FoW: 3rd Infantry Division

So being too weak to actually paint or build models (that second Heavy Gear: Blitz! Grizzly with the broken leg is giving me fits), I decided to photograph where my 3ID is currently (Army, not Marines for those not into Flames of War).  With the release of a new rule set, hopefully I'll get a chance to play.  In the near future, as local gamers whine, waffle and wait for 40K 6th Ed.

M2A1 105mm Howitzers Field Artillery Battery

So the 105s are one of the thinks that make a US Rifle Company really work.  Why?  They lay smoke, and smoke hides infantry!  In 2nd edition, this was really important, in 3rd, we'll see if the importance lessened any by how much easier it is to stay gone to ground and concealed.  Additionally, now that moving artillery isn't so painful, maybe that will happen too.

One team on front view

A different team on rear view.

M1 57mm Anti-Tank Platoon

These guys seem to be overly hated by German armored cars and Panzer IIIs.  I mean, they only 1/2 the time and cost 100pts.  Oh, ya... obligatory 4 bazooka teams not shown...

Nice impression of the # ID patch on the shoulder.  Light Grey with Blue liner pen.

Weapons Platoon

These guys shoot a lot.  Sadly the M2 60mm mortar does not fire a smoke round.  I do believe those M1017 HMGs get better in the new version though.  I never really had them do much.  Being able to shoot over my own units should help a ton.

Sample of my infantry teams

Proof that GW Badab is truly, liquid talent.

I play an Infantry Company so I have lots of these buggers.

And here are some shoots of what I have done, what is started, and then what may never make it out of the box.

Here is everything I have completely painted and sealed.  Handy little force for fun games.

Here is the work in progress.  Those big guys in the back never actually entered production in the real war.  I hear they made it into World of Tanks.

And everything else... Close ups of the stack below.

And here you can see what I exactly all that other "stuff is... Mostly stuff for Late War, since well US Infantry doesn't get any better.

I like to stack things, it makes my laziness feel more organized.

And blisters, Oh My!

Food Poisoning

... really impairs your ability to hold a paint brush steady.  I wont even dare to mess with the airbrush in my state.  Ironically, this is the healthiest I have been on my birthday in years.  Perhaps this is a good time to get the light box out and photograph so stuff I have painted in thr past two years.  Did I actually paint anything int eh past two years?

Heavy Gear: Blitz! -Part I

I bought this.

So in a random fit of curiosity, I started looking into Heavy Gear: Blitz! (HGB, for short).  What is it?  It is a miniatures game set at 1:144 scale for (primarily) combined ground force combat.  The stars of the game are vehicles known as Gears.  They are capable of walking for well, for a lack of a better term roller skating across the surface of the far away and basically abandoned planet Terra Nova.  I like mechs, and was looking for random stuff to add to my cart on The Warstore and well, things just proceeded from there.

I will say, that I bought a copy of Locked and Loaded v1.1 (the rule book from 2009) some time back.  So I had read the rules once, and then became engrossed in the fiction.  I knew that a 3 gears on 3 gears two player intro was near useless, so I decided on the Northern Army Starter Kit.  It is a jam packed box as we'll get to in a bit.  The outward presentation is top notch.

 Here is the back of the box explaining in a nice clear type what is in the box, and how customizable it is.  Kinda handy actually.  That weapons chart there, is way more helpful than you can imagine at this point if you have no experience with HGB.

The sides of the box are given over the description and pictures of two of the three chassis you'll be assembling (a Jaguar and  Grizzly, poor Hunter got left out).

So what is it like opening a box? Well, first be aware for its size, it is pretty heavy, you get tons of stuff.

It all fits inside tightly.

Really simple, but wholly functional packing.

Now yo see that white slip there?  That is pretty much the only guidance you get.  Why two rule books? Well, here is the thing... That green and black rulebook is the complete, up to date rules set (with some extra handy stuff like errata to other books, etc.) and that pretty orange one is the old rule book with all the army lists for the main factions in it.  So from a value perspective, you get all the information you'll need.  The rule books are black and white, and sometimes the things that should be in color translate to grey scale very poorly and are very difficult to read.  It turns out much of that information is readily available on their website, but as a total newbie I didn't know that.  Actually, Dream Pod 9 (the manufacturer)  is approaching a Corvus Belli (Infinity) level customer interaction via the website.  The website however is not in the box.  They do heavily encourage you to go there on that white slip.

You also get two trays of five gears (one a Strike Group, the other a Fire Support Group), 2 dice and a little round tape measure.



The metal making the box so heavy.

 The gears' chassis themselves come in 5 or so pieces, with weapons and accessories adding a variable amount based on load out.

A grizzly Chassis (top) and a Jaguar Chassis (bottom).

