Star Wars Reinforcement; Probe Droids, Speeder Bikes, Zero G Troopers

 A bit late for May the Fourth, but I hadn't even been working on these for that reason. So....serendipity. Probe droids and the bikers are some found stls printed out. I had a couple of rounds of resizing to try and make them match my other figs (it's hard to size sitting folks and comparing them to slightly hunched rifle firing ones). 

The zero - G troops are some old sculpts from Ground Zero Games. I *think* NAC but could be mistaken. They are definitely the previous generation of sculpt and have languished in my pile o lead for a LONG time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15mm Star Wars: Empire support weaponry

"Sir! We have confirmation that our detachments heavy equipment has now arrived in system."

"Excellent, begin sweeping the outlying areas, it's important that these local scum understand that the fist of the Empire is hovering above their obstinate heads. "

 

 

More reveals of the 15mm star wars force I have been secretly building up. It's funny how many secret things happen in this fictional universe. 

The heavy work of figering out what minis to use was mined from the internets by diligent searchs. Turns out the there were some micro machine star wards lines that are pretty close to 1:100. 

The AT AT is obviously undersized.......but does it really need to be any bigger for a game? I don't seem myself using it as an actual unit as opposed to facing background and/or objective. 

The AT ST are much more 'in line' scale wise. I have 3 of these bad boys. Considering I only have 30 troopers and a mere 3 support weapons it's a good thing too.

15mm Star Wars: The Boys in White

 Credible intelligence has been received of Rebel activity in Coaltown. You will deploy your men to prevent an attack and locate additional rebel humint. Now move out!

 

15mm Star Wars: Rebel naval troops

I've had a slow burn (VERY SLOW) project to get some 15mm figs on the table for star wars action. These folks are meant to be rebel naval troops.....the poor shmucks who get dismantled in the 1st movie ever produced. 

They are a bit....under geared in the movie. I imagine that they are acting as a diplomatic honor guard more so than doing a hard assault. Naval troops I imagine are both for ship board security (and while at dock/port), but also form scratch forces of infantry when the full army (such that it is for the rebels) isn't nearby. Perfect setting for small scale gaming. 

May the 4th be with you... 15mm star wars characters

 Yikes! Time spins by so fast. I've been snowed under with daycare plague brought home by the children and a new (second) job. Productivity in the painting department has definitely suffered. I have been doing a paint night a month with some friends via discord so that is a positive. 

Here are some figures that have been recently completed and most fortuitously....topical to the date!

As noted in the title they are 15mm figs. Some pals from space. The maker is a bit reticent to go out and use labels so I suppose I should respect that as well. 

Bases are from proxie miniatures.

Enfilade 2019 pt 3 Saturday Afternoon - Battle of Hoth (Airwar C21)

Saturday afternoon (second block) I joined in with the Battle of Hoth (how it should have been). This was an "air combat" game using airwar C21. I see this ruleset come up for conventions fairly frequently but I have never played. It seems fairly quick to play, easy to pick up, but I can't comment on how 'realistic' it is.

I was on the rebel side attempting to guard the ion cannon and powerplant for long enough for the transports to get away. Our assets included a line of turrets (fairly short range and poor accuracy), some ground troops (to get shot at by storm troopers), 4 y wings, and maybe 6-8 xwings. By the strange randomness of conventions one fellow (Victor maybe?) and myself ended up with our 2 y wings on the left flank flying directly at the imperials, while the balance of the rebels swing across the table diagonally from the right, creating a bit of a flanking furball when they arrived.

The imperials needed to blow up the power plant and ion cannon OR capture the base with their storm troopers. They had a fairly huge host of empire bombers (4-6?), 2 tyderian shuttles with storm trooper squads, and a few tie fighter escorts (4+).

The GM had done a good job setting us up with cheat sheets and tracking records. The rules seem pretty easy. Unfortunately with the noise, a bit of ambiguity of the cheat sheets, and a pretty light touch on explaining rules up front there was some confusion about how shooting worked. This didn't end up mattering too much before we figured it out, but it did affect how the rebels used their missiles.

