Catching up on old projects (a slight reprise)

I have actually achieved a target for 2025 before January is out!  My Irregular Miniatures 6mm British Civil War troops are rebased and a limited amount of repairing and repainting has been carried out as well.  The standard of painting is OK but some of the details needed updating as I know a bit more than I did when first painting them!  For example I had given  a handful of Scottish infantry royal standards (the red lion rampant on a yellow ground) when only the King or his appointee were allowed to carry it.  Most foot regiments had a white colonel's colour with perhaps the colonels coat of arms so a number of flags were updated.  The cast on bases had to be redone so they blended into the basing sand I use as well.

So here we are all the painted 6mm ECW are rebased

Scots at the front two lines and English behind them.

For the unpainted figures I managed to undercoat all of them as I had a day with low humidity, reasonable temperatures and no wind so out came the rattle cans of primer.  Some of these are on the painting table awaiting  my attention.  I'm considering giving for King and Parliament rules a try they sound interesting and are a reasonable price.

I like this view apart from the poor exposure on my iPhone camera washing out the green cloth's depth of colour

In other news there is a new Facebook group for fans of Irregular Miniatures called Highly Irregular.  It covers 2mm and 6mm as well as their larger scale lines.

Lord of the Rings Risk

You may recall a few posts back I mentioned that the family had played a game of Lord of the Rings (LOTR here after) Risk.  This got me thinking about the possibilities LOTR Risk offers.  Of course the game itself is great fun as written but the board is just screaming out to be used for a campaign of some sort.  If this sparks an interest in obtaining a copy of the game, I don't think it is available new any longer and a quick trawl through the net showed a number of different versions of the game for sale second hand, some at really rather silly prices.

The box (apologies for the poor image )

Lets start with a look at the game as written.  Opening the box finds a good quality hard backed game board, the traditional five dice two black (Defence) and three red (attack).  The playing pieces are cast in a hard (but potentially brittle) plastic.  These are in denominations of one, three and five 'battalions'.  The rules are printed in a full colour booklet and are easy to understand.  The only unclear point is with regard to sea lane attacks, but more on that later.

The game map

The map covers all of those areas of Middle Earth that feature in the books plus a couple that are simply hinted at or just shown on maps.  Apparently some early versions did not include all of the areas from the book (I think it didn't have the southern part of the map).  Thankfully I have the later edition, there was an expansion made to to extend the map for owners of the early version  but whether that is available any longer I don't know.  Like traditional Risk it is divided into regions which if a player controls the entirety of  provide bonus re-enforcements each turn.  Unlike the real world map used in normal Risk there are no easy to defend 'continents'.  The regions bordering the board corners are the nearest to safe area but there are sea lanes that allow attacks on them.  Some borders between regions are uncrossable (mountains and major rivers) although bridges do allow crossings of rivers you need a special event card to pass through a mountain range.  There are also strong holds such as Mordor and places of power such as Weathertop in a few regions.

The playing pieces the top set are 'Evil' bottom are 'Good'

There are four armies, two good and two evil so this limits the game to a maximum of four players.  There are also two leader pieces for each army who provide bonuses to combat dice rolls and can also obtain event cards if they meet certain requirements such as being present when places of power are captured. There are two packs of cards rather than the traditional one.  The first are the event cards these give special bonuses to movement or combat when played, the second are more like the traditional risk cards marked with a region, and a troop type.  They also have good or evil status noted for the region which comes into play in the deployment stage.  Other than that these cards are collected and traded in for re-enforcements just as in standard Risk. 

Deployment has a nice twist built in.  Each player gets a starting allocation of troops (45 'battalions' in the four player game).  The deployment cards are then sorted so those showing a good or evil affiliation are withdrawn from the pack .  The two good players get half of the 'good' regions drawn at random and the evil players the same from the evil side of the deck.  They then place one 'battalion in each region they have been dealt.  This creates a deployment that puts good forces in good area and vice versa for bad.  Next those cards are retuned to the deck which is shuffled and set aside, the pack plays no further part in deployment.  Instead each player in turn places one 'battalion' in an unoccupied region until all areas are claimed.  After that they continue going round the players re-enforcing regions already held by their army until all the allocated troops are deployed.  I rather liked this mechanism.

The game is now played pretty much in the normal way.  The only differences being that leaders grouped with an army give a bonus on attack or defence dice rolls and event cards can be played on the holding players turn to effect re-enforcements, combat or movement.  Traditional Risk might have similar options for all I know, my copy is from the 1960's and doesn't have there bells and whistles!  Sea lanes are more threatening than in original risk as they allow rear areas to be attacked.  The rules are unclear as to whether only one step along a sea lane is allowed or as my son insisted they allow movement past multiple ports.  Personally I prefer a single port to the next port hop and no further. 