So I decided to build the big guy, known as a Grizzly.  As I understand, these are the big guns of the Northern Coalition.  Their little data card is chocked full of stats for weapons, everything from a guided heavy mortar to a vibroblade.

Bits o' Grizzly.

As far as molding goes, it was a mixed bag.  The left leg was flawless, while the right legs had a nasty mold line right down the treads on the foot.  There was also some mild mold slippage on the same treads.  The rest of the pieces where fairly standard in quality, nothing glaring bad, but still required some attention and mild clean up. (Update: I decided to build the second Grizzly last night, and the leg had actually ripped in half at a thin joint, probably from being a space too small for it.)



After how many years of fixing GW and FoW treads, yet another game that has my pet peeve.



And other shoe drops...  proof they can in fact do it right.


So using my awesome modelling ability, I overcame these insurmountable difficulties and built a model just to see how it goes together and get a real sense of the scale.

A gadget for every occasion, see what I mean a real walking arsenal.

So the body of this thing was easy to build, as it has nice sockets and pins for everything to fit together.  That is when I cam to how to arm this thing.  Obviously you can't equip all that stuff at once, well that actually isn't all that obvious, but you can't.  Having no idea what exactly is good, or well rounded or what not I decided to build a stock Grizzly.  So off to the data cards in the back of the book.
(Update: it turns out, the white slip of paper actually recommends a congiuration for the Fire Support team)

Not for the visually impared.

 That little block of stats is what you have to go by, and in decent light in my basement it was hard to read.  The fact that it is dithered grey scale is think contributes heavily to that.  it turns out you can get nice full color cards for with this data from their website for free to print out.  That is awesome, actually; but, as a newbie I am just excited and building models with minimal direction.  So after return to the back of the sleeve, I find all those little parts except the thing labelled HMG.  HMG any war gamer will assume means heavy machine gun.  So I get out my Field Manual to confirm that I am correct, then I go looking for a picture of it.  There is an expanded reference with every weapon in the game in the Field Manual.  Not there.  Hmm, after a while I discovered there is an integrated HMG of the lower right torso.  Okay, so I lost 10 minutes of my life, but I gained an appreciation for how stuff works in this game.

Don't throw this away, you'll really need it when you start.

The hand weapons are added using the time honored tradition of chopping off the handle and placing on a closed fist that we all learned back in the day on our 1st-3rd edition space marine, and numerous conversion packs.  The main different here, you are glueing a very narrow tab into a very shallow slot.   My heavy autocannon thus droops a little, but given that it isn't really being aimed like person would it (the gear just carries it, and the fine adjustments are all done via senors and computers), I don't think it is a huge deal.  If I ever really get into this game, I'll probably go back and modify it.

So  I started with this...

and ended up with this...

These models are shown to scale, otherwise this would be a pointless picture.

So there you have it, the basis for my initial impression of the boxed starter army.  So here is my actual impression.

This is not for a wargaming newbie.  For many of the basics you are on your own.  The models will require some detailed cleaning, and installing the weapons systems will require rudimentary conversion skills.  Trying to determine weapons loadouts are difficult, but clearly doable.  Working you way better Feild Manual, Locked and Loaded (which contains obsolete rules in addition to the current army lists)and the internet can be frustrating and counter intuitive.  Really that white sheet need to be double sided or better yet a nice getting started pamplet explaining more.

For an experienced wargamer, things are different.  This is a god kit for the educated consumer.  Go online and read about what is in the kit, so when you get it you'll not be dazed by the "new and shiny".  Read the manual, learn the weapons and lay everythng out above and you'll generally be fine.  They give you tons of weapons options, so you can get the set, and reconfigure everything later.  This a very much a bits box game, and so far I have tons of left over stuff.  Maybe it will be like how everyone has tons of bolters laying around, I don't know yet.  The models themselelves are varied, adn with some planning you can mix and match the arms or do soem minor conversions to get some reallty nice poses.

Glowing Chickens and a not yet dead chick...

So I have slowly been puttering away at my Cryx battlebox.  Are they awesome, not hardly. In fact now that I am looking at them under a harsh flash, they look terrible (actually I am running the flash through a diffuser box, but anyway).  One sure way to ruin your self esteem in the painting world is take up close photography.  Maybe I'll do a post on the pro and cons of self photo critique later.  What looks to the normal eye to be a decent start on blending looks like sports black or a watery paint mishap.  However the lighting int eh basement is so bad (and yellow tinged) the flash works well enough until I get out the light box, and have a little more control the photography.  I have a hunch, it will still look terrible though.

Here is the group currently.

Denny is all her unfinished glory.

I play football.

Seriously though, this Stalker is only in the beginning phases of highlighting and blending.  The massive blue blotches on the head are barely visible to the human eye.

Here are the orange painted and green inked ones.  I have started the highlighting  and some of the touch ups.

