Why I don't like Flames of War

I'm pretty open about the fact that I really want to like Flames of War, but I don't and can't.

I really want to like it because I grew up on a cracking set of home-grown company level WW2 tank rules to which I contributed the air rules and IIRC helped with the infantry rules. To a large extent that, along with Napoleonics and 'cardboard' WRG Ancients, are my first loves in wargaming. Back in the day (turn of the '70s/'80s), we were restricted to what we could scare up from Messrs Airfix and Matchbox as regards AFVs, along with a few other obscure things (I still don't know where the lone 1/72 M4A3E8 HVSS Sherman or the JagdPanzer IV came from, although a little research suggests they might have been Hasegawa kits), so just simply the idea of the massive range of 15mm tanks and vehicles available from Battlefront is enough to make me drool, let alone the other manufacturers.

I really want to like it because there's a hell of a lot of decent people at club who play it, as well as a bunch of nice 15mm scenery: no shortage of opponents, no shortage of people who have and know the rules, have the supplements, etc. And I'm completely unashamed to admit that if I could like it, I'm the kind of person who'd be buying every book and add-on, and shedloads of vehicles and figures.

But I can't.

I've tried, but I can't.

I can't at least in part because they don't feel to me like rules that actually reflect the conflict they're representing. They seem to encourage things like massive blocks of on-table artillery that would, historically, have been about three more tables away, and infantry seems to be just a speed bump for tanks (as someone I recall reading put it).

I can't because the army lists seem to encourage mini-maxing down to the last point, and the rules seem to encourage fine-tuning the position of a piece to the last mm to get the best possible dice modifier. And knowing the rules seems to be more important then knowing the capabilities of the units the miniatures represent in real life. As I said in a previous post, it seems more like very complicated chess with model tanks than an actual simulation of warfare, and little or no simulation of 'friction'.

I can't because it has that ghastly system of plonking down an objective marker at some arbitrary point on the board, and that seems to be the sum total of its nod to any concept of larger scale situational awareness. And yes, I know Napoleon at War has that in its tournament rules, as well. I don't intend to use it!

I'm well aware that folks who do like Flames of War are going to tell me I'm wrong (heck, who knows, they may just ignore me completely), and I should point out that this post doesn't reflect on the folks down the club, or elsewhere among my readers, who do play it, and clearly enjoy it. It's just not for me, guys.

I Ain't Been Shot Mum 3 (aka IABSM3)

And here was I thinking I was safe from further Christmas spending! Had a lie in on Christmas Eve morning, listening (finally) to the latest Meeples and Miniatures podcast, courtesy of Neil "The Man Who Reviews Things I End Up Buying" Shuck and Richard Clarke of Too Fat Lardies. Up till now, I'd been listening to M&M on my longish commute to London, but since that ended in October, I've been short of two hour slots in which to listen - I did try the 'go to bed early and listen' approach, but that just resulted in my falling asleep, which is, I hasten to add, no reflection on Neil's talents!

Topic for this episode was the new "I Ain't Been Shot, Mum" rules, version 3 thereof. I'd already had my curiosity a little piqued by the scenario in Battlegames issue 27, but was still a little sceptical of the card-based semi-random activation system. While I do like systems that allow for a little unpredictability, there can be the potential for a degree of frustration - see, for example, some of the lousy dice I've had with both Blitzkrieg Commander and Hail Caesar (in the absence of a battle report for this one, I should just note that I had the left flank cavalry in one of the example scenarios, and pretty much never moved).

The podcast, though, was an eye-opener, in terms of Rich explaining the thoughts behind the design and the system generally: if you don't have time for a good listen (which I do strongly recommend), check out his article on the Too Fat Lardies blog on the subject. Definitely has me convinced that the system is workable at the company level it's designed for, and doesn't cause you to wind up sat in a corner of the battlefield beating your head against the wall as you throw 10s and 11s repeatedly.

In a nutshell, for those who haven't time to read either: the core system relies on a deck of cards, one for each platoon/armour section on both sides, plus a 'Tea Break' card. Cards are drawn, and units get activated when their card is drawn, but the Tea Break card ends the turn. So far, so random. Except that there are extra cards for the leaders (what IABSM calls 'Big Men') allowing them to give actions to units within their command radius, and other extra cards that tune the balance of the game. It's very neat, and I'm certainly more than willing to give it a shot in action.

I was also struck by a review comment on, of all places, IABSM's Wikipedia page:

"Most games on the market, in general, pre-suppose that you will be playing with reasonable people with whom you are at least quasi-friendly. IABSM takes this supposition and advances it even further. These are NOT tournament type games rules because frankly they rely on players being more concerned about having fun than winning a trophy."

