How I currently base my figures

Fellow Schild & Vriend member and TTM author BD once mentioned to me that it would be a good idea to do a basing tutorial on this here blog. There are a lot of painting tutorials out there (including some of our own), but tips on basing your well painted figures are apparently somewhat underrepresented. Hence this entry. BD, see - I do listen to you :)

Over the years, I've used several different ways of basing my miniatures, but lately I've been settling on a way I'm quite happy with. For as long as that will last, at least :).

For the bases themselves, [I use standard slottabases](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000001.html) (hey, that was the _very first entry_ on TTM. Ah, nostalgia :) ), augmented by [some rare earth magnets](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000137.html), though I am now eyeing [Galeforce Nine](http://www.gf9.com) bases, because they come with 'rubber steel' inserts to put in your movement trays or transport boxes, saving you an extra order elsewhere. I also like the GF9 bases because they are not slotted.

The disadvantage of slotted bases is of course that when you put a flat based figure (i.e. without the tab to fit in the base's slot) on the base, you will need a way to cover up the slot in the base. The classic recipe of white glue and sand does not work here, ending up with at best a local depression in the base, and at worst a clear hole. You need something that covers the slot well - some kind of wall filler like Polyfilla is the usual solution. I used that for some time, but have now found something which I think is ideal: P�o sand mortar from [Brico](http://www.brico.be):



The Pebeo range of mortars and textured gels is meant to create interesting textures for painters and interior decorators. As miniature wargamers are the world's foremost scroungers, we can of course use these things as well. In the case of the sand mortar, it makes an ideal basing material. It scoops easily, not being runny; it is fairly sticky so it sticks to the bases easily but not sticky enough so that you cannot easily wipe off any overspill on the figure itself; and its texture is just right to recreate a kind of rough terrain for the figure to stand on. The result when the stuff has been applied looks like this:



The mortar is dry after around 24 hours (though you can cut this short in a pinch if you don't mind risking your brush when you paint the not completely dried mortar) after which it can be painted and drybrushed just like normal:



The base above was finished with a few patches of [Woodlands Scenics](http://www.woodlandscenics.com] Blended Turf flock (I get mine from [EC Scenics](http://www.ecsenics.co.uk), glued on with gel form super glue.

All of my recently finished figures have been based in this way, and you can see the results on [my Flickr account](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robartes).

It's a fast and simple way of producing good looking bases. A future 'improvement' is that I will use lighter colors, more tans than browns, to paint the bases, as these look a bit dark when viewed en masse. But as most of my armies have had their bases painted with my current colors, I'll use the new colors for new armies (Carolingians to start with).

TT tags: miniatures wargames basing

Commands and Colors: Ancients

The new "Command and Colors" game is available. It is the third game in the series, now dealing with Ancients, the previous two being Battlecry (ACW) and Memoir44 (WW2).

I'm a big fan of this system, it has inspired me to develop my own fantasy version for 25mm miniatures on hex-based terrain. So I'm looking forward to acquiring a copy.

Links:

[http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/14105](http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/14105)

[http://www.gmtgames.com/cca/main.html](http://www.gmtgames.com/cca/main.html)

Phil

_Update_ (Robartes): linkified links

Why buy new figures? Use what you have available!

One of the public secrets of the "wargaming industry" (at least in my opinion) is that gamers buy stuff they'll never use. Wargaming manufacturers sell their products, which 2 years later end up in the Bring-and-Buy section (unused), are being bought by another gamer , who still doesn't use them, until they get bought by a 2nd hand store that sells it on eBay as a highly priced collectible, is then bought by a collector who still is not using the items, until after several iterations the items end up on an attic to be forgotten. Now, this is all understandable, because wargaming is also partly about "dreams that never come through". Just as you are dreaming about that Ferrrari you'll never have, or in my case, a big private library stocked with 16th century books, including one of the only three surviving copies of the Necronomicon... hmmm, the tapping of long-forgotten dark knowledge ... Anyway, back to reality ...

A typical scenario goes like this:
- Gamer goes to convention or website or browses through magazine
- Gamer sees a very cool figure or item and wants to buy it
- Vision about grand game or campaign starts to form based on this single cool figure
- Gamer (now completely in an unrational mode) decides that the entire range of figures is needed, just in case the range is not available anymore within 6 months. Anof course, this is EXACTLY the range, scale, and type of figures I've been waiting for.
- The big game never materialises (surprise), the several hundred unpainted figures end up in storage.
- Next year: repeat!

Well, no more! It has been a few years since I bought huge amounts of wargaming figures, I've resisted the urge of falling in the trap of buying things for games that never materialise. Instead, my new approach is to design games around the stuff I already have. It sounds logical and non-revolutionary, but in my mind, it is truly a revolutionary idea.

