Roman Around

Recently, Pete's been very excited by tiny elephants.

He painted up a couple to go with his 15mm Carthaginians, which were part of our Impetus project from a while ago.

Fortunately, I have a 15mm Republican Roman army for Impetus from even longer ago, so we decided to give Basic Impetus a go to ease ourselves back in. This is so quick that we managed two games in an evening!

For once, I remembered to take some photos, although I can't definitively remember what actually happened, so I'll have a look at the photos and guess...

The first game

Roman legions stick together and tentatively
send cavalry and skirmishers forward

Unfortunately this leaves the Carthaginians free to send
cavalry down the flank...

Elephants stomp forward making as much noise as possible

Legionaries brace for elephant impact,
while the levites start throwing things 

Elephants trample the skirmishers and slam into the Roman line,
while the Roman cavalry on the left charges a Gallic warband.
The Roman cavalry on the right had been brought down by javelins by this point.

Cavalry threatens the Roman flank...

...which surges forward to get out of the way, having
eventually brought the elephants down.
More levites move up to try to face this threat.

Eventually enough carnage occurred that both sides routed. A draw!

The second game

We both tried a different setup.
Due to some very good rolls, my cavalry
had a ridiculously successful early charge.

The forces square off, and I forget to take any more pictures.

The second game went much the same as the first - Basic Impetus does make forces less likely to do anything complicated as they can't do multiple moves. Unfortunately, the second time round my force routed when I was 1 point away from breaking Pete's, which I suppose is technically a win for him...

These were very enjoyable games, despite the limitations of Basic Impetus (and the fact that I was playing Pete (hi Pete)). We both agreed that we should move back to the full Impetus rules for future games, so hopefully I'll have something to report on that soon enough.

Struggling to Contain Myself

I'm sure people must think I do some of my painting just to enable hilarious blog post titles like this one. I couldn't possibly comment.

Anyway, a bit more painting. These are the 10mm shipping containers I bought at Derby Worlds, for use as scatter terrain for Dropzone Commander.

These are from The Baggage Train, they're not the cleanest castings in the world but for something like this, especially at this scale, it doesn't really matter.

Anyway, I'll be hiding behind these in due course!

And now more numbers...

For 2015 so far:
Painted: 119
Bought: 68

And for the Challenge:
Painted: 62
Jokers Used: 4
Jokers Earned: 2

More Shaltari!

Kieron pointed out in a comment on my last post, about my tower, that it was the first thing I'd painted all year that was neither French nor Shaltari.

I shall now redress that by posting some more Shaltari. Everyone wants Dropzone Commander pictures, right?

First up, some Spirit light gates.

Fwoosh!

Hover hover. Once again, poor lighting strikes my pictures.

These are super fast, and can deposit an infantry squad each. They are, like all Shaltari gates, a bit flimsy, so keeping them away from AA fire tends to be a good idea.

Then, a commander!

Yes, we need seven separate canopies on the turret.

It's just struck me that it's not obvious how the sponsons are aimed.
Maybe they just guess.

This is my Gharial, which at the moment only has experimental rules. I like it because it has powerful, but short-ranged, weapons. This means it forces me to fling my commander into the action head first, which is the kind of thing I tend to do anyway.

With these painted I'm at 1000 points of painted Shaltari now, and can abandon the shameful practice of playing with unpainted models. Just need to paint my secret reserve models so I can reach 1500 points!

I have also done some spending though - I was at Derby Worlds at the weekend and came away with a 28mm Panther for Bolt Action (with no immediate plan to paint it, it was just cheap...) and some tiny shipping containers, for my sneaky Shaltari to lurk behind.

Right, numbers time again...

For 2015 so far:
Painted: 111
Bought: 68

And for the Challenge:
Painted: 54
Jokers Used: 4
Jokers Earned: 2

A Towering Achievement

Yes, I am fairly happy with the title of this post, why do you ask?

Our merry band of gamers has recently been a bit swept away by excitement over the new version of Kings of War. As this has follows hot on the hills of the Age of Sigmar travesty, we've gone for the obvious route of having games set in the Warhammer world but using the considerably simpler KoW rules.

I've decided that we need more terrain for this, and rooting around in my disturbingly colossal heap of unpainted models, I uncovered a tower. It comes from Battle Masters, the old MB/GW crossover game that I had as part of my unholy pilgrimage into the hobby (which, if you're interested (you aren't), roughly ran as follows: Fighting Fantasy books, HeroQuest, Battle Masters, Warhammer, 40k...). I sprayed it black some time in the late '90s, and a couple of brief decades later, I've finally finished the job. Well, apart from the flag.

So here's some pictures!

The flag needs something. Dunno what though.

Possibly some work for a plasterer there.

Stairs!

I've got nothing to say about this picture.

Trapdoor!

Of course, you're now desperate to see some numbers. And here they are!

For 2015 so far:
Painted: 108
Bought: 59

And for the Challenge:
Painted: 51
Jokers Used: 3
Jokers Earned: 2