turn admin (warband tests, rally, etc) and plain didn't see them until it was too late. Nrrrgh. Stupid, stupid, stupid. 0-32.

Lunch! And man, that red velvet cake was gorgeous.

Last up, and 40 points off 15th (which was about the point that I realised there was a last place prize!) I drew John Wall with his collection of my hereditary enemies, the early Imperial Romans. We got a very plain table, one wood in the middle and a couple of hills. My lights went for a sweep round the right flank, carrying off his bolt throwers (but not before they'd taken out one of my chariots) and some archers, while the warbands fanned out either side of the wood. On the left centre, we had kind of a standoff for several turns, until one warband blew its warband roll and advanced into charge range of a legionary cohort (which ended up with it chasing me off the table over the course of about three turns). On the right, my chariots' dice deserted them and they got routed by a legion (with thirteen attacks on a charge, and 3+ saves, they really should have done better). However, the two warbands on that side (including the fanatics) got stuck in properly, to two knock-down drag-out brawls (one including TWO tied musician rolls, both with snake-eyes), and eventually broke a cohort of auxillae and one of legionaries. Meanwhile, my cavalry's dice also deserted them, and they got routed by a smaller unit of cavalry, largely due to a very bad Feigned Flight roll putting them in harm's way. By then it was turn six of seven, and everything was, pretty much, out of reach of everything else, so we spent two turns jockeying for position on the table quarters and called it a game. A defeat, true, but a much more satisfying 13-19 to John, and I could maybe have won it with better dice - not losing one or other of the chariots or the cavalry would have made it interesting!

And that was that, barring the awards. I'm struggling to remember all of them: Keith Tait's gorgeous Sassanid army deservedly won Best Painting. AndyB upheld the club's honour by winning Best Sportsman, both Grahame and I won a raffle prize (to my relief. I didn't win any more Celtic Warband. but some Immortal Miniatures Hoplites instead). My loser's prize was a copy of the Hail Caesar army list supplement, and...

...well, I'll let AndyP, the organizer, have the pleasure of revealing the results at the other end of the table in his own time.

I'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who took part for being friendly, accommodating and making us all welcome. to AndyP for a sterling job organising the whole event, and to Maelstrom for hosting (and the lass behind the bar for countless mugs of proper, decent, drinkable tea!)