Let me give an example: I'm currently designing a multiplayer game around a siege of city set in medieval/fantasy setting. I need different factions of troops, representing various armed forces that are present in the city. I went through my quite large figure collection (I count my figures not in the hundreds, but in the thousands), and decided that I needed more figures! I didn't have the figures needed for this game! So I started looking around for extra figures. At that point I suddenly realized I was crazy. I have plenty of painted figures! I have plenty of unpainted figures, some of them became collectibles in their own right by just sitting in my attic, unused! Why am I shopping for more stuff?

So I took a step back and rethought the game I originally had in mind. Instead of using all human/medieval types, and since this is fantasy, can't I make the forces a bit more exotic? I have quite a number of Boxer Rebellion Chinese warriors armed with swords. Why not use them as a Foreign Bodyguard present in the city? Maybe some Redoubt Musketeers as well? Wouldn't that fit in with a renaissance-fantasy-style seen in some French comics, rather than the GW-monotone-fantasy-view we've all come to accept? I had them painted by a world-class painter, so why not put them on the table and use them? So I started to rethink the scenario, I also went creative with my quite huge collection of scenery, and after some experiments (visual appeal on the gaming table is big thing for me), I arrived at a quite satisfactory result. I won't tell you anything more about the game, because it still has to be played, and some players are listening in ...

Anyway, to make a long story short: design your games around your large collection of figures and scenery, not the other way around. The extent of my colelction is such that I can probably organize a dozen games without having to re-use a single item once (and that goes for the dice and lichen too!). So why buy more stuff? Resist the urge! It saves money! Money I can spend on extending my book collection. Wait, there's a problem with that too ....

Enough is enough

Right, that's it.

The last few days we've been flooded with a whole raft of comment spam. Nothing really new there, but this particular variant is both ubiquitous and unblockable. For some reason, the spam blocking software on TTM does not recognise the URL's in the comments, so it cannot block them either.

Time to pull out my leet Perl hackerish skills and do something about it, I say. Over the next few hours (or days), comments on this blog might behave a bit ... _erratically_ ... while I work behind the scenes to change some things. I'll update this entry when the work is done.

For those interested, I'm going to replace the comment script with a differently named one. As most of the spam comments are the result from an automated posted to the well known comment script of Movable Type, that should take care of most spam. I hope. Of course, I might well destroy the setup completely :)

__Update__: well, that was surprisingly easy. No leet hackerish skills necessary whatsoever. If anybody finds anything wrong with comments, please [let me know](mailto:ttm@nirya.be). Now let's hope the comment spammers rely on the default name of the comment script and won't parse the content of this blog to find the new name.

__Update 2__: Well, it seems to be working, to say the least. Since I changed the name of the comment script, the spam filter did not have to block _a single comment_, and the webserver access logs show lots of scripts butting their heads against the missing mt-comments.cgi . So Robartes 1 - Spammers 0 so far.

I'm on Ebay!

Those of you who don't like commercials, please duck now.

In a meagre effort to supplement my hobby budget, I've decided to sell the occasional painted figure on Ebay. I've got tons of lead lying around from my wild student days, most of which I'll never use in a game, so that stock will be the source of these occasional offers.

Anyway, I've currently got an auction up for two Old West figures: [General Custer and his standard bearer](http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=8751379268&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT) :




I've put the figures up on Ebay UK, as most of the figure buying public is located over there and Ebay Belgium doesn't even have a wargames category, but that does not preclude Belgian bidders of course.

So, [make me rich](http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=8751379268&ssPageName=STRK:MESE:IT). You know you want to.

Wargames Soldiers & Strategy

During the Christmas shopping frenzy I happened to pass by the
[International Magazine Store](http://www.imstijdschriften.be) in Leuven (which caters for a very diverse range of magazines) and as usual I couldn�t resist the urge of having a quick look (it was cold outside). I tend to glance at the recent
[Wargames Illustrated](http://www.wargames.co.uk/WarIllustrated/Illustrated.htm) issue but I rarely find the content within appealing enough to actually spend a reasonable amount of cash on it and if I do, the chances of becoming a tad disappointed afterwards are fairly large. So over time I have trained myself to resist the urge of the impulse buy. The huge source of information available on the internet these days (such as on Wargames Journal) helps in this respect. This time however I spotted a mag I hadn�t seen before called Wargames Soldiers & Strategy (nr 12) so I succumbed to the �little wargame devil�* and opened up my wallet.

I was not disappointed. The overall layout is tidy, the pictures are appealing and the content turned out to be interesting and useful. When first glancing through the pages you get this strange feeling that something is odd, until you realise that the thing isn�t swamped with advertisements! There is actual content inside! Not all of it applying to my specific gaming interests but still, content!

