I found time between nappy changes to do some painting

It's a busy life, being a dad, as I'm sure many of the adoring millions who read this blog must already know. 

On the one hand you have to go back to work all too soon after the little bundle of joy arrives, and on the other you spend most of your free time when you're not at work either looking after your offspring or catching up on some of the sleep you've missed. 

Family members are drawn to the new arrival like moths to a flame, and your doting partner doesn't get much time to do anything other than mothering during the day so there's always housework to help out with when you get home.

Even if you didn't have to do all this, having your own child around is fascinating and a lot of fun, and you can happily waste hours playing with them and seeing what faces they're going to pull, or things they're going to be sick on, next.

This all makes finding time for painting a bit tricky, but I have persevered, and by not paying enough attention to my daughter waiting until my daughter is asleep, I've managed to achieve some results - the M3 halftracks for my US Armored Rifle platoon for Flames of War!

The photo isn't great unfortunately, but hopefully you can make out that I've used the same style of painting as for my other recent US armour models - a base coat with two layers of highlight, trying not to go too overboard with it and make the highlights unrealistic. I've also left off the transfers for now, and I'm going to stick to the plan of doing these all in one go later.

After some deliberation I decided that my "purple heart boxes" would have the mid-war style mounts for the machine guns, instead of the pulpit mount which appears in late-war. I've reasoned to myself that there must still have been some older unmodified half tracks in service in the later war, and it makes more sense to use mid-war models for late-war than the other way around!

Obviously I now need to paint the infantry for this platoon too. That should probably be my next target (the club FoW campaign starts next week after all), but in fine wargamer's style I've been distracted by something new, so details of that will follow...

Very British Civil Warpath

Very little of the old paintbrushes and superglue used for this one unfortunately, but at least I've done something hobby related that can be blogged about for once.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I've been playing some games of the Warpath v2 beta recently. This is Mantic's sci-fi skirmish game, which is apparently going to be ready for release soon as a full, non-beta version. It's somewhat simpler than 40k and has a nice mechanic for activating units that adds some brinksmanship to turns.

I've also been playing games set in the Very British Civil War, the alternate history setting described in the books from Solway Crafts and Miniatures. In case you don't know, this "what-if" setting assumes an unpleasant outcome to the abdication crisis in 1938 and has a fascist government of Britain fighting a very splintered war across the whole country. It's presented in a very light-hearted style and the emphasis is on over the top cobbled together forces, vehicles and weapons, and can be a lot of fun.

We had been using 40k rules for our games, which worked quite well, but I wanted to try something different and so I have created Very British Civil Warpath - army lists and special rules for VBCW games using the Warpath rules!

Kieron and I played our first test game of this last night and it seemed go well (despite ending in an extremely bloody stalemate).

The simplicity of the Warpath army lists meant that I was even able to come up with (hopefully) sensible points values and options for different units, so it's a system which we can use for some reasonably balanced games and as the basis for our campaign.

Something that I was very keen to include was a method for representing shortages of fuel and ammo - in most cases the weapons and vehicles being used have been scrounged or bodged together so it makes sense to me that they can't be entirely relied upon. I've come up with what I think is a fairly simple mechanic for this, which will require a few tokens to be used to keep track of things but can make for very uncertain times for the commanders.

I've also tried to do something sensible with cavalry and give them the ability to mount and dismount during the game, so that they aren't caught in the trap of trying to behave like napoleonic cavalry against opponents with machine guns.

Finally I came up with some rules that allow vehicles to be upgraded fairly simply, so I think you can cover most things with the options there.

There are still more things to add to it in future but I think it works as is, but I need to test it some more. Any offers of help would be gratefully received...

There may be something of a slowdown...

In the previous thrilling installment of Paintbrush and Superglue, I mentioned that we were expecting a baby girl, and had lowered my painting expectations accordingly. Well, a couple of weeks ago, Jessica arrived...

"Wait, what are you going to do with this photo?"

... and I haven't picked up a paintbrush since. Still, I'm going back to work on Friday for a rest, so we'll see how things go from that point.

However, before the 4:30am drive to the hospital, I managed to do some work on my Stuarts:

These pictures aren't fantastically well exposed...

... since I was taking them between nappy changes and didn't have time to set them up better.

I'm not approaching the tanks for this army as I normally would - I'm putting more highlights onto them than usual. Now, I'm never really sure about highlights on things like tanks that have a lot of flat surfaces. A lot of the models you see that win awards and suchlike have highlights that just look wrong to me - they've been very carefully blended and all the rest, but the effect for me just doesn't seem convincingly like a real life tank. Maybe it's me, but highlights that are way over the top seem to be in fashion as a way of showing how good you are at applying highlights rather than making the models look realistic. Anyway, I'm giving it a try but I'm trying to keep them reasonably muted. There are two layers of highlights on these, but I'll be taking those down with ink later, after I apply transfers. The transfers should be going on to the entire army in one go once I have it ready, so for now, these are done.