A-bloomin'-men. For all the assorted armies and periods I've been playing, the one I miss most from my school club was company-level WW2 with a set of homegrown rules. I keep casting envious glances at the gorgeous Flames of War miniatures that various folks spend a lot of time playing at club, but my one look at FoW put me off for life, as to me it felt more like abstract chess with tanks and minimaxing the rules as much as one could. That and massive batteries of on-table artillery firing over open sights, Puh-leeeze. 

IABSM seems to be everything FoW isn't, and seems also to be the perfect ruleset for the next level up from Operation: Squad, and below Blitzkrieg Commander (which I also like in 6mm for really big sweeping actions, despite the command activation rules - we have, in the past, tweaked these at club with extra command actions COs can hand out... gee, that sounds familiar!!).

And just to further entice me, there's a PDF of the rules available specifically formatted (with lots of links) for use on tablets: works a treat on iBook for the iPad. So, erm... thanks again for the dent in my credit card, Neil and Rich. :) And I'll be picking up the cards and tokens when I have an army to use them with, unless I can borrow someone's Flames of War company to try them out (usefully, it's quite OK to use FoW-based units with IABSM).

A horse of a different colour part 4 - coloured horses

Yes, it has been a long time, but here we are with part 4 of the horse genetics series, and here's where the fact that I'm an Englishman will be obvious.

We're going to discuss what over here are called 'coloured' horses - that is to say horses which have coats which are white with solid patches of another 'normal' coat colour. In the UK, black and white is called 'piebald', and brown/bay and white is 'skewbald' (bay and white - i.e. black mane/tail, brown patches on white - is sometimes called 'tricoloured'). Across the Atlantic, they're all called 'pinto'. However, this is a different pattern to Apaloosa horses (which are not unique to the US), and then there's the American Paint horse, which is another can of worms entirely.

The genetics of coloured horses is complex, and I'm not going to go into it in great depth. If you want a more detailed look, have a peek at the Wikipedia page on pintos. From a painting point of view, what really matters is the pattern of white - collectively, these genes are white-patterning genes.

Skewbald bay with classic
Tobiano markings.
Image by Jean-Pol GRANDMONT
CC-BY-2.5 

The main 'coloured' gene is Tobiano (To/to). It's a pretty normal dominant gene, so if your horse has one copy of it it will display coloured/pinto characteristics. The A/a and E/e genes (from article 1) will govern whether it's a black and white, brown and white or bay and white pinto/coloured. 'Classic' Tobiano markings are white legs, and vertical patches of white, with coloured chest, face and rump/withers.

Next up is Overo. This is somewhat complex, as there are several genes making it up, and we're in the realm of the American Paint breed, which means I need to tread carefully or I'll probably offend someone by getting it not 100% right or grossly over-simplifying.

Well, tough. 'Cause I'm going to over-simplify a bit. :D

Classic Overo pattern.
Image by www.horsevet.co.uk
CC-BY-SA-3.0

Overo patterning is different to Tobiano in that it's much more jagged and horizontal. It is a term used by the American Paint Horse Association to describe a number of 'coloured' horse patterns that aren't pinto/piebald/skewbald.

The most common genetic cause is the Frame gene (O/N). As you can guess from the fact that it's not uppercase/lowercase, its slightly different - it behaves like a dominant gene in that horses with one copy of O display the overo patterning in some form or other. Unfortunately, horses with two copies of O display Lethal White Syndrome - similar to the way Dominant White is lethal, except that the foal is born with a pure white coat and dies after about 72 hours due to an underdeveloped digestive system (and are usually put to sleep sooner).

[Edit: realised I'd missed an important one.]

Sabino patterning on a Clydesdale.
Note, this is not caused by SB1.
Public Domain photo.

Another relatively common (as these things go) patterning gene (or rather set of genes) is/are known as Sabino. They fall into the Overo category as far as the American Paint Horse Association is concerned, and the most common one, SB1/sb1, is another incomplete dominant gene, in that SB1/sb1 (i.e. one copy of the gene) has a different effect to SB1/SB1. Specifically, one copy produces irregular white patches on the face and extremities, and often 'belly spots'. Two copies, on the other hand, are yet another way of producing a white horse! Unlike both Dominant White and the Overo Lethal White, this isn't unpleasantly fatal, though.

