T.W.I.T. #7 - Battle report and ponderings

It's been awhile since the last This Week In Talomir post and I've decided that this one must be #7. Never mind that there are 24 posts with the Talomir tag. I've posted the latest battle report over at Talomir Tales here. The title "Ager Dedecus" is my google translate attempt to get the Latin for Field of Disgrace. You might be able to get the gist of how it went for the forces of Tropilium from the title.

Ruarigh has informed me that the war continues, so I'll need to fight the battle with a dwindling Tropilium army. (Spoiler alert) I need to come up with a new name for a Tropilium general as Manlius Gluteus Maximus has been forced to take his own life so as to spare his family further humiliation and forfeiture of wealth to the Emperor. If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them. I could just use the Roman tri nomina generator that I posted awhile back here. I had forgotten about my free google website completely. Looks like it may be time for a freshen up.

In looking for more Roman names I found a couple of good ideas. Ted's Roman Name Generator is pretty decent, but it is one that works off of an input name, and also not very silly. My name returns Aulus Vergilius Servilianus. Not bad. Paizo had some good ones on this thread and so I may look to Asterix for some good names and I can see from links here and here that there are some promising ones.

Back to the battle, the game was pretty good but was really over in about 3 maybe four turns. I played out an attempted retreat that took the game to 7 turns but the writing was on the wall. I may need to investigate a mechanism for calling the battle, just so as not to slog them out when that is really not all that fun. I have had a few battles down to the last man, but those should be rare. I'll definitely ask on the THW forum but perhaps you all have some thoughts on how a game should end. Realizing that I am playing these solo. Honestly I don't fret about things too much, but perhaps there is a rational way to come to terms when the battle is really decided except for the end game.

Highlights of the battle? Fladnag exploding in a ball of green fire as he attempted to cast a defensive spell. The Stygustan infantry going toe to toe with better armored foes and standing up to them. The ballista driving off one chariot with a precise shot. The Drums of Doom really did doom the Tropilium army with a -1 to reaction tests which was especially bad after the Amulet of Sorbrowane went out of action with Fladnag.

Low lights? Every spell was randomly a defense spell. The fact that the Axemen repeatedly failed a maneuver test after having a spell cast on them, there by losing activation and the spell effect.

A word about the figures. The Stygustani are all Egyptians from Caesar sets H47, H24 with four Nubians from H49 to help fill out the ranks of bowmen. The Priest(ess) is from the Caesar Fantasy Adventurers set F104. For Tropilium it was Italeri sets 6021 and 6028 with Zvezda 8052 thrown in. The Ballista was from HaT Greek Catapult 8184 and the Mercenary Skirmishing cavalry were Strelets Turcopoles 090. Fladnag is also from the Caesar Fantasy Adventurers set.

I thought that the Magnetic sheeting painted brown worked pretty well. I will add random blotches of earth and green and may experiment with a little flock. The 8.5 x 11 sheet that I used was thicker  and remained curved while the business card and 4 x 6 that I cut stayed flat. The only in game issue was the sheeting snagging on some of the sand I had put down on the terrain boards. I had been warned about that.

And welcome to Robin Sutton of Wargaming NZ and two other blogs I am less familiar with. He has some great 1/72 stuff and has been playing a lot of Spearhead and now Great War Spearhead.

There was another person to bring the followers up to 128, but I can't for the life of me tell who.

And a correction for Snickit's Tail.

Zombtober, Bloggery and Basing

Zombtober

Although I don't think I can fully participate, what with Talomir and Orctober taking up a lot of my time, I thought this was a good idea.

I first heard about it from Sheldrake here, but I understand that it originated here. Since most of my hobby time is spoken for right now I thought I'd just make an effort to game Zombies. I think we'll do it this way. We'll play Zombies!!!, I'll start getting my head around ATZ-FFO, and then we'll maybe try using Zombies!!! game pieces and the ATZ city deck. We'll culminate trying to use the 54mm zombies and survivors that we have. Sounds like a plan.

Around 50mm tall, green is the international color for zombies.

Bloggery

I think it was Paradox0n again who noted in passing that his stats had changed. I think he said that his page views had lowered because blogger was no longer counting bot crawls as page views. Mine have been hovering around 100 per day, more if I post, less if I don't. I've also noticed a lot more traffic sourced from google or blogger as the refferring URL, not sure what that is all about. I also received an email from Feedspot, telling me about how many new viewers were reading Talomir Tales on their feed reader. I find this odd as I am only one of about five authors on the blog and not even the admin. When I independently (ie did not follow the link on the email) tracked them down they basically look exactly like Feedly. So I'm not sure why I would change to them.

