Soulless plastic

I have ranted about plastic modelkits vs toy soldiers before.

The latest issue of Miniature Wargames, came with a free sprue of a mounted knight, for the game Conquest - The Last Argument of Kings (never heard of this game before, but I also think I'm not the target audience anymore :-)) The figures of this game are also much larger as what we would expect even from "heroic 28mm" (which really is 32mm?). The figures looks closer to 42mm, although I didn't make a formal measurement. But you can probably find the relevant information online.

The sprue didn't look very inviting. Sprues these days are very obviously "computer generated", a result of some optimization algorithm to lay out all 3D components. To me, it simply looks like a piece of soulless plastic. How can a good toy soldier ever come out of this?

Yesterday - after working in the garden - I suddenly felt the urge to put this thing together. So I set myself to it, and 15 minutes later (take or give a few minutes), the knight was assembled.

Now, I admire the design of such a figure. The level of detail and complexity is something that was unachievable when I starter miniature wargaming in the 80s. And if you paint it up, it would probably look fantastic.

 

But to me, it has no character. No matter how detailed, it feels like a modelkit, not a toy soldier. It's still soulless plastic to me.

Dwarven unit from 3D printed miniatures

 I have been in possession of a 3D printer -- well, two to be honest -- for a couple of years now, and have used them to print terrain and vehicles, of which you can see some in action in our Crisis 2019 game.

So far, I have not printed any miniatures. Both my printers are FDM, or filament, printers and they are considered less suitable for miniatures because their resolution is too low. You can consider the theoretical limit to resolution for detail on these to be 0.1mm. In practice you can only count on 0.2 or even 0.3 mm, depending on how much you want to fiddle with your printer and slicer settings. For miniatures, that is scratching the bottom of the barrel detail-wise. The holy grail of 3D printing for miniatures are resin printers, but I have not made the plunge to buy one of those yet, for various reasons, mostly to do with resin handling & curing.

Nevertheless, I decided it was time to print some miniatures. I got some dwarven models from various sources and printed the next unit for my dwarven army on the highest resolution and settings possible on my printer.

Allow me to introduce the raw version of the Forge Guard of the Watch of the Seventh Deep:

As you can see, it was not an unqualified success - the black material is the filament I used for the print, the grey are plastic bits I had to use to replace broken parts or incomplete prints. About half of the figures lost part of themselves.

For those of you familiar with FDM 3D printing, anything that is overhanging by more than 40 degrees or so needs to be supported during the print, or the printer is printing in 'thin air'. These supports take the form of light, but still solid, pillars of filament that reach up from the build plate (the flat plate the 3D printer prints on) to the object being printed. In the case of these dwarves, the objects that needed supporting are the axes. If you zoom in on the photo and look in the back, you can see a model with its axe still supported.

To get the finished model, these supports need to be removed. And that's where the problem is - removing them from the very thin axe hafts more often than not results in said axes breaking off of the model. To a certain point, you can work around this issue by printing the models on an angle (rotating them so the axes lie directly on top of the build plate) but then the problem still remains that the axe hafts are very thin and vulnerable. An FDM 3D printed model just does not have the strength (especially in the orientation I printed them in) for that. Again, you can fiddle with the orientation so that the layers of the print are along the haft and not across it as I printed them, but that will still not be as strong as necessary.

So on about half of the models, I lost the axes while cleaning away the supports and they needed to be replaced by various axes & shields from my bits box. The majority of the replacement axes (and sometimes entire arms and hands) came from Orc sprues from Mantic Games, who used to do (and maybe still do) a grab bag sale at the end of the year where you can buy a bunch of random sprues for next to no money. I can highly recommend this for your bits box.

The conclusion? While I am happy with the detail and the lack of visible printing layers (although we'll see about that again after painting them), I doubt I'll be printing any miniatures like this again. Vehicles and buildings are fine, but for miniatures let's wait for a resin printer.

One Hour Skirmish Wargames

A while ago we tried out the One Hour Wargames rules. It wasn't a success, and that's why I since then also pretty much ignored the One Hour Skirmish Wargames published a little bit over 2 years ago.

However, I read Rick Priestley's column in the latest issue of Wargames Soldiers Strategy, in which he mentions One Hour Skirmish rules and gives a brief overview of some of the card-based mechanics, and I was pleasantly surprised. I looked up some more reviews, and one review even said to not base your judgement on the "One Hour ..." title - which was of course exactly what I had done.

But anyway, long story short, I ordered a copy and it should arrive in the mail soon.

The Magazine index has exceeded 7000 entries

Today, I added the Miniature Wargames Nov 2020, and Wargames Soldiers & Strategy Oct/Nov 2020, to the growing index of my wargaming magazine collection. It has now exceed 7000 indexed articles.

I regularly search in the index myself to look for relevant articles, a task which was otherwise almost impossible without an index. E.g. I was reading about the ACW battle of 1st Bull Run/Manassas a few weeks ago, and wanted to know how wagamers had translated that battle to the gaming table. Last week I saw a documentary about the Hun invasion in Europe and the battle of Chalon in 451AD, and again the index proved to be useful to have a look at some articles.

So it is definitely has become very useful for me, and I hope others find it useful as well.

No Crisis this year

This past weekend, I should have been at CRISIS 2020, but of course, due to the Corona Pandemic, there's no CRISIS this year.

The first time I attended Crisis was in 1996. In 1997, our small gaming group was present with a participation game. Since then, we've been present with a game at CRISIS every single year (you can see a lot of our games linked in the column on the right).

Over the years, our participaton efforts varied in intensity. Some years, we buil an entire new game. Other years, we re-used what we had done before. We managed to win 4 game trophies: Best of Show in 1999 with an Arthurian Mons Badonicus game (alas, no surviving pictures); Best Participation Game 2005 with a Kriegsspiel-like Arnhem game; Most Original Game in 2011 with paper miniatures; and Most Original Game again in 2013 with our real-time, mass-participation game Red vs Blue. There used to be a time where we specifically aimed for these trophies. But not anymore. We're usually happy to be present with a game and chat with friends.

 

When you search around on this blog you'll find a lot of Crisis reports. The question that inevitably pops up is whether Crisis has changed over the years. The answer is simple: of course it has changed. Not only because of a bigger venue, and better organisation throughout, but it also changed because the wargaming hobby itself has changed. Wargaming has changed from being largely a DIY hobby with wargamers building their own games, to a consumerist hobby, with wargamers consuming commercially produced games. There's a lot of discussion about this topic on various wargaming forums. I have no axe to grind here or be nostalgic about the old times. The hobby changes because hobbyists change. It's a simple as that.

So, will be there be a Crisis in 2021? Hopefully, yes. But we still have to see what game we might run there. Our original idea for Crisis 2020 would have been an expanded version of our Toy Soldiers in 42mm we ran at Warcon last February. But we still have 12 months to make up our minds :-)