So...2mm?

Actually yes, 2mm.  I'm looking soon to a world I'll have to give up the hobby room in to have a bedroom for another child.  My wife is doing the best she can supporting a hobby she find infantile, but it's greater DC-space remains a premium, and with as much as I get to the hobby (see blog title if there's any confusion) I will have to reduce.

While my eyes are good, I'm going small.  How Small.  Well, below please find my Late Roman Archers, my Sassanid Cataphracts, a Sassanid Elephant, and a Beer (the Tradition from DCBrau). Drink the last, paint the first three.

So, yeah, tiny.

At the least these are armies I can paint, base, and store in a limited space.  You should see these guys based on 1" x 1/2" to 1" x 1" bases shortly, but deeds not words.

In case you are interested, there's a good guide here. Especially the article on Atomic DBA that I'm using as the foundation.  I could do this large, with bases with twelve of these little castings each, but I'm going easy.  I could also do generic armies, instead I'm going to be stubborn with separate armies for each of the ones in my little "7th Century Collapse (or Rise depending on your point of view) Campaign". Like my aspirations for DBAesque Moderns, color is a major theme (little byzantine humor there).

Current Figures
  Byzantines - Red
  Sassanids - Purple
  Arab Conquest - Green

Phase II
  Visigoths - Blue
  Avars & Bulgars - Orange (Both, options, one army)
  Lombards - Black
  Khazar - White
  Lakhamids - Yellow

Still looking at some other options - Slavs, Ostrogoth, and Moors are shortlisted, but before I plan too much let me at least basecoat what I have.  I think this range would be perfect for Horse and Musket, but, you know, one project at a time.  More the pity there's only one source for these figs.  Irregular has a mixed rep-everyone always says they "paint up well", but can be a little rough.  Their selection is unequaled though, and looking at their smaller scales, whether these or the Dark Dwarf 6mm army I bought 16 years ago, there's few, if any better.

I wanted to make one last comment, in case you are still reading - I tried to buy some metal bases from the brick and mortar around the corner.  Apparently they can't get them for me.  When did we stop being able to get metal bases...but ok. I am going to go back to my porch and yell at kids in my yard, pining for the days when hobby shops were plentiful and I could afford Games Workshops models.

Further Thoughts on The Battle for Planet Earth

This is an opportunity post I started while I had a two month old passed out on my chest.  As the twin of this points to, he's six months now, so little progress was made. This means, probably, few links and no pictures.  Not sexy, but an opportunity to spitball.

Since I started this, I have failed the Guild challenge.  Between work and parenthood, it wasn't happening.  but I still have my fleet.

I can't argue that the ships from Bandai are cheap.  Running two bucks a pop, they're pretty well detailed, and well the occasional headache occurs putting them together, there's far worse I've encountered with fantasy figures in 28mm.

The problem is that of scale.  I originally bought these figures with an eye to mixing them with Silent Death ships.  I was inspired by this post and the rest is history.  The problem is that some mix, some clearly do not.  If you look at the lead figure variants here ships match, but the Bandai plastic Okita and Kodaikan (if you're still following me, bravo) are close to the same size.  Or in more sane words, Cruisers and Destroyers are roughly within an inch of each other in a game which huge ships clock in at 6".  A possible explination is the size of jump drives....but I will noodle on this.

As a side note for anyone who might care, I am a fan of Silent Death, it was the go to game for college days.  It plays fun but two problems arose, periodically.  The first is the moment we all remember from every bit of space anime in history, when the ships get to standoff distance, and every torpedo is released, and has to be tracked.  The other is the Conga Line of Death, where intiative feeds into ordered distruction. Still, fun and quick.  I'm now looking to see if I can convert CY6! to something playable...project 107 on the pile.

So what am I saying.  I like these ships.  I have now about 30 of them.  And I still have no clue what I will rule set I will use.

Why Wargame?

Don't worry, this is not a diatribe on existential angst or desire to imitate a smoking French philosopher.

I missed Historicon.  This is all the more disappointing, as it was a mere hour down the road, but there were more important things to deal with, like a drooly now six month old who eats my clock and gives me an adequate excuse not to blog most days.

So I looked at some pictures and remembered my last big east coast gaming convention.  During one of the events I remember seeing a Roman vs. Roman battle, Phillipi I think.  It was pretty impressive, scenery was well done and the figures looked wonderful in 28mm.  Out of all the battles, that one stuck out, as the Cohorts, or Legions, or whatever the force divisions were for this particular rule set, were stacked on a 5'x6' table with no space in between them.

Is this wargaming:  lining up troops, moving them forward, and rolling dice.  One can write a software program to determine the result (not me mind you but someone).  That doesn't seem fun.  Lately I've been fascinated with Check Your 6!, the skirmish game, and DBA.  Why?  They give you decisions to make.  I look at a number of convention games I played, and few of them really give options.  You take your barbarian horde and charge the Roman wall-the table doesn't have room for a left or right-and what?

I have been reading a few documents of late.  There's not a lot of time, but between a doc on the Northern Crusade and anthology of award winning sci-fi, I've been reading about the Soviet Operational Art.  Why?  It's because it's not just about the battle there, it's about preparing to be in the battle at a much higher level that wargaming I see allows.  It's because I was thinking about  the Ulm Campaign as I read about it in the End of the Old Order.  This is a game where armies campaign , and with surprising little in the way of battle, the Austrian Army capitulated.

I've seen boardgames that capture the strategic, and wargames capture the tactical.  However, for you wargamers out there, when have you actually chosen the ground your soldiers fight on?  I think that is the game as much as the actual battle.  That is what gets my juices going, and that is what I'm trying to figure out. There are options I am exploring, and really Battlefinder has the best starting point when combined with a simple game system (read: DBA), with Too Fat Lardies' philosophy on blinds, but, I'm still figuring this out.

The fact is, though I am a fortunate man, I do not have a great wealth of space for gaming nor funds (wargaming library to the contrary).  What this means is me thinking back to that table, way back at the beginning of my monologuing, with Philipi.  It's about the scale.  I can put one 28mm figure on a 1"x1".  Or I could put a cavalry stand in the same space.  How?  This is the point of solution where I am certain someone is going to throw something at me.

Irregular Miniatures puts out a series of 2mm.  I've been looking at a number of 3mm figures, be it Jet Aircraft or Cold War formations.  I realize it's microscopic, and as the poor painter I am, this is just a space saving option to use something just one notch over counters.  For me, it's about the game, not the spectacle, so this will work for me, particularly as we consider what a 4'x3' table could bring, especially when the stands are 1" x 3/4" for infantry.

It's not ideal. No one is pretending that much.  But my fleet of Starblazers ships sits in drydock.  My 15mm Romans and Celts sit only basecoated.  I have either time or energy lately, and that, I hear, for fathers, is not unusual.  So I plan to start a project where an army costs roughly $7, and limit the focus to the 7th Century, with Sassanids, Barbarians Successor States, Byzantines, Arab Conquest, Bulgars, Avars, Khazars, Slavs and the rest tumble together in a mess worthy of gaming. Obviously from the list I'm not much on limiting.  It'll shake out, I'm sure.

Will it work?  I'll let you know. I order this weekend.

In the end, if I'm using 2mm Micro Wargaming to wage a war of maneuver as well as the battles as well, then I will be satisfied.  Even if it's just a bunch of glorified counters.