Basing

Now that push is coming to shove for finally gaming an RRtK battle with figures I'm going to actually have to work out my basing scheme. As you may recall I was going to use magnetic sheeting as stands/movement trays. They are 3.5" x 2" and I was going to use a full one for cavalry, engines and monsters while using half of one (3.5' x 1") for infantry. Well the chariots alone would not fit on a 2" deep base if I'm trying to keep the 3.5" frontages consistent. 3.5" is a frontage of about 89mm, which also begs the question if I should be playing on a larger table. I currently play with these frontages on a 4' x 3' table, but I think that size was with 40mm frontages in mind so I should probably be playing at least 6' x 4' if not 8' x 6'.

That will have to be sorted another time as I need to get this done. I'm happy to report that painting the magnets looks okay. For now I'll just paint them my base earth tone. In the future I'll experiment with some light flocking.

Still way behind.

And welcome new follower Snickit. You got stuck in the back of the followers widget because you don't have an avatar, one of the annoyances of blogger. I thought your blog was Snickit's Tale but that appears to have been deleted. I thought I was following it as well. If you have a new blog, or can resurrect that one, just let me know.

Orctober

So Erny, over at Erny's place has come up with an idea to get Orky in October. Or rather Orctober. He's doing this by having a giveaway here and 25 days of featuring Orcs.

I am definitely in for the plastic Orcs, they'll fit in nicely with my batch.

My 10 plastic Orcs. Looks like I need shields.

I thought I'd take it one step further and use this month long (or 25 day long) celebration to motivate my finishing up some orc figures. I have plenty of 28mm and 1/72 to work on.

1/72 Caesar and Dark Alliance

Dark Alliance and Ironwind Metals Wolves

Straight from the Ukraine, I'm not sure why the picture will not display horizontally.

Of course I still have to finish my Talomir forces and play out the battle.

I've had a few new followers to the blog so welcome to:

Phil, your blog is not listed in your friend connect but I'm sure it is the blog Association - Les Riflemen. A very nice blog with well painted figures and good battle reports. It has the plus of an inline English version of text for those of us who are Francophonically challenged.

Dennis Hutchinson, I don't see a blog listed for you either. Let me know if you have one and I'll post a link.

wKfB5nhpy8kvEj44APoPXM7nHFixHoKE, I have to say that I am troubled by your name. I can't tell if I've been butt added (sort of like butt dialed or butt posts to facebook) or if you are real. My apologies if you are real. You also do not have a blog link. Let me know if you have one you would like me to link to.

My kind of maid service, after the break.

Chariots!

So I think I mentioned that I'm a tad behind. I got some more work done on the Stygustan and Tropilium armies for my Talomir Tales battle using the RRtK rules from THW.

As you may recall I did not have a ready made base handy so I was going to make some from roofers tin. Here's what I came up with.

Not glued down just positioned. Sorry for the cellphone picture.

So I just laid them on the shingle, marked off a rectangle with a sharpie marker and then traced the arc of a 1.5" washer to help get the rounded edge. Only really had one burr from cutting and some casual passes with a file took any troublesome edge down. My normal procedure is to glue the figure to the base and then build it up with clay, but I thought that would be difficult for this application. So I spread a thin layer of the air drying modelling clay on the tin, added the texture goop and then spot PVA glue on the chariot wheels and horse hooves. The assembled chariots were a tad warped, so an apple sauce jar lid was laid on top to hold the figure down. As usual the green aquarium sand was sprinkled on while the goop was still wet. I think it was Mathyoo who mentioned mixing PVA into the clay. I did not do this but will henceforth modify my basing procedure by spreading PVA on the metal surface of the base before applying the clay. I have been successful in gluing dry clay down with the goop, but it can be difficult. Especially with thinner layers of clay.

Said Chariots

Chariot crews

I am beginning to appreciate that fully assembling the chariots is going to make them difficult to paint, but I am desperate to have assembled models at this point.

The Ballista and crew (HaT Greek catapult)

The camera refused to focus on the figures on sticks

And I just wanted to show you how I rigged up some balsa block with tooth picks for painting riders and shields. I need to figure out a good way to affix things so that they won't fall off when I paint them but won't be permanently glued there as well. I received a pile o' figures from someone that had a few that had suffered the permanent attachment to the painting stick.

So that's that as they say. In other news the Old School Gamers group on facebook just had its second anniversary.

Old School Gamers

And I'm excited about Orctober. You can read about it at Erny's place here.

Random news for today

I'm feeling a little loopy today, just tired I guess, but there have been a few interesting things I've read about today that I wanted to share.

