Battle Report - 05-May-2013 - Dux Britanniarum

The Saxons, driving MY cattle
before them.

Saturday's game at Tim's was a raid scenario, with the Saxons (run by Phil) trying to make off with some British cattle from Caer Gynntguic, while I as the British attempted to thwart them.

First time I've played the British (as Andy has that pleasure in our campaign), which was interesting. Force Morale rolls gave Phil 8 and me 6, which really would come back to bite me later. 

Phil's Saxons got a good first move, and I came on in probably the second worst place I could, midway down the left flank with trees between me and them. To add insult to injury I then got to deploy precisely two units on my first turn.

And things didn't get much better from there, to start with. On my second turn I deployed my levy, and used a Bounding Move card to get them a bit closer to the action, as well as the warriors.

As you can see, as 4d6 rolls go, it wasn't exactly stellar. On top of that, I got over keen with my hearthguard, forgetting for a moment that shieldwall and single units don't mix...

How not to use a unit of British
hearthguard (bottom left).

The end result of that was getting charged by both units of Phil's hearthguard, which... unsurprisingly, since he had a nice hand of Fate cards...  rather, erm, hurt. Cue lost Amphora (now I know how Andy feels!), and - double ouch - minus 3 on my Force Morale. 

I also had to burn a Step Forth card to hurriedly get my warriors into Shieldwall, having strayed a little too close to the Saxons on the previous turn. Which I was a tad annoyed about, as there are only two in the deck, and it was my own stupid fault for wasting it.

My basic tactical goof, to be honest, was heading straight across the table to intercept the raiders rather than tracking them down the table and trying to cut them off at the end. However, I decided the best thing to do now was to send the levy and archers that way now, while hopefully using the warriors as a distraction. It ... nearly... worked.

Time to evade!

Phil pulled off two units of warriors and his hearthguard to head off my warriors. We had a fight between me and the former, which I managed to survive the first turn of (while wishing I'd kept the Evade card I'd literally just ditched two activations previously), and then managed to draw a Disengage card, which avoided any more painful Force Morale loss, but did result in Phil turning them back to follow after the cattle. By now, we've gone right through the Fate deck, which is pretty unusual, and started on a second shuffle.

And I have an interesting hand. Yes, that is the other Step Forth in the deck, PLUS the one I discarded!

Meanwhile, the levy and missile troops hared down the table to head off the raiders, with Phil's warriors and elite catching up. They catch up even better when I manage to roll a 4 on 3d6 for the levy's move (stop me if you've heard about my dice rolling before!), and they charge.

Whoops. Time to burn ... another Step Forth! I make it into shieldwall, and the Saxons wind up just short. The archers, meanwhile have made it right round the end of the table and are engaged in an archery duel with the Saxons, while the cattle and herders hide behind a small hill. I'm hoping that I can kill enough to make them lose control of the cows, so that Fleet of Foot card is very handy, as it gets me a 3d6 move away from Phil's archers, and round the side of the hill while still being able to shoot without penalty. Sadly, I only manage to do one shock. 

Lefy (on the left) in
their final death or
glory charge.

Back at the levy. It's a new turn. And Phil's leader comes up first. 

Time to burn... you guessed it... my third Step Forth. Pray I can roll enough on 1d6 to close, and hope 18 levy in Shieldwall can break two units of warriors supported by a unit of hearthguard.

It was so close. I had some absolutely preposterous luck, doing five kills on one group of Phil's warriors in the first round and routing them. Unfortunately, in the second round I had abysmal luck rolling to see if kills got assigned to my leaders, and got one killed and my Lord wounded.

So let's roll for force morale. Leader killed.  -2. Lord wounded?  -1. 

Making zero. Byebye levy, and byebye cattle. 

Loved it - really fun game that made me think in a whole different way to playing the Saxons. Again, thanks to Tim and Phil - looking forward to the next one.

