Mediterranean Bases

Hi,

Just as an addendum to Mike's post below.

This is style I have chosen for the bases my FJ on.

I am wanting to go for a more Mediterranean colour than a pure Italy one. Mostly so I can use them for Crete aswell and at a pinch North Africa (all roughly similar) .

I have tried to go for colours that represent Limestone and Pumice. I have also tried to use Photo's from a family trip to Italy years ago to choose the right tones.

Please excuse the photo quality.

The White stones are meant to be strewn pieces of rubble, but I think I may just paint them as rocks...

I have gone with a base coat of Green Ochre with a good drybrush of Basic Skin tone (both from the Vallejo range).

Please let me know what you think and feel free to share your ideas.

Cheers

Garth

Painting progress and reconnoiterring the old boot

Well it seems that I made a bit of a boo-boo and the 30 strong mortar platoon of been grinding my way through is actually a fair bit less strong.  I checked the unit composition in the Cassino and Fortress Europe books today and my two-section mortar platoon blister pack has a total of 19 wee men.  The error stems from Garth and I proxying flames of war miniatures for moderns when we were having our first run through of the Force on Force rules.  Stupidly, I must have put the HQ blister and Mortar blister all back in the same bag.  I'm not particularly worried about it, and to be honest I feel like I've made a lot more progress with my painting now!  I wasn't intending to use the HQ blister as I have other miniatures for it.  It's also opened up the possibility of using the light mortars from the HQ blister as the third mortar section in my mortar platoon.  I'm in no hurry to use a third section yet, but the option is there (if you can comment on the appropriateness of using the light mortars in this way - they're slightly more slender - please do let me know).  

Once I've made the finishing touches to the 12 figures I started on the weekend it'll be time to move on to my first lot of basing.  I've obtained various shades of static grass (green, parched, dead/winter) and some medium basing grit of Gale Force 9 origins.  The next step will be to obtain some kind of filler to build up the bases with. If any of you kiwis have any product advice in this regard I would be very grateful!  The scheme that Garth has used for his bases so far (he's a fair bit ahead of me in painting) is a base of green ochre with a heavy dry-brush of the palest flesh tone on top.  Bearing in mind that this is for the Italian theatre, I'd also appreciate advice on base colour schemes or any sneaky tricks you've learned along the way!  Hopefully the basing that Garth has completed isn't too premature, given that we've yet to build our board.  I would like for my basing scheme to be consistent with his.

I'm going on a holiday to Vegas and Mexico in late October - early November so my funds will be fairly tied up until I get back.  I expect to have a fair bit of cash left over (with a couple of pay packets arriving with my bank while I'm away - the novelty of this pay thing really doesn't wear off!), so we're planning on making a start with our terrain board for Flames of War.  We've earmarked the following purchases:

• A 6'x4' "Brown-Green" gaming mat from theterrainguy.  Described as a heavy duty flocked game mat, canvas based and rubber coated with permanent flocking embedded in the rubber.  I've read very good reviews of this product on TMP.  The "brown-green" option (picture below) should be suitable for a semi-arid Italy.  Alternatively we could go for the "Dryland" mat which is much more brown than green.  We will have a think about how arid Italy actually is, and go from there (an advantage being it might be usable for the Desert also).

The "Brown-Green" gaming mat

• The Battlefield in a Box - River from Flames of War.  This box comes with 5x 30cm river sections, 2x 30cm river sections with fords, 1x wooden bridge and 1x stone bridge.  We should be able to get a hold of one at a price substantially lower than that on the Flames of War store.

Battlefield in a Box - Rivers

• The Battlefield in a Box - Rural Roads from Flames of War.  This box comes with 6x road sections (I'm not entirely sure of the section lengths, Garth has this stuff noted down).  We may get two of these so as to get sufficient road sections for a 6'x4' board.

Battlefield in a Box - Rural Roads

• The Battlefield in a Box - Italian Monastery from Gale Force 9.  This is reasonably priced and versatile, and we hope will provide a good objective on our gaming board!

Italian Monastery

• Italian Buildings from Games of War.  These haven't been released yet, but going by the prices for other such products on their website, they will be very affordable!
• Hills: for this we'll make our own out of some kind of polystyrene.  

And there we have it!  I think that these will make a pretty solid start to our gaming table.  Now, we could probably make many of these things ourselves, but as I have stated in an earlier post our aim is to have painted armies ready to go as soon as possible.  We're willing to fork out a bit of cash to get a playable table up and running in short order; I expect I'll be exhausted by the time I've finished painting the little men!

That said, we are very willing to take advice.  So if you have any product recommendations or comments as to how we could do things differently, please let us know!