First there is this truly amazing chart comparing sizes of almost every starship you can think of over on Deviant Art. I heard about it on Old School Gamers and then again on the Hive Zero blog here.

Chris Stoeson is having a giveaway over at Wargamer's Odds and Ends here. In celebration of 300+ posts and his birthday if I remember correctly. Anyway go check him out. The prizes are some limited edition 28mm figures for Sharp Practice, some 15mm armor and the scenario books that he sells. Pretty awesome. You can read a review of his latest over on Ray's blog here.

There is also a rumbling over on the THW forums, from Ed himself, that the 5150 big battle rules might be underway. Another step closer to replaying Squad Leader with THW mechanics. Although if I had any imagination I could probably just figure it out for myself.

I think the caffeine is finally kicking in and the children are restless for homework assistance. Sorry I don't have time for invigorating photos today.

Anne's Awesome (and super secret) giveaway.

Just a quick one today. The not so well kept secret is out, and you may already be entered without knowing it. Anne over at O'Leary Miniatures is have a super secret giveaway on her blog here. The offerings are very good and honestly it is exciting just to be in the running.This give away is being sponsored in part by author Patrick Hatt. You can find Mr. Hatt's Amazon Writers Page at http://www.amazon.com/Pat-Hatt/e/B00AGFMYVC. Best of luck to everyone whose gotten their name in and I have been lucky enough to win something from Anne once before, so hopefully I still have a little luck left.

I finally found my d10's, they were inside the boxes for Munchkin bites and Munchkin Cthulhu. I think I had the bright idea to use them for level counters. I discovered them just before my horrific loss at Munchkin Bites.

Here is my updated dice challenge table.

Die	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Avg.
d4	2	4	4	2	2	4	4	4	3	4	3.3
d6	6	4	3	4	2	5	5	2	1	5	3.7
d8	2	6	1	4	3	3	5	1	6	4	3.5
d10	3	4	8	3	1	5	3	2	5	9	4.3
d12	5	6	5	8	10	6	5	12	9	4	7
d20	2	17	1	17	8	6	17	19	9	8	10.4
d100	94	60	36	96	34	62	27	50	36	32	52.7

Fairly poor on the d10 but just about average on the d100.

Ray asked to see the visor in action, and I finally figured out how to work my webcam, so here are a couple of shots.

I'm wearing my glasses underneath. And for fun some more Ladies of Metal, after the break.

Magnifying Visor

I went ahead and purchased a magnifying visor to help with my deteriorating eyesight. It seems I am suffering from the inability to focus up close, even though I have been near sighted my whole life. Quite frustrating really. You may recall that I have a magnifying lamp that I mentioned here, but I find it to be problematic in some instances as I bang paint brush and knife handles on it as I'm trying to work.

The visor gets around this rather well. I ordered this one from Amazon for $6.85 and it arrived in two days.

From Amazon.com

The knob adjustment for size can be difficult, and the plastic pad across the forehead a bit sweaty, but it works pretty well. It has the fixed magnifier, another inside the visor that flips down, and the small one that swings down on the outside. I did a couple of hour session with it last night and it worked fairly well. The light is pretty good and runs off of two AAA batteries. It can be adjusted vertically and horizontally. One word of caution. Be careful when flipping the visor up. I had a few instances where I was tilting my head down with the visor up and it flipped down of its own accord. The visor drove my glasses into the bridge of my nose, which is annoying at best and painful at worst. The hinge adjustment knobs seem to be difficult to tighten sufficiently to totally remove this possibility. And then my wife says it makes me look like James Hom from Blade Runner.

I got it from here. Where he got it from is anybody's guess.

In other news (ie putting this here to remind myself), Warlord Paul has listed some more blogs that may be of interest here. Orlygg at has a post about Oldhammer in the States here. I want to get back into 3rd edition, but I fear I'm so far behind on painting etc that it will lead to stress related illness. In any event I will tap into what is going on.

And lastly just to inform those of you who are into 1/72 in general and fantasy at this scale in particular I stumbled across a blog that was new to me. Cheap Fantasy Minis is definitely worth your time and ranks highly, in my opinion, as a resource for those interested in this niche of a niche.

Had a great weekend. My son's team won their first flag football game of the season, and my back only hurt marginally as I got thrown around. Also the weather actually felt cool with a breeze. I have some volunteering to do at the school today and a project to design some sort of background for a Tai Chi presentation. Other than that I hope to get these figures painted and play out my next battle for Talomir. You can see the battle reports that have already come in at Talomir Tales. My Tereken forces were defeated and there is now an enforced peace between us and Altengard for the next two years.