There is one final twist the game has a limited but variable number of turns.  This is controlled by the progress of the One Ring along a path from the Shire to Mount Doom.  In most cases the ring moves forward one region along the path at the end of each player turn, but some zones are hard to leave and require a dice roll of better than three on a D6 to move on.  On average I calculate that each player would get four or five turns before the ring is cast into the fires of Mount Doom.  At that point victory is calculated by looking at the number of regions, strongholds and places of power held and completion of any quests thrown up by the event cards.  All in all a nice little game.

As I said at the start of the post the map would be really good for running a campaign on.  The obvious one being a LOTR fantasy game.  I would probably do that by playing the game as written for map movement and fighting any resulting battles as a table top game.  Still I suppose I should finish the Dark Age campaign first, after all I have only been messing about with that since the 1970's!

Catching up with old projects

For reasons that will not be immediately apparent I spent a couple of hours earlier trawling over some of my past blog posts.  It became very clear to me as I swiped through the pages that I do not have a great record of following projects through!  For example Altar of Freedom has only seen two games played, Western shoot outs haven’t been followed up for eighteen months or so and it’s been several years since the last look at the Dark Ages campaign or a World War One dog fight being played.  Clearly I need to get more games in.

So with that in mind the plan is to finish the AI general project by filling in the deployment matrix and then to stop work on that.  Actually once that is done it will be pretty much ready for use and I can start playing some games to test it.  However, while that is happening I'm going to try to pick up the Dark Ages campaign again.  This may or may not involve using ADLG for a few trial games or I may just set up some test games to play under DBA and repeat with ADLG.

Meanwhile an order from Warbases has arrived which has allowed my 6mm BCW rebasing to get underway.  I may achieve one of the objectives for 2025 before the end of January if I'm lucky!

I ordered a couple more of the Antonine Miniatures Strength and Honour units while I was at it more about those once I have them painted.

One Wargamer's Library

There are some books that have really influenced what I do as a wargamer and which I wouldn't really want to part with.  I suppose we all have those books which grabbed our younger selves' attention and shaped how we saw things be they hobbies or more important stuff.  So what follows is my list of those books which really influenced my wargaming life over the last 50 years or more.

1. Battle - Charles Grant

Still worth a look even after all these years

Actually it was the Meccano Magazine series of articles from circa 1968-1969 (which when collected together became this book) which were my first step up from playing soldiers with Airfix figures to wargaming with a set of formal rules.  Not all of the rules made it into the compilation shown here but an expanded edition is available that I presume does have the missing parts.  This wasn't just a set of rules but most importantly included an explanation on why the rules worked the way they did and the thought process that led to them.  Really rather old school now but still capable of providing an enjoyable World War Two game.  

2. Discovering Wargames - John Tunstill

I'd love to get another copy for nostalgia sake

I lost my copy of this 1971 book, or rather booklet so I have parted with it but can't ignore the impact it had .  The Discovering series was intended to give an introduction to a number of hobbies, I recall Discovering Brass Rubbing as another title in the series .  In this work John Tunstill did for Ancients, Napoleonic's and American Civil War gaming what Charles Grant had done for WW2 wargames.  It provided a set of simple rules, but more importantly an explanation of how they were designed.  I still recall his explanation of how a figure's base size was linked to ground scale , how many men a single figure represented (I don't recall if it was 20, 25 or 33 by the way) and the spacings for ranks and files.  Without this and Battle I don't think it would ever have crossed my mind to play around with creating my own rules.  These gave me the toolkit that allowed me to understand the process.

3. WRG Ancient's Rules and Army Lists - Phil Barker et al

Based on a desire to play the rules in Discovering Wargames a friend of mind and I converted lots of Airfix figures into various pre-gunpowder troops (very badly to be honest) but they gave us hours of enjoyment.  Then two things happened in quick succession firstly a model shop opened in Blackburn which stocked Hinchcliffe 25mm metal figures and in my first term at university I saw a game played with an early set of WRG Ancient rules using full armies of 25mm metal figures.  These were a huge step up from previous rule sets I had used.  I think I have copies from 3rd Edition onwards.  Out of fashion now a days but for the 1970's these were the standard other rules aspired to.  The army lists were also a huge innovation as they took much of the guess work out of army creation.  They also stopped the creation of unstoppable but non historical armies as well as creating a shopping list of new must have figures!  On the other side of the coin they fostered the rise of the 'min-max' army creator mentality.