With the Stuarts completed, I decided that the next thing my US Armor company needs is an armored rifle platoon, since tanks without infantry support can be very vulnerable to assaults from enemy infantry (something I like to exploit with my Airborne company, heh heh heh). The .50 cal machine guns strapped to basically every vehicle the Americans fielded help a lot with this, but I still want some infantry support and so I started on the halftrack riders. 

Like Kieron, I've realised that the recon platoon is basically bits of an armored rifle platoon plus jeeps. So, with the aim of acquiring table-ready platoons for as little work as possible, I've started to paint a halftrack and a jeep. I also started the anti-tank gun from the armored rifle platoon, since it was just sitting there.

Errr... that's it. I'm not sure when I'll next paint, or post, or anything, but as life with a daughter sinks in and gets less hectic, something like normal service should be resumed in due course, and I'll ramble on about it as boringly as possible here. I'm sure you're looking forward to that as much as I am!

Mobile Phones Don't Have Very Good Cameras

The month has ended, and I've painted something. 3 Shermans, in fact:

Apologies for the not so great photo - the good camera is now packed in the "The Baby's Coming, We've Got To Get To The Hospital" bag, so I used my iPhone to take this.

Anyway. These still need transfers adding, but given that I have a big pile of tanks to paint I've decided to do all of the transfers together at the end. I particularly like the baseball bat on the the turret of the lead tank, nice bit of character for a US tank I thought!

As I hinted at oh so subtly above, Mrs Matt is due to give birth this month, which is likely to have something of an impact on my ability to paint stuff. Since I've started them already, I'm just going to aim to paint 5 Stuarts, which would probably make my US Tank Company big enough to use in some games (although until I do the armored rifles I think it will struggle a bit with no infantry support at all).

Better Living Through Chemistry

It had to happen sometime.

Admittedly, it took a convenient confluence of circumstances - rain that stopped me doing work in the garden, a cancelled meeting at work so that I unexpectedly finished 90 minutes earlier than I expected - but here we are.

Not only have I started painting something, I'm blogging about it too!

Right. So, errr (clears throat). How do these things go again? Oh yes, targets.

I've always liked the American army in WW2. I suspect this comes from movies and video games that tend to feature the yanks heavily (often in fact to the exclusion of everyone else involved), but in Flames of War there's an obvious attraction - the US Army seems to have an unlimited supply of equipment (especially bazookas...) so playing as the Americans gives you access to a lot of fun toys.

When I first started playing FoW I got myself a US Airborne force, which I've had a fair amount of success with - big, Fearless units can be very effective when they're flung with reckless abandon at enemy armour, especially when they also have gammon bombs. Eventually I added some armoured support of my own, and now I have a full (fairly large in fact) armoured company that I'd like to play some games with. However, it's not painted.

We're planning a mid-war campaign at the club over the winter, and I'll be playing as the Americans. So my goal is to get a mid-war version of a US Tank Company ready for that, to allow me to alternate between the Airborne and the Armored guys.

I've also got some late-war tanks to paint, but I'll put those on the back burner for now.

There's not much of August left and I don't expect I'll get a lot of free time for painting (my wife is eight months pregnant, so there's a lovely list of DIY I need to do) so I'll start small and try to get three Shermans painted. That will give me eight painted Shermans, so I could field that as two command and two platoons of three.

Here they are as they stand at the moment - base coated with some highlights, but the tracks and stowage still need to be done.

I also started a couple of M18s, just because they were undercoated and sat on my desk...

 

I'd also like to sing the praises of some new technology I've acquired. First off, "Zip Kicker". I picked this up in Modelzone, it's an accelerator for superglue.

 

Really works, too! It makes it much, much easier to put fiddly things together, especially stuff like Battlefront tanks which have resin and metal components. The superglue bonds and sets immediately, so you aren't trying to hold things in place as it slowly dries.

Next, I thought I'd try some of Games Workshop's (boo! hiss! etc!) Liquid Green Stuff.

 

I'm not quite as big a fan of this as I am the Zip Kicker, but it does work, and I was able to fill some gaping holes in the hulls of these plastic Shermans pretty easily.

Using Liquid Green Stuff is a bit like painting with toothpaste - it's thick and dries quickly, so you have to move fast and use layers to build up any big areas. It is certainly easier than solid Green Stuff for things like this though.

Building a Better Future

Ah, irony. I finally break my blog silence (with a post so apparently well-written that people queued up to insist I hadn't written it), apologise for not posting, and then circumstances conspire to prevent me from posting again for another fortnight. Well, that's a better explanation than "I couldn't be arsed", so I'm sticking with it. Here we go, another post. Isn't about painting and doesn't even have any pictures in it, but it's all you're getting.

Anyway, to wrestle myself back on topic. The Wargamers FC clubhouse is currently abuzz (is that a word?) with talk of Mantic Games' not-in-any-way-similar-to-Warhammer-oh-no-siree fantasy game, Kings of War. I played my first game of this last night, and it's pretty good - in particular, I like the fact that you don't take off models as casualties, so it's much tidier. Also, the way damage works in Kings of War is nice - it's worth peppering units with fire before you engage them in close combat, as the damage you inflict with shooting makes breaking the unit in combat easier. As a final bonus, since you don't remove individual casualties and units have a set formation based on their size, you could use scenic bases and fewer models than for the equivalent Warhammer unit.