Turns out that gunfire does 1 points of damage per hit, whereas a missile hit does 1d10. The Y wing pilots all largely ended up cooking off their missiles ASAP believing they were in flying coffins and it was better to have used them then not. The GM kept shaking his head about why we'd use them on lower value targets like the escorts. We were thinking "my guns do 2d10 damage, why wouldn't I use the weaker missiles".....ooops.

I feel quite bad for one of the empire flyers who was flying a couple of the tie fighters who was tabled *very quickly* as 'missiles away!' and the thought that we'd be better off chewing up the bombers once the screen was gone. He walked away obviously irritated and I can't blame him at all.
As we figured out how guns actually worked we discovered our turrets were barely a speed bump and the tie bombers (with a ton of missiles that only attacked ground targets) were destroying them left and right.

The rebels managed to down a shuttle, forced the other to drop their stormtroopers early, and cut the empire bombers down to 2. Alas two bombers with bays full of 10 missiles each did short work on our infrastructure. *BOOM*

Well played imperials, well played.

Interestingly the GM noted this was the first time the imperials actually won. The big difference being they usually spread their forces across the table or on two corners. This time they were concentrated on one flank (far from our own heavy flank), and we simply couldn't do enough damage in time with the target rich environment. Clever play rather than simple luck on this one.

I'd be willing to try airwar C21 again to get a better sense of it. It'd be good to hear from those who play more air games as I've only played CY6 (and Cy6 jet age) and it's definitely a more crunchy realistic system (with the resulting increase in playtime/decrease in flyers required).

Star Wars Armada: Game 2

Once again I dropped in on my friend for a game of armada. Since I'm pretty clueless on the game, he has been making balanced forces. This time we played with some of the smaller support ships, and more fighters.

Our mission was to pick up 'intelligence' tokens, with a single nominated ship on each side. We both 'cleverly' hid the tokens in the asteroid fields, and set up for a head to head pass. Garret used a fast blockade runner, while I was hoping to explode him with my Gladiator. Unfortunately I've found the gladiator is a knife fighter that is incredibly tricky to actually get into firing range. Boo.

The rebels had admiral ackbar who adds a sick amount of firepower to all the broadsides, which ended up being pretty punishing over the game.






More after the jump....

Star Wars Armada: first play

Crush the sci fi terrorist!

 I've managed to locate another war gamer locally. A great find of high caliber: he has both sides of numerous games....painted! We met up for a first game of Star Wars armada. I randomly drew the imperials (secretly I was hoping to play the star destroyers).






There's an interesting mission selection mechanic where each player builds three options into their list. The dice off for initiative determines which players choices get used. Having no idea what we were doing we random selected a mission which ended up with the imperials getting to hyperspace jump in one smaller ship and 3 groups of fighters into the middle of the board later in the game.

 This game seems to theme, and reward, the player who can predict what till be happening/needed in the future. 

There are 4 types of commands you order up (roughly damage control, shoot more/better, change speed/turn harder, get more fightyness from your fighters). The big/slow ships have to queue up their orders up to 3 turns in advance.

Firing happens before movement, so you remove a crutch most players don't realize they have where they can move into better range before letting loose with their guns.

 The movement ruler is articulated and ships are allowed certain numbers of 'clicks' of turning each space interval. It's pretty clever and easy to learn to use, but quite restrictive maneuvering wise for the big ships. Very thematic. We both ran into space hazards, and my opponent managed to bumper car his own ships a couple of times.

The ships end up with quite a different flavour. I particularly notice my smaller star destroyer was a pig to move and turn. There's a variety of defensive tokens that each ship gets, which also conveys a difference in how each ship functions in battle (ex nebulon b frigates have 2 evade tokens, whereas the big star destroyer has none). 

I was soundly thrashed by my opponent. I think poor setup (I didn't get my big ship where it was much use, and my small ships ended up directly facing his bruisers), and a failure to capitalize on my hyperspace ambush (I popped in right as everything was flying out of range of my guns) weighed pretty heavily. It also takes a bit of time to grok a new game. 

I'm totally looking forward to getting in some more games, as it has a very cool look, and seems to play reasonably fast.

We figure a bit under 3 hours with 'tournament point value' including rules explanations, occasional rules look ups, & general unfamiliarity (i.e. thinking hard about what to do for each phase, rather than it being fairly obvious what the better options are).  I could easily see this dropping to 2 with a second or third game.