Tournament! Bama hits the Atlanta WarRoom

This past Saturday saw another rumble in the cement jungle, with 'Bama well represented at the Atlanta War Room. The Grinch threw a great event, as always, though I do not envy what these games do to that boy's blood pressure. He tried something a little different with this one, running "an experimental escallation tournament." Game 1 was an Encounter at 1000 points, Game 2 was Hold the Line at 1500, and Game 3 was a 2000 point Fighting Withdrawl. I thought it went pretty well -- most folks were able to finish most of their games with at least a little time to spare, and since you could jigger your list to the mission you'd be fighting there was a lot less of that old, "man, but I really wanted to play with toy X..." Another interesting element of the event was the double art competition, one category for pretty toy soldiers, and another for fancy table construction. And you KNOW I fancy a little artistic competition.

You can read a few other folk's comments about the event on the NATO site, and Caesar's always entertaining report on Steel City. Now, on to the pic fest!

First, the Tables:

In general, I was pretty happy with the terrain on display at the event. From what I feel to be a general trend, mostly just my impression from looking at pictures on line, down south we tend to roll anywhere from "moderatly dense" to "sweet jesus, I gotta drive my tanks through THAT!" Which is, I think, as it should be. Hell, some of these boards even had the snow rules in effect! I'm not sure who made and brought what -- some folks obviously carried boards in with them, but I think most of them were laid out with stuff in the store -- apologies to any one I'm slighting with that.



My own giant slab of foam. I should have taken a picture from the other end to show the swamp everyone loves to bitch about...


Caesar's Italy/West Texas table built in his typical barrow-steal-kill style.


Kritikalfailure's brand new Russian winter board. I think this turned out rather well for him, and he sure cranked it out faster than I ever get anything done. I think he was the only other guy there who brought in fully sculpted tiles.


One of the Grinch's cute little villages:




The setting for my Game 3 spanking. I liked the fall colors.




I played Game 1 here, and loved the fancy hedge rows. Of all the flat-mat based tables, I think I liked this one the best.


Again with the hedges... So very French.




I thought I'd taken pictures of all the tables, but alas it looks like I may have missed out a few.

This just occurred to me, looking for specific details to include here -- folks often comment on the sporting conduct of the other players when discussing tournaments, but honestly, it didn't even occur to me. Every one was cool and laid back. Sportsman ship is sort of one of those things that can get taken for granted, at least around here, because it only stands out when it is absent. At the War Room it just wasn't an issue, at least as far as I could tell. Folks down here be cool and stuff.

GAME 1:
For the 1000 point Encounter I faced off against a local refugee, Danny (sorry if I'm misspelling your name!). We fought it out in the French hedgerow country, and we both seemed to have the same strategy -- floor it, and shoot anything in your path! As my Panzer IIIs drove up the road towards his objective and artillery...

...his Shermans advanced over an open field, giving my Grenadiers a chance to earn their pay:


On my side of the table, things started like this:


and somehow ended up like this:

Yup, that one little platoon beat down his Shermans (who went for broke and assaulted me in the woods) and killed his CiC. Too bad he still had some Stuarts to take the objective...

At the other end of town, my Panzer IIIs blasted their way through his Priests and parked on his objective:

But at the start of his next turn he took the game with his Stuarts. A 5-2 for Danny...

Or was it? This WAS the outstanding Sportsmanship point of the day: after the post-game handshake, while we were out smoking, I asked what was left in that artillery platoon. I really, honestly, wasn't trying to nit pick -- I just don't remember rules for crap during play, and try to check on stuff after the games. Anyway, my question reminded him (he'd honestly forgotten, too, in the excitement of impending victory) that the artillery platoon was well below half strength. WITH that platoon and the Stuarts, his force was viable, but without it he was below half-strength, and since his CiC was dead, that would be an auto-fail on Company Moral. Anyway, he volunteered to take the test, even though the game was over. He rolled the dice, and took it like a man -- they failed, the platoon broke, his army vanished, and he handed the 5-2 to me. It was a manly way to go. It was also my only victory for the day...

GAME 2:
For game two, I was up against Larry and his US Armored Rifles. Since we're both Mechanized, it was a dice off to see who would attack and defend. He won, so I'd be defending. Here he setting up his American parking lot:




Now, I thought I had something cool going on when I laid out a mine field right in his way. What I failed to do was extend it all the way to the side of the board -- all he had to do was drive around the edge!


I made him sweat a little when I popped my StuGs from ambush and engaged his Shermans...