So that's all good, and I'm sure I'll play it some more. In particular I think coming up with different armies would be easier as there's a lot less scope for variety in army selection than in Warhammer, so I'll be looking at different races and so on that I can make with my Games Workshop models. Got to use them for something!

Perhaps more interestingly though, I've played a couple of games of Warpath v2 with Pete and Kieron. Warpath is a sci-fi skirmish game in which a totalitarian human faction attempts to dominate other races based on standard fantasy races such as orcs and dwarves. Any resemblance to other sci-fi skirmish games in which a totalitarian human faction attempts to dominate other races based on standard fantasy races is, I'm sure, entirely coincidental.

Warpath is perhaps more similar to 40k than Kings of War is to Fantasy, since you do remove individual models as casualties. What's interesting though is the unit activation system. You are never entirely sure what order your opponent will choose to do things, which means there are lots of tactical decisions to make each turn.

As we've been playing the beta v2 rules there are some things that I think need to be changed. The Mantic forums suggest that some of these will be altered, and we're likely to get more interesting army lists at that point. I even suggested a couple myself (probably too late to affect anything), so I now consider myself to have co-authored whatever version of the rules is eventually pulished.

I think both Mantic games are much simpler to get into than the Games Workshop equivalents, and to my mind are much better suited for games on a club night. It is probably also fair to say that they lack some of the GW depth though - there aren't as many silly or completely fantastical things available to you as there are from Warhammer army lists, but then all the lists are in the basic rulebook which is nice.

In my mind at least I am still setting these games in the Fantasy and 40k universes. Not that it really matters, but I've never had a problem with Games Workshop's background - it's just the games that get a bit over complicated for me...

There you are then. Couple of interesting new games, and if nothing else I can use my existing models for more things than before, which can only be a good thing. I'm going to have a look through the army lists and see what other variations I can come up with.

ISIHPIAP

There are certain traditions that you have to obey in whatever you're doing. In friendly competitions, it's customary to shake hands after playing to show that there are no hard feelings, or at least to give you the chance to try to crush your opponent's hand if you were beaten especially badly. At Christmas, it's traditional to struggle to compose your face into something approximating gratitude when opening a package which contains some "hilarious" socks that are in fact too small for you to wear anyway. When decorating, the tradition is that you only notice that you've missed a spot once you've packed away all your brushes and when leaving a job it's traditional to pretend that you actually like the deadbeats you've been saddled with every day for the last few years and you aren't utterly thrilled at the prospect of moving on (and inevitably saddling yourself with a remarkably similar set of deadbeats).

Blog writing is no exception and has its own tradition - the "I'm sorry I haven't posted in ages" post.

The "I'm sorry I haven't posted in ages" post, or ISIHPIAP as it's known by literally no one at all, serves three important functions. The first is to assure the blogger's hordes of loyal readers (in most cases, the same people that refer to these posts as ISIHPIAPs) that the blogger hasn't been abducted by aliens, shut down by the FBI/CIA/MI5/RAC/YMCA for telling THE TRUTH, infected with a horrific tropical disease, or found by the authorities, having been partially eaten by their own cats, after neighbours started to complain that the smell was even worse than usual. The ISIHPIAP is proof of life, of a sort, and allays any fears that may exist in the blogosphere about the blogger's wellbeing.

The second function of the ISIHPIAP is to ease the blogger back into things. As with any task, blogging is easier with practice, and  as he or she spends more time in the real world (scavenging from bins, avoiding eye contact with other humans, hissing at sunlight, that sort of thing) the blogger will find that the mental muscles to create the scathing yet somehow subtly beautiful prose that is their medium begin to atrophy. The ISIHPIAP allows the blogger to discuss (at length if they are especially vain) something that affects them deeply and which they are intimately familiar with, namely themselves and whatever pointless waste of time they've been indulging in instead of the crucial work of typing barely literate hogwash into a browser window.

The third function of the ISIHPIAP is perhaps the most important - it helps to soothe the blogger's ego. Like all areas of human activity, blogging has a series of numbers associated with it, which an insecure person (for example, the sort of person that feels the need to keep a blog) can easily be tempted to use as a score card. If their "friends" have more followers, more views, and indeed more posts on their own blogs, the blogger is bound to feel that they are losing at blogging, much in the same way that they used to come last in school sports days. The sting of this realisation can be harsh, and so the blogger feels it necessary to get something, anything onto their blog to redress the balance a little, and make at least one of the little numbers on the dashboard go up.The ISIHPIAP reminds the blogger of the thrill of making the little numbers go up, and asuages some of his guilt at letting his loyal followers (see: people that call them ISIHPIAPs) go without the benefit of his boundless wisdom.

In the end though, the ISIHPIAP is a tradition, and that's why it's done - they are written because it's the done thing and always has been. Wherever there are deeply lazy and untalented people with blogs, these posts will have a place.

I'm sorry I haven't posted in ages.