4.  WRG Armies and Enemies of Imperial Rome (and all the other 'Armies of' books) - Phil Barker et al

In the world before Osprey's these were the go to reference works for any armies tied to the WRG ancients rules.  I still have a good few of these on my bookshelf and refer to them on a regular basis.  They provided almost everything needed to gain an understanding of the history, main battles, equipment and tactics of the period covered.  The only thing missing was coloured illustrations.  I went as far as getting the coloured pencils out and coloured in the Late Roman shield illustrations to see which ones I wanted to reproduce on my 25mm Hinchcliffe's.  My copy of Imperial Rome is now getting a bit battered after almost 45 years of use! They still get used as my initial reference for any new army I think about creating in the period they cover.  While a lot of more recent information has been published since these first came out they have the advantage of being a one stop shop for the information wanted by wargamers.

5. Warfare in the Classical World - John Warry

It was the cover illustration that grabbed my attention

I saw this in a tiny wargaming shop in York  in the late 1970's or early 1980's, the shop is long gone now (aren't they all) but I still have the book.  I forget how much it cost but suffice to say I was more than slightly nervous about walking into the house and facing the "and how much was that then?" question from Mrs E.  Not that I needed to have worried really.  Its a cross between a general military history of the period from (roughly) the Trojan Wars to the Fall of Rome and a look at weapon's armour and tactics as they developed during that time.  I suppose much of the detailed analysis has been superseded by more recent research but the illustrations and battlefield summaries are still worth a look.

6. Atlas of Military Strategy 1618 - 1878 - David G Chandler

Sorry about the shine from the dust jacket

Ever since I first saw a couple of pages from this book detailing the classical military strategies of antiquity I had wanted my own copy.  Once I actually laid hands on one I was not disappointed.  It really does do what it says on the cover, provide maps and analysis of strategy and tactics as applied for the pike and shot and horse and musket periods.  Well written and easy to digest with some really useful maps and plans to support the text.

There are others of course: the original version of DBA showed just how far a set of rules could be stripped back to while still being playable.  The 1970's Western Gunfight Rules provided an introduction to skirmish level wargames that is still hard to beat.  Then there are the works of fiction that make you stop and think "Ooh that would be an interesting period to game".  Yes, so many books and so little reading time (or book shelf space).

Solo Gaming & AI Generalship a short(ish) update

I am working towards a two or possibly three stage system for the AI opposition.  Stage one is the Fight or Fly decision, stage two is a deployment system and stage three will be a battlefield tactics decision, except it may not be!  This is because the deployment may be all I need, I'm currently wondering if it's going to be the case that once a deployment is decided upon by the AI the actual tactical plan is obvious.  Time will tell on that one.

Here is what I have so far for the deployment stage, the results from the fight or fly test are merged together into four deployment groups, these being:

1.  Aggressive (Fight or fly result one or two)

2. Balanced (results three, four or five)

3. Defensive, (results six or seven) and

4. Retire (results eight, nine or ten)

For each of the four deployment groups there will be ten possible deployments, imagine a grid of four columns of ten rows giving forty possible choices of deployment. To generate a deployment the column is selected that matches the fight or fly result and a single cell obtained by a di roll or card draw.  A result of one being a less aggressive deployment and a ten being the most aggressive deployment for that column.  Some of these results will be duplicated so for example the three least aggressive deployment options in the aggressive column (numbers 1-3) would be mirrored as the most aggressive deployment options of the balanced deployment options (numbers 8 - 10).  This should mean that I need 31 deployment descriptions.  Which is where you 'dear reader' come in!  It would help me enormously if you could suggest some deployments to fill the spaces in the grid.

An example of the sort of thing I am looking for is:

"No reserve line, extend cavalry wings, mass at least 70% of any shock cavalry on one wing (dice for which) deploy light infantry and cavalry to screen the assault troops balance to the weaker wing."

It might help to go back and look at the fight or fly test factors which would create the outcomes that I grouped up into the four deployment categories.  In principle the aggressive deployment group expects to simply roll over the enemy, the balanced deployment expects a fight but with an advantage to the AI, Defensive expects a stiff fight with the enemy force having advantage, and retire is an AI general having an 'Oh bugger we are in the deep do do here, what can we salvage'.  Remember that each column covers a range of fight and fly outcomes so I'm attempting to generate a range of deployments for each column.

It's worth knowing that the deployment layout uses a nine box grid taken from Rob's suggested blog site 'Grid Based Wargames' (thanks Rob I found some rather useful ideas there).  These are three lines each with a right wing, centre and left wing.  The lines from front to rear being Advance guard, main Line and Reserve.  I may add a fourth line but with only a central box for a grand reserve or similar.