Mustering the smart way

My life has changed a lot since I last took a look at wargaming; as a school kid I had plenty of time for painting, list building and playing, even around lessons and sport after school and on weekends (it helped that almost all of my gaming buddies were in the same football team!).  I even think that time moves slower the younger you are, perhaps something to do with the distance you are from the ground and the effect of gravity.  This theory is probably easily disproved given that I'm still the 5'6" I was 10 years ago!  

Fast-forward to 2011 and I have an 8-5 job (with roughly 40mins commuting each day), two football trainings a week for about 8 months of the year, a football game each Saturday afternoon (generally requiring from midday to 6pm) and a trip up to Auckland to spend time with my much better half.  With football and late nights, and an hour and a half drive back from Auckland on Monday mornings before work, I'm often too tired even within my time constraints to devote much time to painting or the idea of wargaming.

Thankfully, my HTC Desire HD smart phone has come to the rescue!  Having a smart phone has really changed the way in which I interact with technology, though I confess with both positive and negative consequences.  I do practically all of my web-browsing on my phone now, from anywhere I go.  

The HTC Desire HD for Android: a bit of a beast!

My computer at home is a desktop PC that I built for myself about 6 years ago.  While it's lasted the distance very well (it runs recent games such as Shogun 2 Total War just fine), I've been thinking about replacing it for quite some time now.  The first thought was to buy a laptop given that I'm far more mobile these days and it would be useful to be able to take my computer with me when I go places.  The other reasoning behind it was that I'm into computer gaming much less than I used to be, so I'm a little less concerned with the better price/performance ratio you can obtain with building a desktop PC.  If it wasn't already clear, my smart phone has turned all of this on its head.  

I use my phone for pretty much every purpose that I might have used a laptop for while travelling.  I don't really play enough games now to feel the need to play them when I go away, so the things that I might have needed a laptop for - browsing, communications, music, audiobooks, ebooks, even movies/tv shows in .avi format - I can now do on my phone.  Hell, if it wasn't for my 24/7 internet access, I certainly wouldn't have got into blogging.  The Google Reader app means that posts on all of the blogs I follow are delivered straight to the home screen of my phone in a low-data format.  Google Listen provides the same functionality for podcasts.  I even draft blog posts using the Blogger app, and monitor traffic using DroidAnalytics.

The flipside is that all of this functionality isn't great for my wargames addiction or my habit of digressing.  I have the maelstromgames.co.uk and waylandgames.co.uk websites available at my fingertips, as well as product reviews and the adventures of other bloggers introducing me to new products and ideas all of the time.  I probably wouldn't have it any other way, but I sure have had to work on my self control (this also isn't very good for garth, as I send him links daily with new and interesting wargames info that I know he won't be able to resist!).

But to get down to the real subject of this blog post - what the smart phone has done for me in wargaming.  As well as having all of the above functionality available wherever I go, the smart phone has definitely provided options for me in respect of wargaming.  I now have access to online resources such as forums and rules wikis (in particular the excellent InfinityWiki) as well as up to the minute news information for the diverse rule sets I'm interested in.  

The thing I'm most in love with, though, is online army generators.  These are nothing new; I used Army Builder a lot back in the early 00s.  It seems that since then the concept has really taken off with many systems supported.  While its probably not too good for my productivity, I can now theory-craft and tinker with my wargames interests wherever I go.  Since discovering these resources I've actually spent much more time looking at lists than I was before hand, largely due to my inability to sit down and look through rulebooks for any length of time at the moment.  I'm finding them a great aid to my re-entrance into wargaming, and they're certainly helping to keep my enthusiasm up.  I'll discuss the programs I'm using at the moment below!

As I've gushed about at length in an earlier post, Corvus Belli have produced an official army builder program for use with Infinity.  Infinity Army is a very slick program with great production values and aesthetics very much in keeping with the Infinity setting.  They've also made it available as a downloadable application for PC in addition to the browser version.  This is a good thing as the load time on the browser can be excruciating.

Infinity Army

  

A bit of digression: the thing that impresses me the most about it is the fact that the games company has produced this product as a player aid, an act made possible by the fact that they make the Infinity rules and army lists available for free on the internet.  Its a different business model to the one I'm used to from my teen wargaming days (Games Workshop), and it looks to me like it is quite successful.  It means that entry into the system is essentially effortless and they let the quality of their products do the real work in selling their miniatures.  Its nice to have the feeling that the games company isn't working against you, as is so often my impression with the business models and policies of other gaming companies (a not so veiled reference to an outdated business model (in my opinion) with consequently high pricing and an international sales embargo).

