Back to X-Com

For this year's Mayday gaming convention, I'm running my Strange Aeons: X-Com game again, this time with slightly different scenarios to make it easier on the human player.

I've painted up some extra miniatures for both the human and alien sides, to make the original scenarios better-balanced.

First up are some Elhiem Figures "armoured fed troopers", used as medium-armoured X-Com operatives. These are incredibly good miniatures that fit well with plastic 1/72 miniatures. Hopefully they are part of a trend popularizing 1/72 scale science fiction.

This is one of the armoured troopers compared to a Caesar ultra modern miniature.  You can see that they fit together perfectly in terms of height and proportions.

Here's the whole gang I painted up.  They can be used as a squad with rifles, a heavy weapon, and a leader with some sort of carbine.

A close-up of the heavy weapons trooper and his loader.

Another comparison shot with a Caesar miniature and the Elhiem carbine trooper.

I'm thinking of using these medium-armoured X-Com troops against the original snakemen, and give them better armour and weapons ratings than the poor initial tech-level humans.

To get a bunch of easier opponents for the humans at early tech levels, I painted up some sectoids. These are Rebel Minis alien grays, and even though they are designed for 15 mm, they can fill in as child-sized aliens for 1/72.  The only modification I did was to add some wrist-mounted plasma pistols since the originals were unarmed.

Here's a comparison shot showing the height of the grays. They look fine as small aliens versus human miniatures.

I'll see if the humans do better this time. The sectoids, just like in the computer game, are significantly weaker than humans and only have plasma pistols. Hopefully this will give the early level humans a fighting chance.

Tuesday Gaming Night

Ever since I bought a smart phone, I started taking pictures of my regular Tuesday night gaming club events.  This is the first time I'm actually posting any pictures from one though.

I went to the April 21st gaming night hoping to have a practice run of my X-Com game for Mayday.  However, it looked like everyone was occupied with a game already, so I just joined an "All Quiet on the Martian Front" game, also being prepped for Mayday.

The game has an excellent sci-fi premise of the Martians from H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" coming back for another round during the time of WWI.  The humans have various type of primitive tanks, along with giant "land ironclads", and the Martians have their classic tripods in a variety of flavours.

The scenario we played centered around an American land ironclad getting attacked by a large group of Martians, along with other human reinforcements thrown into the mix.  The land ironclad is a huge resin model that dominated the table.  Unfortunately it didn't hit much due to bad dice rolls.

In this picture a group of rough riders - overly brave motorized chaps - tried to immobilize a Martian tripod with grappling hooks.  They succeeded too!

Here, massed tanks attack tripods on the Martian flank.

The game was extremely colourful, and I can't wait to play it again at Mayday.

There were a few other games running, including Kevin and Elliott playing the new Star Wars Armada game.  It looked really good.  I think Dave was running a DBA game, and there was a CCA game being played too.

Overall, it was a pretty good night.

Bio-Titans

Continuing on with my epic scale Tyranid kit-bashes, I created some bio-titans, again from 40k bits.

These will represent barbed hierodules, the ones with barbed strangler launchers.  They are small bio-titans and are made from 40k termagant bits.

A couple of close-up shots showing the details of their guns.

These are scythed hierodules, with two large scything talons and optimized for close-combat.  They're made from 40k hormagaunt and termagant bits.

 

More close-ups showing details.

These are a couple of trygons, made from gargoyle bodies, ripper heads, and gaunt scything talons.  The talons look a little too "busy" to me, so maybe I'll change them around a bit for later versions...

I also put together something larger - an attempt at an hierophant, the largest of the bio-titans.  This is made from a warrior body and various large creature bits.  I like most of it, but it still sort of leaves me cold.  Maybe I can try a different design.

This is the same creature from the side.

Now I just have to start doing some painting.

Harridans

To create some enemies for the Tau from my previous post, I started putting together some Epic Tyranid kit-bashes.  The good thing about Tyranids is that you can use Warhammer 40k bits to make larger creatures for Epic scale.

I made a couple of harridans from left-over Tyranid gaunt, warrior, and gargoyle pieces.  These are quite imposing in Epic scale, being the size of very large flyers.  In Epic Armageddon, these are war engines with 3 damage capacity.

A close-up of the first one - the wings are from Dark Eldar ravagers, which are slightly larger and seem to be more fitting than gargoyle wings.