Apart from the general gaming content they also feature one core theme (or dossier as they call it). This issue had Trafalgar as the central theme and featured an interview with Rod Langton, an article on the history of and the events leading to the battle (pretty general introduction, but then again going in too much detail would require a book, not a magazine) and an article on painting and rigging ships from the age of sail. Having already read a few articles on the rigging subject, this one was by far the clearest. This is a considerable achievement since it is very hard not to get bogged down into an incomprehensible mess of nautical jargon which would give an admiral a headache, let alone be any way near comprehensible to your average land lugger.

The magazine turns out to be made by a bunch of Spaniards but this only shows to a small degree in their book reviews which feature Spanish publications next to the more international ones, in a schematic/map left and right and in the abbreviations used in the Trafalgar board game that came with the magazine; Nothing too disturbing. All in all this is a serious contender in the published wargames magazine market.

*The same one that insists that you �need� Gallic allies to go with the recently acquired Roman army (which is on number 358 of your painting list to start with). You probably know him all too well.

_Update_ (Robartes): fixed two links which exhibited very weird behaviour

Two zero zero six

As is usual around these times (best wishes to all readers and their
miniatures, BTW) one gets slapped around the ears with a bewildering variety
of reviews of the just departed year. Not being one to miss a chance of
boring you all to tears, I will jump on said bandwagon as well.

2005 has been a fairly good year for me in the toy soldier department. First
off, two statistics:

* There have been 91 TTM posts in 2005
* I painted 32 figures (is that all?)

TTM has been going strong throughout the year, although there have been a
few periods where there was more than a week between posts (as, for example,
has been the case in the previous weeks). This is not for want of material,
I think, as I have several post ideas and unfinished series lying around,
and I'm just one of the authors on TTM. This is simply a case of competing
interests for what little free time we have available. As the major factor
driving traffic to this site is the updates to it, and as we all (well, at
least I do) like increased traffic, one new year's resolution is to post
more.

Next is the painting. I had a good feeling about my painting this year, but
it seems that on examining my records (well, the pictures I posted on my
[Flickr Account](http://www.flickr.com/people/robartes), plus two painting
competition entries
[featured](http://theminiaturespage.com/workbench/73597/) on
[TMP](http://theminiaturespage.com) ) I only painted 32, with a big gap
between January and May. That gap is easily explained, as that was the
period where the house was being (not) finished and we moved into what was
more or less a construction site, but I had thought I picked up that
painting pretty well after that. So, new year's resolution number two is to
paint more figures. This will need to be done by lowering the time I spend
per figure (as more free time will remain a distant dream), or in other
words, by (finally) dropping standards for wargaming figures so I can paint
one in less than an hour. It will be interesting to see whether I:

1. actually do this
2. stick to my layering technique, and figure out a way to speed it up
(reduce to two layers, probably, but which ones?)
3. go for a different technique

Time will tell...

For the rest of the year, I played quite a number of games (now that I have
a wargame room -- although that is currently in a state of flux, having served as
guest room over the holidays and having to serve as bedroom for child number
two which is on the way), the majority of which were Blitzkrieg Commander or
WAB.

I'm quite proud of the [WEC
campaign](http://www.nirya.be/snv/sections/WEC) which really took off this
year, but the other 'big' project I launched, a WWII virtual game has died
an ignominous death for want of attention.

And then there's also the big Arnhem game we put on at Crisis, which was a
marvel of cooperation, with Alan doing the figures (millions of the little
buggers), Phil providing the game system (netting us a 'Best Participation
Game' award) and myself doing the terrain. The game was well received, so
that was good.

That's about it for my year in wargaming - pretty positive, I find. How was
everyone else's year?

TT tags: miniaturesgaming

Lotsa blogging going on

There's an ever increasing number of wargames blogs out on the Net these days, but here's one of the latest and best: [Wee Toy Soldiers](http://www.weetoysoldiers.com).

Hyun's blog is more about the modelling and painting side of the hobby, him being a 'converted' boardgamer attracted to modelling, so there's less actual gaming content than on other blogs (such as ourselves), but he does make up for it with other high quality posts. Just check out his brilliant [CD case becomes organizer](http://www.weetoysoldiers.com/wp/?p=76) post.

All Quiet on the Western Front?

On December 26 I organized a full-day World War 1 game. 4 players (Vince, Frank, Dominique and Brendan) showed up, and all were eager to take part in some trench-raiding action. Since it was 2nd Christmas day, quite a few people still had some family obligations, so the turn-out was a little bit less than expected, but 4 players was enough after all to create some good action.