Amd here is the orange inked bad boy.  I am not really happy with how he turned out though.  Since I had to mix custom orange from red and yellow, I didn't really get the color I wanted.  Inks when concentrated look nothing like what they turn out to be spread on white paint.

The woes of yellow ink...

So for anyone in who lives in the NoVA area (specifically the 95 corridor in Prince William County), you know we have had a bad run over the past few years with gaming stores.  Recently, I discovered it is even creeping in to craft stores.  So with our GW gone for years now, Game Parlor gone for a while, and HobbyTown gone, I went to Micheal's for of all things... yellow ink.

I am painting some Cryx and I wanted to a nice orange glow from the "furnace" over a deep blue chassis (Exile Blue for the PP paint people). For what ever reason, the first attempt I used paint.  This gave me a chicken 'jack that looked like it was on fire.  Neat, but not at all what I was after.  So I decided to try and do it with ink to get a more menacing glow.  Well, okay, I can see orange ink not being that common since it can easily be made from red and yellow ink.  Given that it will take a lot of ink over an entire army of Cryx that happen to glow a lot (actually they wont, but I want the glow consistent over all my models to do and will painted at different times).  I decided to hold off making a big batch of custom orange ink, and just try out of the inking methodology on a chicken 'jack with green just like in the back of the Cryx book.  Well it turns out I didn't own yellow ink...

Yellow ink...  I tend to use calligrapher's ink for my models.  It is cheaper, comes in bulk (for my purposes bulk is those little glass jars), and is generally nice high quality stuff.  It doesn't come in yellow though.  Which when I think about it kinda makes sense. Who writes in yellow?  Well, as I mentioned above, hobby supplies are in kinda short supply in NoVA.  So Micheal's doesn't carry it (or sable brushes anymore).  GW doesn't carry ink anymore (woe to me, for I have all the other inks).  Fredericksburg is so far away that I have to plan my trips there carefully (which wasn't going to happen in the time window I wanted to start the orange glow).  So Warstore here I come...

Ah Warstore...  If I ever get married, I have a hunch my credit card will be blocked from there.   So I am snooping through the volumes of stuff on there and find Vallejo Transparent Orange.  Oh, premixed Orange?  that is exactly what I need, so I go and order it and red and yellow and wood.  Wood ink you say?  Ya, that should have tipped me off that I wasn't buying ink.  Of course, I proceed to buy tons of things that are not ink, like Heavy Gear: Blitz, ACTA: StarFleet, an extra Ashlynn to convert into a non-pumpkin head, etc..  The key is, not ink.. .  Well, Neil manages to get that box to me in less than 48 hours, pretty sweet, and everything is actually in the order!  So I run to the basement with my transparent paint in hand, excited to get my green grow trials underway.  And I was less than impressed.  Transparent paint is cool, and I can see potential for it; however not as a substitute for ink.  After all that, off to Game Vault in Fredericksburg Saturday night for yellow ink (and red, and green and blue).  Oh well, So here are some snap shots of what I have been painting.

Here are the base coated Cryx models that haven't had any attempt at lighting.

  The bugger on the left is my first attempt at OSL of an orange glow, as you can see he is on fire, which is not a sinister orange glow.  The Green glow is the attempt where I actually had yellow and green ink.  I also switched shades of green ink from Windsor Newton Green, to PP green. I am starting to get the hang of the white base for the white base. The use of the white base for green glow is giving me fits.I think the inked one looks better in person, the camera is picking up a ton of glare that wont be there on the final model (ink being shiny until sealed and all).

Here are the same models on the opposite profile.  On the right is my green glow using green ink and yellow transparent paint.  While not hideous, it was not what I was looking for.  You can also see the subtle highlighting and shading I started on the orange one.

Back from the brink.

Okay, so a good 6 sinus infections, two gaming groups shrinking to near nothing, numerous hobbies and Lord knows what else, I have finally found the time and energy to start back at this.  So that is the why I haven't been blogging, now what I have I been up to? Well, I read a Song of Ice and Fire, got a high end Kichten Aid Mixer, actually played in a series of Warmachine tournaments, started teaching someone how to paint and play that game, started new factions for games I rarely play (Cryx, ALEPH, early war British), bought way too much stuff for game systems I don't think I'll ever play even once (Heavy Gear: Bliltz!, Uncharted Seas, Firestorm Armada, MERCS among others).  I even stopped buying GW products other than paint.  My last model purchased was the Space Wolves termies adn the last book the Grey Knights Codex.

Hopefully over the long weekend, I'll get a chance to document my partially painted Cryx bottle box and summarize my experience with the Heavy Gear starter.

Along the way, I am going to also start documenting a bit of my other unfinished hobbies inculding photography (ya, I bought Adobe CS 5 Design Premium which was an more costly and foolish decision than most of my miniature expenditures) and fancy bread baking.