WW2 from Space, Dux B and other news

Just got back from Cambridge after probably one of the most challenging and fun games of Dux Britanniarum I've had in a while. compounded by the fact that I got to play the British for the first time. I am somewhat knackered and my brain hurts, so I'm sorry, but you're going to have to wait for the battle report until I can do it justice. Many thanks to Tim for hosting and umpiring, his wife for an excellent meal, and Phil (who played the Saxons) for being a worthy adversary.

To tide you over till then, I just spotted (thanks to an email from Sky) that the History Channel are showing 'World War 2 from Space' next week. It looks interesting, if nothing else because I'm an unrepentant 'cool graphics' geek, so I'm going to hold off from watching the version that's available on YouTube in favour of a decent off-air HD recording. Being the History Channel, it's going to range somewhere from 'fascinating' to 'that's 90 mins of my life I won't get back', I suspect, though.

In other news, I think I've now repaired the marsh back to the point where it's not going to leak when i pour the scenic water in, and you can't see the places where I had to lift and re-affix the DAS clay surround. Fingers crossed for Monday, when the PVA etc has dried and I can move on to the next step.

Bank Holiday weekend, and upcoming Plastic Soldier Company stuff

Hopefully I'm going to get stuck in on some scenery building over the Bank Holiday weekend, as well as a Saturday trip into the Fens to visit Tim for another game of Dux Britanniarum (he promises me he's ditched the nonstandard rulers!), and with a bit of luck recording the rest of Episode 2 of the podcast. In order to show willing, I'll be going home from work via the garden centre to pick up some bedding plants for the wall by the garage first, though!

While pondering what to do this weekend, I picked up another couple of eBay bargains to augment my slowly amassing stockpile of 15mm WW2 for IABSM/Blenneville or Bust, and almost pressed the fire button on a couple of Forged in Battle M8 GMC's. However, I happened to have just opened a tab on the PSC website to check if they had a shipping date for the War Sprays I'd ordered, to find a new 'new items' update!

By D. Miller (Flickr: M5 Stuart Light Tank)
[CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Now, I love the stuff PSC do, but, dear Lord, they need to get someone to design and maintain them a more readable website that gets updated a bit more regularly. To save anyone else from having to pick through the 10 pixel high unformatted list of new stuff....

Out now(ish)

• War Spray paints - mid-May is what I was told for my preorder (and the main reason I'm holding off on painting the pile of tanks I have!)
• Zvezda 15mm British Matilda I Tank 
• Zvezda 15mm Russian KV2 Tank
• S Model 1/72nd British A13 Cruiser Tank. Due end of next week
• S Model 1/72nd German Kfz 13 Armoured Car. Due end of next week
• Minairons 1/72nd Russian T26 A and B Tank
• Minairons 1/72nd German Befehslwagen IB Command Tank 

"May"

• 1/72 M3 and M5 haftfracks

"June"

• 15mm and 1/72 M5 Stuart (YES!!!!)
• 15mm M8 GMC and Jalopy (also YES!!) as separate kit (unclear when, but it appears they were originally going to try and make it part of the Stuart, as it shares the same chassis, but aren't now)

Work "starting" on:

• 15mm Cromwell

After that

• US heavy weapons
• 1/72nd Sherman M4A4
• 1/72nd Sherman Firefly
• 15mm and 1/72nd Churchills (YES!!!)
• 1/72nd 251/D variants kit.

Heraldry 101 part 10 - Crosses

So having picked up some Fireforge Templars at Salute, I figured it would be good if I got the article on crosses squared away for everyone else who's succumbed :D

The basic heraldic cross we actually should have already covered as one of the ordinaries, but somehow (in fact, deliberately) I missed it. Specifically, here are the two main ordinaries I missed, the cross and the saltire:

Argent, a cross gules

Azure, a saltire argent,

No prizes for recognising the above as the cross of St. George, and what should properly be called the saltire of St. Andrew.

But now the fun starts. Because, as I'm sure you've realised if you've studied any mediaeval coats of arms, crosses come in a ridiculous number of variants, which would keep me amused in Coat of Arms Design Studio for a good while longer than I have time for this evening!

