Flames of War US Army

Well, I finally managed to take some photo's of my Flames of War American forces.... Some may be a bit blurry, my good camera is currently in repair, and we haven't got any decent sunlight here in the Netherlands for a while :-( .

Enjoy!

Clicky for more pics!

Victory at Sea Ship-card database

Long time since my last update, I promise I'll be posting more often. Main culprit currently is my lack of decent photocamera since it has been in repair on and off for the last 4 months.

In the meantime I have been working on my Flames of War and I have been looking for a slightly more detailed naval game than Axis & Allies War at Sea to play. War at Sea has been discontinued for a while now and it seems that Mongoose Publishing is looking to fill that gap with their new 1:1800 line.

I've ordered the River Plate Battle set and will be reporting on the mini's once their in and done.

While waiting I've been working through the V1 rules of Victory at Sea, and it seems like a nice game although some aspects could be improved (V2 is in the works according to Mongoose).

One main gripe with the system (and looking at the navalgame-forums I'm not the only one) is a lack of a quick and clean way to get a ship list to play. The lists in the main rulebook and expansion span 100+ pages and make it very hard to use during play. So some kind of ship cards are in order here.

I've found files of single datacards for each ship but that makes it still a lot of work to get a quick list so I took matters into my own hands.

I've got a little bit of Excel-fu going and I made a database out of which I can select Country, Class, and name for a ship and then print out the corresponding card.

Download Here

When you open the file, save it at your disk. I've not used any macro's, so your virusscanner shouldn't get any heartattacks :-)

Currently I've got the Royal Navy, USA, Japan and Kriegsmarine done. Those are the ones I needed for play, in time I'll add the rest of the fleets.

Enjoy!

Modelling water on ship bases

Sooo, I got the request to make a little tutorial about how I model the water on my ship bases.

Its actually not that hard, but putting things in pictures makes stuff much easier to learn and ofcourse its much more pleasing to the eye!

So while finishing my King George V battleship I used the opportunity to take some pictures while modelling the water effects. Read on for the secret of how to make an awesome ship base!

Deus Vult, the new medieval ruleset by Fireforge

Never having done a review of a ruleset before I guess there must be a first time for everything...

At Crisis I picked up my long awaited Deus Vult ruleset by Fireforge. I got to chat with Fabio and Alessio about the book and they were thrilled that I brought some of my Fireforge-minis to show them. And I was very glad they liked them. I was very honoured that I got the reply "I know those, they are on your blog!", seems my audience is bigger than I thought. :-)

While chatting with Fabio one of the staff tried to give me a sneak peak of the next army, but I guess I'm a bit to 'green' at blogging and getting a scoop, because he got slapped by Fabio before I could get a decent look at it :-D. All I could make out was some horse-archer in a barren landscape, but that could still mean anything. My personal thought is that they will come out with the Arabs first, because there is an Arab armylist in the rulebook (and they have horse archers!).

So read on for a little impression of Deus Vult!

Building USS Texas

It's that time of year again...

Ever since I've been playing War at Sea I've been fascinated by the scratchbuilds being made by the WaS community. Never having tried building man-made structures out of plasticcard (only did some extensive modding on existing ships) I decided to give it a try myself.

Starting from simple cargo ships I've worked up my game to the first highpoint, IJN Nachi. But after Nachi entered my glass cabinet it took almost a year to relight the fire and start scratchbuilding again, this time producing IJN Fuso and HMS Prince of Wales. That was almost a year ago. A year in which I stopped playing Warhammer, picked up Medievals, picked up Flames of War and kind of neglected my Naval miniatures. I think its time to start another project, and since someone has been knocking on my door to do so since the day after I finished the PoW I think it's kind of obvious what the subject should be.

Soooo, stay tuned for the building of USS Texas... I'll be updating this post as progress is made. Untill now I've only made a post on a project after I've almost finished it but thats not the case here since I'm still building (So in a worst-case scenario I'll blow the whole thing off halfway).

Update: I finally finished the model, scroll down for the total building process or just enjoy the pics at the end.

Building a Flames of War Objective

Sooo, since I like to give all my miniature armies some uniqueness by little conversions, additions and scratchbuilds I figured it would be a good time to do some scratchbuilding for my Flames of War army.

The subject this time would be making an objective, since my forces were lacking one. Flames of War only specifies the measurements of the base-area an objective need to cover, so there were no limitations beyond that.

I set my mind to building some sort of radio-station or radar, that would be a nice objective to either capture or defend for my forces.

After some googling I stumbled upon the following picture:


That would be an awesome objective to capture; a German Wurzburg Riese (Giant Wurzburg) Radar station.

HMS King George V and HMS Prince of Wales

So, for this project I decided that I was going to try to build 3 ships at the same time (big mistake!). And to add insult to injury I also figured I would try a more difficult project than any of my scratchbuilds to date….