Everyone gathered at 10am in my house, and the first part of the scenario started. The big picture was that German troops wanted to storm a British trench-system. However, the trenches were not fully finished yet (this was early in the war), and were still incomplete in some parts of the battlefield. Since the Germans had no idea what parts of the position would be fully defended, some reconnaisance patrols had to be sent out.

Every player (2 British, 2 German) got a secret mission for his patrol, and they had to come to the gamesmaster one by one to give their orders. Movement was on an individual map for each player, and during each order, each player was told what he could see or hear in their immediate vicinity. Since the weather conditions turned out to be misty for most of the game, visibility was extremely limited, and all players were moving around very cautiously. All the players were physically also in the same room (the gm being in the next room), and initially did not know who was playing British or German. This created some good tension in the beginning of the game. Of course, after a while, the clever players had figured out who was playing whom by the reactions of some of the participants, and linking it to their own actions just their turn before.

Typical orders included to do a recon of some part of the sector, or to intercept enemy patrols, to go to a specific sector and cut wires, to deploy mines etc. Since the movement axis of each patrol (start position and designated end position) was usually diagonally across the battlefield, a good number of interactions happened. Some patrols opened fire without a positive ID of what they saw or heard, and sometimes there were a few lucky breaks. One patrol got very lucky when a random artillery starshell exploded nearby, illuminating the entire sector that was supposed to be mapped out. Another patrol survived with 1 member, barely enough to bring all information back to HQ. Other patrols succeeded in laying mines, although they sometimes decided that they had gone far enough and deployed their mines some distance short from their designated objective. A German patrol ran into an ambush set up by a British patrol, decided to storm it in close combat, and won! I stressed to all players that their mission had to be obeyed, and this was played out very well. Every side got a total of 5 missions (once a patrol came in, the next one started), and after 2 hours of playing the Germans had gathered a lot of info about the British defences, while the British managed to lay some extra minifields and intercept some German patrols as well.

Then it was time for some lunch, and we headed into town to get some pizza.

When we started again around 2pm, the Germans had the choice of flying a recon mission by aircraft over the enemy trench lines. If succesful, this would mean that the Germans would see the setup of British forces in the next game before having to come up with their own battleplan. We used the Wings of War rules for this game (see www.boardgamegeek.com for a more complete description of this game). This a WW1 aerial warfare boardgame, that plays very smoothly and has a very clever movement system using manoeuver cards. The British started with 4 patrol aircraft, the Germans with 3 fighter aircraft and a 2-seater who had to take the photographs of the enemy trenches.

Sadly, the German 2-seater never made it to the objective. Due to critical damage, its rudder got stuck. First it couldn't turn left anymore, a few turns later it got another critical and could only fly straight. So the mission failed, despite some good shooting by the German pilots.

Then it was time for the big game. This was played out on the big gaming table using 20mm WW1 figures and with a full trench system as scenery. Based on their recon information, the Germans had to come up with a plan, dividing their force over 4 attack groups. The British could deploy any way they saw fit.

I used some house-rules for this game, and the Germans started with twice as many units as the British ( since they were all hiding in trenches ...). The Germans started to move across the battered no-man's-land, units taking hits from artillery and mortar fire, morale dropping, officers trying to rally scared troops ... The British defended really well, but couldn't cause enough casualties to stop the attack wave once the first German lines reached the trenches. German trench raiders jumped into the trenches, and some tough fighting ensued. After a few turns, the British surrendered, so a German victory! By now it was a little after 6pm, the planned ending of the day.

Overall, I think this scneario using 3 linked games worked very well. Once the main game began, the Germans still had some blank areas on their map of which they didn't know anything about. As a result, they lost some troops to minefields. On the other hand, they managed to clear some barbed wire during the first game, and this created a big open field for a German attack wave (although this wasn't the sector were the final breakthrough happened).

The dogfighting game didn't produce extra information for the German players, but it could have, and the British had every incentive to stop the German planes to avoid having to give their troop dispositions to the German side.

During debriefing the players agreed the miniature game worked very well as, but probably the German players had too much machine guns available, and this created some unbalance, especially since MGs caused morale to drop very rapidly.

So, to conclude, a very good gaming experience, and it has encouraged me to set up similar full-day games in the future.

Sadly, no pictures ...

Phil

Corcyra conquered by civilisation!

For those of you who have been following the [WEC](http://www.nirya.be/snv/sections/WEC), our Warhammer escalation campaign -- we've just concluded turn three which saw a massive reversal of balance, which 4 out of 5 games won by the civilisation players. Consequently, Corcyra is now firmly in the control of the civilised side:



For more information on the campaign, click on the image above, which will take you to the campaign home page. There's also the [game report](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000167.html) for my game of round 3 (my Celts lost against Bruce's Belisarian Byzantines).