I'm going to cheat, and refer you to Wikipedia, which for once has a handy and extensive catalogue of heraldic crosses. So as not to be accused of a complete copout, though, I'll flag a few of the popular ones.

The cross patée or paty - as seen in a number of places, most commonly German aircraft, and some variants of the arms of the Knights of the Teutonic Order.

The Maltese cross, as seen on the arms of the Knights of Malta.

The cross potent: you'll find this all over the place, to be honest! Famously, though, in the arms of the Crusader kings of Jerusalem, which we mentioned back when we were discussing the rule of tincture, which it breaks. Hopefully, though, the blazon - argent, a cross potent or between four crosslets or. - will make more sense now!

The cross of St. Julian: I really don't fancy painting this one! It is, though, the arms of the Spanish Order of Alcántara, and I really fancy an El Cid unit with this on their shield!

A few other terms you will come across:

• A cross fitchy or fitchée has its bottom limb replaced by a point, as if to be fixed in the ground.
• A cross that doesn't reach the edges of the shield is referred to as couped.   
• A cross couped with its bottom limb longer, as per a 'standard' Christian cross, is sometimes referred to as a passion cross.

Anyway - that's crosses, although as should be obvious, you can dig much much deeper - try the index of crosses here if you want to keep busy for a while.

I'm mostly done on the basics now - there's three more areas I want to cover before I'm done, plus (as usual) anything else that I'm reminded of as I write. Those are an article on borders and backgrounds, one on the fascinating subject of marks of cadency, and one on the odds and sods I deliberately glossed over at the beginning.

See you then!

The Battle Of Maldon... in Lego

I don't often use this blog to share links for their own sake...

...but this (via @ospreybooks on Twitter) is absolutely brilliant.

Enjoy!

Happenings in the Games Workshop hobby

From WikiMedia Commons user Ardfern, licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike  3.0 Unported license.

According to reasonably substantiated rumour (assuming you're prepared to believe multiple people on different fora's accounts of communication with Forgeworld):

GW are cutting all metal production as they switch over to fine cast, and have let it be known that once stocks of Epic, BFG, Necromunda, Warmaster, Mordheim, Inquisitor run out, then they are gone for good.

(quote from Epic Addiction via Porky's Expanse, backed up with forum postings on various sites.)

I guess this is the next step after Warhammer Historical: again, the listed ranges are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things compared to 40K/Fantasy, and almost certainly don't reflect well in the effort vs. profit scheme of things. They're also, of course, very much in the 40K/Fantasy universe and chock full of GW IP, so thus are even less likely to be sold off to a third party than Historical. (Who am I kidding? GW won't sell Historical either.)

Confusion also reigns as a couple of GW fansites appear to have vanished. It's pretty clear that Faeit 212 has probably pushed their luck with leaks of GW-copyright material once too often, and paid the price by being shut down by Google/Blogger on receipt of a DMCA takedown notice. According to the site admin, though, the Blogger-hosted Bell Of Lost Souls blog is down for technical reasons (although its fora are still up).

A search of chillingeffects.org's DMCA notice archive reveals that GW seem to have been averaging between one and six or so a month, with Apocalypse 40K and Faeit being popular targets.

In a reaction to this, Tabletop Fix just announced they won't be covering any more GW news as, quote "a precaution".

Difficult to know what to make of this one: by all accounts this is not the first DMCA notice Faeit have received, although previous ones have simply forced Google to set the post back to draft mode until Faeit remove the violation. News leaks - in the connected world we live in, this is pretty inevitable, and once it's out, you can't put the genie back in the bottle any more than you can, say, un-see certain popular Internet images. However, it does appear that Faeit have been a bit of a persistent offender, despite being a very pro-GW fansite who probably generate them lots of advance sales. You could (and people have, very loudly) make the argument that GW may have been better served liaising with one of their better advertisers and using them to their advantage, but that doesn't seem to be the GW way.