Unfortunately, the program doesn't appear to be fully functional with the Android operating system on my phone just yet.  I understand that this might have something to do with Adobe Air.  However, all is not lost!  A webpage army builder has been made by the folks at Infinity Pool for use with Infinity.  This army builder does work on my phone, and I've had quite a lot of use out of it.  It is slightly more cumbersome than Infinity Army, given that the page loads each time a change is made, but the interface is relatively straight forward and its pretty functional without being too clunky.

I've also found army builder programs to be useful for my other tangible wargaming interest of the moment, Flames of War.  This is another browser based army builder, available at easyarmy.com.  While it isn't particularly pretty to begin with, persevere with it.  The layout is detailed and very functional; in my opinion it gives a clearer indication of how the lists work than the rule books do!  Easyarmy provides quite an extensive collection of the flames of war lists for the periods and combatants, though I don't know that it's exhaustive.  Some of the newer lists are available after a "donation" of $1US is made to the website.  Personally I didn't have a problem with this as it's spare change and the advantage you gain from having all of the lists available online is huge.  I do wonder about the legality of such a site though, and whether there are copyright implications there.  I imagine that if there are they'll be caught up with eventually.  Until then, I think it's $1US well spent!

Easyarmy: I think I've spent more time creating lists from this
than I have from the hard copy books! Procrastination probably. 

Now, all of the above said, I do think there is still a place for rulebooks.  Firstly, I find reading things in print to be much, much more enjoyable than reading things on a computer or smart phone screen.  There is also the satisfaction of possessing a beautifully produced and bound book and being able to flick through it and enjoy it tangibly.  I love books far too much to ever really consider doing without them, and I think its important to purchase rulebooks from games companies even while these resources are available online.  They've produced a product and they deserve to be paid for it, after all.  For this reason I intend only to use Easyarmy (and any other army builder programs I might use in the future) for lists for which I actually own the print copy.  I think this is fair, and I don't think I'll have a problem with sticking to this rule given the quality products that many companies are producing these days.

If anyone has any suggestions for other army building programs, whether application or browser based, I'd be very interested to hear about them.  I'd be particularly interested in dedicated applications for use on the Android operating system.  While its great to have browser-based resources available, they do use data and I'd much prefer to be able to use them offline.

Cheers!

The Infinity Aesthetic

The general consensus is that Infinity is heavily influenced by anime.  While I do agree with this I do think that it is an oversimplification or an overstatement.  

The art for Infinity is heavily influenced by anime; indeed most if not all of the illustrations in the core rulebook are in a heavy anime style.  Now personally I am not a huge fan of anime (or manga or however you wish to term it, I don't really understand the differences).  My appreciation hasn't gone further than Cowboy Bebop, which I love for the style, cinematography and the music rather than for the particular aesthetic of the animation.  I can comfortably say, then, that I would not really be interested in a game who's miniatures were wholly anime in style.

Infinity's anime art

In my opinion, anime is a subtle influence for the style of Infinity's miniatures.  The proportions are much more slender and lean than the "heroic scale" we are used to from other games, and it is perhaps arguable that some of the facial features are styled in a manner reminiscent of anime.  To me, the features and proportions of the miniatures have a "realistic" aesthetic rather than an anime one.  By this I mean that the forms are more directly proportional to real life than they are an abstraction of it.

Haqqislam Ghulam Infantry: realistic proportions and poses,
without an over-accentuation of the female form!

Ariadnan Zouave: fantastic pose with a gritty realism.

Haqqislam Naffatun: An example of Infinity's realistic proportions and dynamic poses.

I think that it is the technology in the game that shows its anime influences more apparently.  TAGs and Heavy Infantry from the Pan Oceania and Yu Jing factions are much more anime-inspired in appearance, for example (though obviously Yu Jing have an "asian" influence that is a part of and transcends anime!).  I think that it is for this reason that I don't hold a whole lot of affection for some of the miniatures for these factions; however, at the same time I love almost all of the miniatures in the Haqqislam range!  Certain miniatures also appear to me to be a bit more cartoon-ish than others, and I suspect that many of the earlier miniatures in the range might be slightly more abstracted in style.  These aren't really to my taste, but the position of the community seems to be that Infinity is a game where you aren't pigeon-holed into "must have" units.  This means that you can pick and choose your force based on the miniatures you like.  I can't think of any other game systems off the top of my head where this is viable!

Haqqislam Kum Motorised Troop:
A bit cheesy and not to my taste.

Nomad Daktari: Obviously anime-inspired,
but "taking the piss" a bit too!

Pan-Oceania Armoured Cavalry: I think that the technology of this faction
is heavily influenced by anime.