I used a slightly different pair of ravager wings for the second harridan, to give it a different position in flight.

Here's a harridan next to one of the Tau Orca transports.  It's suitably menacing air support for the Tyranids.

I have a bunch of Onslaught games Tyranid proxies too, for all the smaller creatures, and I've got some ideas for other Tyranid bio-titans.  More to come soon...

Something Epic?

I recently bought some old Forge World Epic scale Tau aircraft from a wargames forum I visit.  This is a game I played years ago, and I've always loved 6mm/Epic scale miniatures.  The Forge World resin models were also works of art, possessing extreme amounts of detail.  Far from just for nostalgia's sake, maybe this will get me into the game again...

The deal contained two Orca dropships (top) and two Tigershark bombers (bottom).  They came already painted with a desert camouflage scheme, and it looks quite nice, so I probably won't repaint them.  Unfortunately, some of the always-delicate resin aerials snapped off the models a long time ago.  I'll have to see if I want to repair them.  Included for scale is a Forge World Epic scale Tau Devilfish APC I had lying around.

The unpainted resin model is a Firestorm Armada Manta-class ship I already had.  I'm thinking that it looks big enough and close enough in style to the Tau models to use as a proxy Manta-class destroyer for Epic.  The Forge World Tau Manta is so hard to find these days, and it commands such a high price, that there's really no choice other than to use a proxy.  By coincidence, the name even matches!

Maybe this is the start of a Tau army for Epic...

FallCon 2014

This last weekend I went to the FallCon convention in Calgary for the third time, and it was great as usual.  Unfortunately this year it seemed there were fewer miniatures games than last year compared to board games, but there was still a lot of gaming to be done.

Friday night, I joined the "Roadkill" DBA event run by Paul from Seattle.  This was a tournament where you were encouraged to bring one of the worst-performing DBA armies.  I used my ancient Spanish army to proxy the Ilyrian army, one of the obscure book I armies with a strange set of units.  It has a mostly Aux army with a LH general and a high aggression, a bad combination.  I had a good time, but the army didn't do well.  I think I lost a couple of games and won one, but since my camera ran out of power, I didn't have many photos.

Saturday morning, I ran the same Strange Aeons: X-Com game that I ran at Mayday.  There was only one guy playing it, but I think he ended up liking the game and setting.  The humans died pretty badly again in the game, which led me to rethink some of the rules to make things a bit more even in earlier tech level games.

Saturday afternoon, I played in another DBA tournament run by Mark S., this time using only the same armies against each other.  This was mainly for fun, without much score-keeping, so I just took a bunch of pictures.

On Sunday I attended the annual Alberta DBA Open with my Komnenan dynasty army, which I've always considered a fairly versatile one, and I took on three opponents.  I lost against Mark S's Medieval French and won against Marco's Libyans and Dennis' Italian condotierres.

I ended up tying Mark W for second place in the tournament, which is a pretty good showing.

This turned out to be another great weekend, and it's now a gaming tradition for me to go to FallCon.  I'm definitely looking forward to the next one.

2014 Fall Auction Items

The local gaming club here (Edmonton Wargames Group) is holding an eBay auction in the fall to raise money for its operating costs, and I'm donating some of my unused Warhammer 40k miniatures.  I painted these years ago to get them quickly into gaming, but I think the paint still holds up fairly well.

The batch consists of two Tyranid hive tyrants with magnetized arm hard-points, two tyrant guards, and a carnifex with permanently glued guns.

 Here is the whole gang together, a total of 3 large models and 2 medium ones.

 The two tyrant guards.  These are the older all metal models.

The two tyrants, again both previous edition metals.  Both have four magnetic hard points each.  I have two big guns (venom cannon and barbed strangler) for one of them, and a pair of wings and two twin-linked devourers for the other.

This is the tyrant with wings and devourers.

This is the tyrant with the two big guns.

The carnifex is also from the previous edition, but is still all-plastic.  It has a venom cannon and a barbed strangler permanently glued on.

All of these are painted and based, ready to play.  I'll be wrapping these up in bubble wrap and putting them in boxes for the auction.  The tyrants will be shipped with the magnetized weapons detached for safety.  The club member who is running the auction, Dave, will be putting up the auction link when it starts in September.