More Shapeways

Last month, Shapeways had a sale where they provided free shipping, so I took the opportunity to get some items that I've always wanted. Since I've been looking for Battlefleet Gothic miniatures as orbital support markers for my Epic armies, and the original BFG miniatures are long out of print, I got some BFG-inspired space ship miniatures as proxies. Not only can they be used for Epic, but I can also start building BFG fleets with them.

This miniature is based on a Space Marine strike cruiser from BFG. The design is very similar but not quite exactly the same as the original, and it has somewhat less detail. However, the Frosted Ultra Detail material from Shapeways is quite nice and avoids most of the "texture" problems from cheaper materials. The clear material doesn't photograph well, but after getting painted it'll look a lot nicer.

This one is based on the original Forge World Grey Knight strike cruiser. Again, it's not as "baroque" as the BFG miniature, and it's missing some trademark GW items, like shields and swords on the fins. With some Warhammer bits, I think I can "Gothicize" it.

These are very small gunships that can be used as proxies for Thunderhawks in BFG. To give a sense of scale, the base is a Wargames Factory 20X20mm square. They have a lot of detail for their size and the FUD material really comes through.

This time, I'm quite impressed by Shapeway's 3D prints. The more expensive FUD material really makes a difference. I can't wait to get these painted.

Mayday 2015

This past weekend, I attended the Mayday gaming convention here in Edmonton again.  This year, due to the lack of conflicting Warmachine tournaments, we had both the Warhammer 40k and the Warmachine crowds, and the community center was packed.

The room was so full of tables that my X-Com game had to be moved outside in the hallway.

I ran the same scenarios from last year, but with some gray aliens (sectoids) filling in as the enemies for the UFO crash site, and humans with medium armour fighting the snakemen in the urban scenario.

I hosted a local player who was also here last year through the urban scenario, and it proved to be a lot easier for the humans this time around. Here is a shot of X-Com troops taking cover behind the convenience store.

Since there was time after the first game, we played through the UFO crash site again. The sectoids were weaker opponents, but this time the humans were not so lucky.

At the end, the humans were wiped out and failed to kill all the aliens at the crash site. Here a sectoid captured the wounded X-Com sniper, probably taking him away for probing...

After my game hosting, I played in a DBA tournament. This year, it was rather sparse since some of the regular DBA players were away at the time. We also used the new 3.0 version of the rules, which took some getting used to.

Later in the day, I played in Terry's "All Quiet on the Martian Front" game, which I play-tested on the previous EWG night. This time around, the Martians (including me) were more aggressive, and tripod casualties were high. In the above picture, you can see one of Terry's flashing fire/smoke markers on a destroyed tripod.

It was another great gaming convention, and I can't wait to try the updated X-Com game at Fallcon this year.

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...