I'm not going to label the takedown notices per se as 'GW shoot themselves in the foot again', as, to be honest, they're a foreseeable consequence of the way GW have chosen to do business. and there's a reasonable argument that after multiple prior notices Faeit ought to have got the message, whether or not they liked it. Poke a sleeping dragon with a stick enough times and sooner or later it will do more than just open one eye, growl at you and point out you're crunchy and taste good with ketchup and would-you-not-do-that-please-because-it's-getting-annoying. However much you enjoy poking it with a stick, and particularly when you know quite how jealously the dragon protects its treasure.

I am not a lawyer, so I'm not going to comment on a UK company using US law to take down a site - many other people who aren't lawyers are generating quite enough heat on that score already. But, as a final analogy: us wargamers have got used to the fact that most of the companies that support our hobby are like that dying breed, the family butcher: small, friendly, helpful, in it because they love the business. Some companies are heading towards being the Cooperative, bigger, but still caring about what they do (I'm thinking of the likes of Mantic or Warlord or maybe Battlefront here...).

GW are Macdonalds. It's all about the bottom line. Deal with them, sure, but remember that the company line is about shifting the things they want you to buy to turn a profit.

And don't be surprised if you get a nasty stomach upset afterwards.

Probability for Wargamers 11 - combinations and Chain of Command

Oi bin finkin', like....

The Lardies' Chain of Command has an interesting activation mechanic, and I've been pondering for a while what the odds are on various things happening as a result. To start with, we need to figure out the  probability of rolling a given number a certain number of times on 5d6. So let's start with the easy case.

What's the probability of rolling NO 1s on 5d6?

Easy!

Chance of not rolling a 1 = 5/6.
Chance of rolling 5 'not 1's' = 5/6 * 5/6 * 5/6 * 5/6 * 5/6 = 3125/7776 = roughly 40%!

How about probability of rolling one 1 on 5d6?

Chance of rolling a 1 = 1/6
Chance of not rolling a 1 = 5/6
Chance of rolling a 1 then 4 x 'not 1' = 1/6 * 5/6 * 5/6 * 5/6 * 5/6 = 625/7726 = about 8.1%.

Except that there are actually 5 different ways we can do this: the first, second... etc etc dice can be the 1. As these are independent events, we can add them, giving us a probability of roughly 40%.

What about rolling two 1's?

Simple enough, that's 1/6 * 1/6 * 5/6 * 5/6 * 5/6 * the number of different ways we can do that...

Which is 125/7776 * ... erm...

Right...

So...

We have 5 ways we can place the first 1. And for each of those, we have 4 different places we can put the other 1. So that's 5x4 = 20...

...except that since we don't care about the order, a dice in position 1 followed by a dice in position 2 is exactly the same as the reverse, so in fact there are only 10. Which makes the odds of rolling exactly 2 ones 125/7776 * 10, or 16% or so.

It turns out this 'pick k from n items' thing has a name, and a formula, which is going to save our sanity working through this. What isn't going to save my sanity here is that neither of the conventional ways of writing it is easy on a blog: however, with a little HTML wizardry....

The number of combinations of n things taken k at a time,

_nC_k = (n * (n-1) ... * (n-k+1) ) / (k * (k-1) * (k-2) ...)

As you can see, for our example above, and for the rest...
₅C₂ = (5 x 4) / (2 x 1) = 10 - odds of 2 1's = 16.1%
₅C₃ = (5 x 4 x 3) / (3 x 2 x 1) = 10 - odds of 3 1's = 10 x 25 / 7776 = 3.2%
₅C₄ = (5 x 4 x 3 x 2) / (4 x 3 x 2 x 1) = 5 - odds of 4 1's = 5 x 5 / 7776 = 0.3%
and obviously
₅C₅ = 1 - odds of 5 1's = 1/7776 = 0.01%

I think that car's relatively safe, Rich :D

Now we've got that, we can apply some maths to various things in Chain of Command.

See you next time for that!