Sabino-type patterning, however, doesn't always result from the SB1 gene - there are a number of similar patterned horses that don't test positive for the gene, so there's clearly more research to be done. It is a classic pattern in draft horses (Shire, Clydesdale) although whatever the gene is that causes it, it doesn't produce a white horse if the animal has two copies: it's also a pattern found in Arabian horses, again caused by yet another gene.

Appaloosa with one of
the many possible
patterns.
Wikipedia - CC-BY-SA-3.0

The Appaloosa is a whole different ball game - they display what's called 'leopard' spotting, a much more mottled pattern than either Tobiano or Overo. This is caused by a family of genes collectively giving rise to the 'Leopard complex'. The principal one is Lp/lp, which is an incomplete dominant gene, in that animals with one copy of Lp display different patterning to one with two copies of it. Generally, one copy of Lp produces more, larger spots than two.

I'm not going to try and describe all the possible spotting patterns here, but, as ever, Wikipedia will come to your rescue. It is worth noting that the Appaloosa patterns are not unique to the classic 'Indian pony' - there are records of horses with leopard spotting patterns from as far back as Ancient Greece.

As I said, by this article we're now in the realm of quite complex and not-perfectly-understood genetics - if you want to learn more, Wikipedia is the place to go. But otherwise, hopefully I've covered enough to allow you to get a paint-brush out and produce convincing coloured horses (as well as convincing-coloured horses!)

And I'll leave you with a question to see if you've been paying attention. Why do Romanies have black and white horses?

Seasons Greetings

As seems to be a tradition among most of the wargames blogs I follow, may I take this opportunity to wish all my readers, both regular and occasional, a merry and peaceful Christmas, and a happy, prosperous and gaming-filled 2012.

So far the Christmas break, apart from Midnight Mass at church (for which I was doing sound) appears to have involved a lot of experimenting with a model trebuchet (not quite the one linked) for James' history homework. He and the rest of us have learned a lot about the physics of how the thing works, and we did manage to get it tuned to fire a good 20' across the length of the living room - you'd be amazed how much extra range fine-tuning the sling fixing and release point gets you! Her Majesty and he are currently busy in the dining room, working on a post-Xmas dinner assembly of one of the Usborne card castle kits. I have a copy of Paddy Griffiths' "Sprawling Wargames" for after-lunch reading, and then we're aiming for a game of either Shadows Over Camelot or Catan Histories: Struggle for Rome.

My belated Christmas presents to the lot of you will be the last two or three parts of the Horse Of A Different Colour series of posts - part 4's research notes ('paint' or multicoloured horses) are tabbed in the browser as I type, and my plan (and I have witnesses here to nag me into it) is to get them done by the end of 2012.

As for a New Year's present... you'll just have to wait and see. I intend to get busy with my partner in crime on this one Real Soon Now, and we may be looking for beta testers. Watch this space.

WAB2: Armies of Antiquity review

OK, so now I've had the book for a few days, it's been passed around the club members at our Christmas bash (yes, the committee can organise a pissup in a brewery!), and I've absorbed various folks comments elsewhere.

So, what do I think?

I'm coming from a background of not owning most of the WAB1 supplements, as I'm a late arrival to WAB itself, and my choice of ancient armies were fundamentally driven by what Warlord and Wargames Factory produce, which I suspect was also in part driven by what lists were in the base WAB2 rulebook. In a way, then, I'm possibly not the typical customer.

Basically, what you get for your £28 is a 200 page hardback book, in a pretty-much identical style to the core rulebook, packed with roughly 100 army lists. If, like me, you can do the maths, you can work out that that averages out to two pages a list, and you'd probably guess, and you'd be right, that that doesn't leave much space for pretty pictures and flowery text. Personally, that's not what I bought it for, anyway. Some folks on the fora have been moaning that for the content, they'd expect a £15 softback, or a bunch more content - while I can see their point, it does work out at 28p per well-researched list.

And they are, as far as I can tell, well-researched. I've been following the History of Rome podcast of late on my (now much shorter) commute, and I'm definitely pretty happy with the armies and enemies of early and Republican Rome (though the lack of a Samnite list will, I hope, be rectified in the lists Martin Gibbins has promised to post next year).

What's in the lists?


A rough check of my Brigantes army (the rulebook Barbarian list) vs building it on the British Tribes list suggests it'd come in around one and a half times the points for the same figures, partly because the warband now have the Light Infantry rule and are 10 points a pop. Equally, my 1500 pt rulebook EIR army kicks in around 200, at a rough first glance, with AoA - it is, though, a more varied list, including options for Numidians and Equites Alares, among others. There are a few subtle changes - for example, legionaries are now Raw, Seasoned or Elite - Seasoned and Elite get Drilled, only Elite get Stubborn, and Veteran is a +1pt extra buy for Seasoned or Elite. Also, no slingers, unless you take them as allies from the Armenian list.