If you've dismissed Infinity outright for its "anime aesthetic", I challenge you to give it another look.  Take a look through the miniature range for each faction, you may be pleasantly surprised!

Ruleset Roulette

I have a habit of becoming intensely interested in new projects on an imaginative level; after all, one of the central attractions of wargaming to me is the visual way in which you can give life to those imaginings.  The problem is, I have an interest in so many different subjects that I tend to move from project to project very quickly with nothing overly tangible to show for it!  Suffice to say, the only thing I have from my first six months back wargaming is a pile of rule books and reference material.  I can spin this in a positive light, of course; I have been very deliberately trying not to buy more miniatures than I can realistically paint!

A history of digression

I had piles of unpainted miniatures in my teenage wargaming years from army and game system "false starts", and I currently have two boxes of Perry British Line Infantry sitting in my closet from Garth's and my "postponed" Napoleonic efforts of last summer.  I've since acquired 1500pts of Flames of War miniatures for my British Rifle Company, as well as the Haqqislam starter set, Djanbazan Sniper, Djanbazan Heavy Machine-gunner and the Naffatun blister for my Haqqislam force in Infinity.  Probably enough to keep me painting into 2012.  Garth's and my planning for a Italy-themed Flames of War terrain board in 15mm has already got me contemplating its use in 15mm Napoleonics using the General de Brigade ruleset.  As you can see, my "fear" of lead hasn't really stopped me so far.  To this end, I've come up with a couple of guiding principles for my re-entrance into wargaming:

1. Stop buying rulebooks (!); and
2. Get a painted army on the table as soon as possible so that I can actually start participating properly in the hobby.

I'm doing okay with #1 in that I haven't bought a rule book in a couple of months, though I have had a couple of close calls (I also don't count my future purchase of Corvus Belli's Infinity: The Human Sphere as I've already invested in this system and the only reason why I haven't bought it yet is that it seems to be out of stock everywhere - I'll convince myself of anything...).  The reasoning behind #1 is that I'm going to have to be realistic and honest in order to achieve #2: I don't need distractions!

Given the amount of painting required in order to field a reasonable army of Napoleonics in 28mm, I've strategically redeployed my British Line Infantry into reserve as a "long-term project" (hopefully by then the Perry brothers' 28mm plastic British cavalry will be out, if their French cavalry are anything to go by they will be gorgeous).  Instead, I've decided to focus on Flames of War for my first tabletop army and rule set.  Without delving too deeply into my desire to game World War II, my reasons for choosing Flames of War over my other options are:

• I've had a lifelong interest in the Second World War, an interest I have in common with Garth;
• The game is popular so there should be no dearth of opponents, and as Battlefront is a New Zealand company it is well stocked and supported here;
• It is the one game that retained my interest when I quit wargaming Games Workshop games 10 years ago; and
• It's in 15mm so my very rusty painting skills won't be overtaxed, and the painting time should be lower.

To be honest, bullet-point #4 is the fundamental reason why I chose to run with Flames of War first.  I really do want to get gaming as soon as possible, and 15mm should definitely be quicker than 28mm.  The decision to build Flames of War first might have been different had I discovered Infinity earlier - with 7 figures in my starting 150point list I think that I could have had them painted much more quickly than my Flames of War British.  On the other hand, I'm not sure that I would have been willing to inflict my very raw painting skills on Corvus Belli's beautiful miniatures!

Even with focusing on 15mm, I'm finding painting to be very slow going.  It's taking me a while to get back into the swing of things, having not painted in so long, and I'm finding that with work, football training and family during the week as well as football matches and commuting to spend time with my partner during weekends, I don't actually have a whole lot of time left for painting.  I suspect that starting this blog might not have been the brightest idea in terms of my painting progress!

Flames of War starter bundles from Waylands

Waylandgames.co.uk have announced Flames of War starter bundle deals for sale on their online store. Waylands are a great company with a good range and fine customer service. I've been very impressed by them in my dealings so far, not least because of the way in which they've gone out to bat for the Australasian gamer with Games Workshop over the international (outside of the EU) sales embargo. I plan on covering this issue in a future blog, but for now its very nice to see someone having the balls to stand up to GW. Importantly, for the island-dweller, waylands also ship for free on flames of war orders!

Now, they're selling bundles for most of the armies over the more common company types. To illustrate how good the deal is I'm going to run through the British Infantry bundle.

The bundle contains:

1x British Rifle Company box
1x Field Battery Royal Artillery box
1x 6pdrs AT gun platoon box
1x British late war paint set
1x Open Fire Rules starter box

All of this for the price of £129.60 or $250.55 NZD. This is a substantial saving, given that the rrp of the bundle is $342 NZD! (though to be fair, buying from the UK is always much cheaper with the strength of the NZD at present).