...but before they could do anything decisive his infantry snuck up out of the woods and blew them apart with bazookas.

After the loss of my heavy armor, my entire defense started to fall apart. Now, what I SHOULD have done (you learn so much in hindsight...) was feed him one team a turn into the gap beside the mine field and just let the clock play out. Instead I tried to just stay in my fox holes and take it on the chin. This was the result:

It was a good game, and I learned a good bit playing against a skilled and graceful opponent (graceful in-game: by the end of the day, I'd rechristened Treadhead as "Butter Fingers.") but dear lord I just couldn't kill a damned thing. I was over run in Detroit steel, and handed over a tidy 6-1.

GAME 3:
I'm very embarrassed to admit this, but I suck with names and can't recall just now who I played against in Game 3, but he was good. I think he could have beat me in his sleep, actually. I heard tell this boy managed to place in the #3 spot at Origins this year, so at least I got my ass kicked by one of the best, right? How bad did I do in this, my final exhausted game? I couldn't even kill 5 Stuarts with 3 Panters, that bad!

First, my as yet unnamed opponent:

EDIT: the identity of this soft-spoken killer of men has been clarified! Good game, Jess.

Early-game action consisted of a toe-to-toe pissing contest between my halftracks and his armored cars:

He won the contest...

Meanwhile on the other flank, my Panthers took pot shots at some of his infantry. Due to the nature of the scenario and general hearsay that one should try and time it just right, not swooping right in for the kill before he's pulled off any units and not waiting until the end when the clock might get ya, I didn't want to rush them in. In the event, I should have played far more agressivly with them.



After taking a few pot shots at his infantry, they turned an attacked some Stuarts he'd rolled forth. I think we was trying to throw me a sympathy kill...



I got most of them, but the last one passed its motivation and ran away, giving him essentially another platoon that could be withdrawn without significant loss from his point of view. Anyway, long story short, he eventually killed my 2iC and both Panzergrenadier platoons. I think his infantry managed to kill my Tiger and two Panzer IIIs that I rushed up the other side in a desperate bid to snatch glory from the jaws of defeat, and my Panthers left the field in shame. Here's a final shot of his armored cars chasing my 2iC back towards his own lines:



What a day! In the end, that's one (technical) 5-2 for me, while I gave up two 6-1s to the other guys. I'm not sure why, but I guess my heart just wasn't really in it. Don't get me wrong, I had a good time and I'm glad I went, but especially by the last game I just wasn't feeling it any more. Maybe that was just the sour, lingering flavor of defeat...

I'll close out this post with a quick look at the other armies that took the field in Atlanta:









Kritikalfailur's massive hoard, stretching from one end of the table to the other:






The forces of Caesar. You can see better pics of these boys here.














And my own army of the day. I picked out my 2000 point list because I thought it was pretty, not because I thought it would win anything on the table.





One last shot, of someone else's game in progress, just because I thought it looked cool:



EDIT: I some how forgot to mention this when I first posted, but there were two (count 'em, 2!) artistic competitions at this tournament, one for prettiest army and the other for fanciest table. Without modesty, I won both categories. Owing, I think in part, to an imbalance in the number of prizes and the number of winners, they lumped both my wins together and gave me one large prize instead of two smaller ones. Which was a total bonus to me, since I won the very box set I'd been debating purchasing all day! I picked up several sets from the Miniature Building Authority that day, and won their Russian Village (link goes to their retail page.) Thanks, War Room!

More AirBrush Fun

I've been playing with the airbrush again, and I think I'm getting a little better with it. I've started using Tamiya thinner to go with Tamiya paints, and I can get a much better edge, and less clogging, with this mixture. I did a few StuGs, too, but I don't have pics of them yet. The details arn't done yet, but here's how the camo came out on a few Panzer IVs:

Chinese Army progress

Well, this has been quite the little distraction! Honestly, it hasn't been any fun, either. There is no room for art at this scale, just process and repitition. Still, I've got this step done: the entire army is modeled (what little modeling there was to do) and dry-brushed a very light grey. All I'm going to do for painting is to stain them with color and then some simple bases. I want to play the game, but it just isn't worth much modeling time. So here's what the Thousand Yellow Devils are looking like, still mounted to their painting sticks:

Mighty (Empires) Finished Game

Well, that's out of the way!



The map is all flocked up and stuff. I used two thicknesses of flock, one for the fields of grass and another, thicker flock to represent big tall trees, "forrests" in game terms.