Several of the lists have variants - they're either expressed by variations in the balance rules (percentage of cavalry etc), or by restricting some troop types to particular sub-lists. Even more lists for your money!

I should note, I wasn't expecting the points to remain the same - the whole point (no pun intended) of AoA2 is surely to balance out the lists, whatever it takes, unlike the WAB1 supplements. The Macedonians, for example, seem to be a little pricier than they are in the original supplement, but I think I've made it clear that's no bad thing in my book (sorry PhilF!) :D

What's Missing?


As I said in my earlier post, the contents page will give you a good idea of what's in the book. What's clearly missing - by design - is all the 'Biblical' lists (New Kingdom Egyptian, etc), and a more annoying omission, which I gather from Martin's forum post is not deliberate, is any French opposition for the medieval English list at, you know, places like Crécy and Agincourt.

There's only one real 'Dark Ages' list - I don't (as yet) play that, but several people have commented that the list covers a long time (75AD-800AD), even though it's divided into several variants.

Also missing, according to Martin, is his last batch of errata, which is a bit more of a fundamental cockup from Warhammer Historical/ForgeWorld. especially after apparently committing much the same sin with the core rulebook.

In Summary?


Gripes aside, this does pretty much what it says on the tin: definitely worth the money in my view, and has me considering several lists in addition to my planned Parthians.

Battlegames issue 27

So, to my considerable delight, as I was pondering what to do with the afternoon, an email dropped into my inbox from the new publishers of Battlegames Magazine with a link to my first subscription issue. [And, quite surprisingly, the previous half-dozen, which I wasn't expecting, and did cause me to double check when my subscription expired!]

Now, I've downloaded and devoured most of the freebies available on the site before, so I'm pretty familiar with the house style - having an entire afternoon's worth of reading after a week of madness at work was just what the doctor ordered, even if I probably should have been getting stuck in to the figure painting I have queued up.

Unlike previous issues of Battlegames, which were, I gather, available as PDFs, the new publisher makes them available via a web app or a similar iPad app. Being the happy owner of one of the late Mr. Jobs little babies (which, unsurprisingly, has a number of Battlegames' free PDFs on it!) I went for the latter approach. The app's OK - it did fall over on me a few times, but didn't lose my place on restart, which was nice - basically it's yet another digital document viewer. Pages are at print quality, zoomable in, with clickable links, which is definitely a plus - this includes contents page links, which is even better.

Content-wise? It's Battlegames - by now, I know what I'd be getting: nice production quality, nice photos, articles written by gamers with their heads screwed on right. High spots for issue 27 for me were the continuing narrative of the Grenoussian Intermezzo campaign (so itching to have been a part of this), and Neil Shuck's taking over of the Forward Observer column. Neil's Meeples and Miniatures podcast (see top right links section!) as well as his and Henry Hyde's View From The Verandah kept me sane during my long commutes to London (which thank goodness I don't do any more!), and I love his style. The I Ain't Been Shot Mum scenario intrigued me, and I was very impressed by Mike Stewart's "Wargaming Blind" piece - there but for the grace of God go I. The review of Saga has done nothing to dissuade me from buying it, either!

All in all? My kind of wargames magazine. And I really must get my thoughts about wargames campaigns vs leader-board "campaigns" down in an article for this blog sometime. So, in a nutshell - if you are into more than points-based tournament battles? get your credit card out and subscribe. Now!

WAB2 Armies of Antiquity is out

Unsurprisingly, not in the Warhammer Historical sale :D but it is available, and I have succumbed, since I'm still angling to put together a Parthian and probably a Norman (12th Century) army before next year's out.

Available from here, and, being Warhammer Historical, here alone, for £28 + P&P. Sadly, no bulk postage discount either. The list of armies is one to three pages per army, starting with the early struggles of Rome and going through as far as the Wars of the Roses and the Ottoman turks. I gather from comments on the WAB Forum that the author (Martin Gibbins) has said that he will publish a couple of PDFs after it's out, one containing about 20 Biblical lists, and the other 40 or so 'uncommon' lists.

I guess from other comments that the idea is that the lists will (unlike those dotted around the various original WAB supplements) be balanced relative to each other, and also not be as powerful point-for-point. This definitely wasn't the case with the original supplements, from some painful memories of getting roundly hammered with a bunch of Assyrians and Danes when playing WAB2 rulebook EIR.