In addition to the great price, waylands will issue a £10 voucher to be spent on gale force 9 products so you will have everything you need to base your figures ready for the table.

So if you've been looking at getting into FoW or the missus is getting sick of you hanging around on weekends, you can't really go wrong with the waylands bundle as a cheap way of entering the hobby!

Infinity: Terraforming Bourak

I've aligned myself with Haqqislam in the world of Infinity; a combination of the low-tech miniatures with less of an anime aesthetic (in my opinion) and the background story of a "new islam" reverting to its humanist roots really appealed to me.  The happy coincidence of this choice is that the Haqqislam planet, Bourak, is a desert planet much like our middle east.  I see this as an opportunity to create a playing board a little bit different to the urban landscapes I've seen throughout the Infinity community, with (hopefully) some cross-over into terrain for the modern skirmish wargame "Force on Force" by Ambush Alley Games.  A multi-purpose board will save on storage, time, and money!

I see the Haqqislam faction as having been influenced by the Fremen of Frank Herbert's Dune in addition to the obvious contemporary middle-eastern and islamic cultures.  I've also looked at Tatooine from Star Wars for inspiration; its another well-known science fiction desert setting after all.  I've collected samples of the following art to try and get a feel for how desert settlements can be portrayed in Sci-Fi:

"Dune" by thegryph.deviantart.com.
A mixture of high-tech and desert hovels.

A scene influenced by a middle-eastern bazaar with high-tech elements

Tatooine: Rough structures with high-tech fixtures.
The design of the buildings seems subtly different to contemporary culture,
giving the landscape its own flavour.

I think that the above images will be useful.  I'm not sure that they're exactly what I'm going for here but they've given me a few ideas:

• Subtly changing the shapes and designs of buildings can make them seem both traditional and futuristic at the same time;
• It may not be flavourful enough to just "strap on" a few token high-tech items to traditional style buildings - they may look out of place, and I suspect that the lines of traditional buildings may not be crisp enough for the Infinity aesthetic;
• Deserts are dusty and dirty places - while Haqqislam are supposedly the masters of terraforming, I doubt they keep their landscapes spotlessly dusted; and
• I could recreate the traditional middle-eastern bazaar with an Infinity high-tech theme.  For awnings, perhaps suspended sails with crisp lines, or awnings made out of coloured perspex similar to the terrain pieces made by Micro Art Studios. 

My intentions at this stage are to create a desert themed board with buildings made out of apparently natural material (modelled stone and clay) that blend in and function well with the environment.  This could work with pre-made terrain designed for a contemporary setting, such as the resin pieces pictured below.  In terms of having a multi-purpose board these models would be ideal as with removable/interchangeable parts they could be appropriate for both settings.  My concerns are with this is that they won't quite be unique enough for Infinity in that they don't really fit with the "flavour" or aesthetic of the world so well, and they may not necessary fit in with the background of Haqqislam.  They're the leaders in the fields of medicine and terraforming, so they're hardly likely to be residing in mud-brick hovels.

A resin middle-eastern themed hovel
from www.colonialsteamboat.co.uk

A two story building (converts to ruin)
from the Miniature Building Authority

My favourite: A two-story hovel
from www.crescent-root.com

A single-story resin hovel
from www.thewarstore.com

All of these terrain pieces are fine.  Some better than others, and some certainly more worth the price tag.  I think they'd all be passable with some modification for an Infinity table.  However, they're an expensive option, especially given that they'd need to be shipped to New Zealand; in light of this is "passable" good enough?  I don't really think they fit too well with the infinity aesthetic - there is a bit much damage to the walls of the hovels for my taste, and I'm not too sure how old buildings in Infinity should look.  Bourak hasn't been colonised for that long, after all.

The other idea is to scratch-build buildings using foamboard and other materials.  This would allow me to design the buildings to have clean though subtly traditional lines more in line with the Infinity aesthetic, and would be significantly cheaper, though more time consuming, than using pre-made resin terrain.  Unfortunately, this would probably mean that the terrain wouldn't be appropriate for use with Force on Force.  There is of course a third option - paper terrain.  I suspect that I may utilise this while I am in the process of building more resilient terrain.  I'm not particularly "crafty" or creative-minded (years of doing language based stuff at university probably forced all of that out of me), so I expect that I'd find making buildings slow going.

What do you think?  Does anyone have any relevant experiences with making terrain for Infinity?  Any hints, tips, or favourite products that you could comment on?  Any help would be appreciated!