I also made up a crap-load of markers for the game. Most of them are pretty boring, but I did like what I cranked out for capitols for each of the player nations:





And, just for fun, I made a volcano!



Here's a few shots of the trial game I played with myself, just to see how things would work:





Now all I gotta do is get those slack-asses to get together and start playing the fucking thing. I spent enough time on it.

FoW -- Field Fortifications

After getting my ass handed to me a while back over a buddie's mine field (my boys just would not cross that thing) I figured it was time to invest a little time in some field fortifications. Since I built these almost exactly as Battle Front have suggested both on line and in print I won't go into a length discussion of how they were made, I'll just hit the high points.



Each base is 2 x 8 inches, just like the rules say they should be, set on masonite bases I cut from some left-overs. Since I don't own a real drill, I twisted the wire in my Dremmel. If you try it that way, be carefull -- you will snap some with anything above minimum speed on those things.



I decided to go all-out (no, not me!) and bought a pack of their beach obstacles. Each base has two of the hedge hogs used as supports...



... and to make some handy corner bits:



I had a few twised strands that didn't quite have the length to make a full piece (remember what I said about twisting wire at 20,000 RPM?) so I cranked out a "cleared" section:



All told, I made enough barbed wire to supply a standard Pioneer Platoon in Flames of War. If I want to do any real fortification type games, I'll need a lot more, but for now this should be pleanty (I wish I'd used all of this in the tournament I was at yesterday...)



I also made up a mine field to slow tanks down (when I'm not a dumb-ass and leave them a nice big fat gap to roll through...)



It is just a simple base with match sticks cut down for the corner supports. I strung a thin wire around the whole thing, wrapping it around each post and glueing it in place with super glue.



And it just wound't be a mine field without a warning sign. You can also see one of the exposed mines, made from a bit of plastic punched out with a hole-punch and a bit of round sprew glued on top.



Before everything was put together, they were covered in my standard basing paste (coffee, water, and white glue) and painted up to match my table. Bits of grass finished the bases, and then I glued on the wire. The wire was quickly rusted with some chestnut ink shot from the air brush -- I didn't even bother to paint the wire as metal, since it already was, well, metal. The burnt color in the cleared section of wire was also done with a quick air brushed shot of black.

Weird War II -- SciFi German Death Rays

Based on reverse-engineered technology salvaged from craft left-over from the 1938 Martian invasion, the German military first began field-trials of their various Death Ray weapons in late 1943. By mid-1944 units began to receive these weapons in limited quantities, typically with a single unit receiving a mix of weapon types. Fitted to existing halftrack mounts, these weapons were issued to anti aircraft units, though they were often intended for ground attack uses. Here we see both a Heat Ray and a plasma weapon of some type:





Ev
The Heat Rays were very popular with the troops and made excellent area-denial weapons. Effective in the anti-infantry role, when fired the weapon spewed forth a shower of white-hot sparks, instantly vaporizing organic tissues. The victim's remains are deposited on the ground as a roughly man-shaped lump of white powder. An interesting side-effect of extensive use of the weapon is a localized magnetic field which can knock out wired and wireless communications and temporarilly magnetize clocks and compases, rendering them useless for a short time.





The plasma weapon, referred to by the troops simply as a "death ray," is a more complicated -- and less reliable -- design, but it is the far more potent of the two weapons. Its science is a secret closly guarded and seldom explained by the scientists of the Third Reich, but it somehow breaks down the atomic forces holding molecules together. Any object hit by these glowing green globs simply seases to exist. Tanks glow for a moment before they disapear. Humans freeze in place, their skeleton briefly shadowed by their radioactive flesh, before they also vanish.





I built these models on a whim on afternoon. Based on Battlefront armoured AA halftracks (it is two vehicles, with different putty-made stowage, but I wasn't consistant when I took the pictures), the weapon mounts are removable, allowing the vehicles to return to standard duty.



The guns themselves are built up from old Games Workshop 40K heavy weapons. In this case I used a multi-melta from a Space Marine land speeder, and a plasma cannon from... somewhere (maybe Imperial Guard? I really don't remember.) The gunners are Battlefront side-car riders seated on cut-down Old Glory side cars, with some rivited plate armour salvaged from some old GierKrieg models. The controlls are disused gun sights, and the back sides were detailed with whatever crap from the bitz box looked right, mostly Space Marine jet pack and bolter parts.



Eventually I'll come up with some rules for these things as part of mysooner-or-later-but-probably later Weird War Two project.