Terrain - Camps for DBA

Camps are a chance to show a little flair in our table top terrain.  DBA and its offspring all require a camp on the table so why not take a bit of time and effort over them.

Tactically there is a case to be made for using the smallest possible foot print for a camp but I take the view that a bigger base area gives scope for a diorama style camp design.  If it makes it a tiny bit easier for the enemy to reach then so be it.  After all if they are able to sack the camp I clearly haven't guarded it properly!

With that in mind I set off to create some new camps for my 6mm Ancient and Dark Age forces (I know I should be calling them early medieval but I only just swallowed the fact that the English Civil War is now the British Civil War, there is only so much change a man can take in a week!).

I decided that most Dark Age armies wouldn't have that much in the way of tents on campaign so instead I decided that the focus would be the designated meeting spot for the troops.  After all we do know that when the Anglo Saxon  Fyrd was called out they were told to assemble at a well known local landmark so a similar approach would work for other armies of the period.  Other than Vikings who did tend to build fortified camps to protect their longships.

My first attempt was to create a round barrow and some standing stones.  This where your local garden centre becomes your source of supply.  They sell all sorts of ornamental gravel and often don't mind you taking a small sample.  This can provide useful natural stone fragments for use as standing stones and lintels for the barrow.  I made the grassy dome of the barrow from Milliput and textures the whole thing in the same way I do bases.  A mix of kiln dried sand (the sort used for the gaps in block paving) and flock.

This was the result.

Roman Fortlet

Round Barrow

I also made a Roman marching camp based on the floor plan of a small 'fortlet' excavated on the Welsh marches.  Pretty much the same techniques of using Milliput to form the base this time with a palisade of cocktail sticks and some Leven Miniatures small Roman tents.  I have some bags of supplies from Perfect Six in the painting queue which will be added to both camps once finished.  I'm also tempted by some of the scenics from Baccus especially the camp set with tables and a fire.  Some 6mm sheep wouldn't go amiss either.

Catch up time

What has Elenderil been doing since 2016 I hear you cry?  Well when I say cry its probably more of a resigned whimper.

I have been toying with a new set of ancient rules - Arte del le Guerre which I haven't managed to get a game of so far but the rules have a bit more granularity than DBA3.0 so they look like they should give a good game.  Certainly the reviews from Madaxemen's site are very entertaining and make the game look interesting.  I also did some more work on my 2mm English Civil War rules, although I suppose I should really get used to calling them the British Civil Wars, or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms!  what do you think BCW or TWOTTKs?  I'm thinking BCW will be less wear and tear on the keyboard.

I have been doing a bit of painting and modelling mostly 6mm figures and terrain.  I now have a start on an Early Sassanid Persian army to match up against my Late Imperial Romans.  My Dark Age British forces have expanded so I have the nucleus of Welsh, Strathclyde, Dal Ratian and Pictish Armies and a decent size force for Saxons and Vikings.  I also rebased my Dacians to put more figures on each base. That said of late my painting output has dropped off a bit as work on the house has limited the space available to have my painting table setup.

Rebased Dacians

A start on Sassanid Persia's finest

I managed to get to a couple of war gaming shows including the Joy of Six at Sheffield and actually got some games in.  I'm currently inspired to try a solo BCW campaign after reading the 1642 and all that blog.  I'm thinking about campaign rules already.

Chilli Jam

I thought that I would share my chilli jam recipe. I have been growing chilli peppers on and off for about 10 years usually a variety called Apache which is a medium hot chilli (about 75,000 on the Scoville scale if you are interested) and as they provide a lot of fruit this lets me use up the ones that don't get used in cooking.  This is not an act of random kindness though as it ensures that I can find it myself in future.  I've lost the book with the recipe before and probably will again so if its on my blog I know where to look!

This chilli jam is great with cold meats, it makes a great alternative to apple sauce with roast pork.  I like it with sausages too.  The original recipe came from Allotment Garden.org in the Val's Preserves bit of the site.  I changed the recipe the first time I made it as I didn't have enough red peppers but I liked the result so I have stuck with the change.  Below is the original recipe my changes are shown further down the page.

Ingredients
8 Red Peppers.  De-seeded and roughly chopped.
5 Medium size Chilli.  Roughly chopped.
1 Finger sized piece of fresh Root Ginger.  Peeled and chopped.
8 Cloves of Fresh Garlic.  Skinned and chopped.
400gms canned Tomatoes. Chopped.
750gms Castor Sugar.
250ml Red Wine Vinegar

Method
1. Blitz the Peppers, Chilli, Ginger and Garlic in a food processor.
2. Place these in a heavy bottomed pan with with the can of tomatoes, sugar and Red Wine Vinegar and bring to the boil.
3. Skim off the scum that rises and simmer for 50 minutes.  Stir regularly (it mustn't stick as it will burn). 
4. Continue to simmer for 10 - 15 minutes stirring continuously.  Check if will set by dropping a little of the mixture onto a cold saucer.
5. Allow to cool slightly and bottle in sterile jars.

I swapped 3 Red Peppers for the same weight of fresh Tomatoes leaving the seeds in.  This has the bonus of making the resulting chilli jam look a lot like raspberry jam!  Not that I would ever take advantage of that fact.

The finished article

I use Apache chilli as I grow these.  One plant usually provides all the chilli's I need for cooking and making this jam.  Apache Chilli's are reasonably hot (75,000 on the Scoville scale about three times hotter than Jalapeño's).  This produces a jam with bite but not unpleasantly hot.

Make it between now and the end of November and it will be perfect as a gift for Christmas.

Enjoy.

I aren't dead........

........to quote Granny Weatherwax.

Sorry that it has been a while since I last posted!  Real life got in the way as it so often does.  The last you heard from me was that we had to move house.  Things became 'interesting' after that.  My mother in law was diagnosed with a terminal illness and she had little local support available from Mrs E's family.  Her brother had done a sterling job but was finding difficult to cope with the drain of work, family and caring all at the same time, so Mrs E took on the mantle.  That meant her moving from Northamptonshire to Yorkshire to become a full time live in carer.  As these things do her mother's condition worsened and in the end I too moved to Yorkshire while continuing to work in the Midlands.  Once the inevitable happened we then had the job of settling the estate and selling the family home and moving again.  We settled in North Lincolnshire and bought a house here as two of our children live near by.  I work from home a couple of days a week and stay in the Midlands for a couple of nights so I can be in the office.

Then just to prove real life can be just as difficult as soap opera life, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  It appears it's currently the fashionable one to have; me, Bill Turnbull, Stephen Fry all the cool kids have it!  I was told that if you have to get a cancer as a man this is the one to get as it is more likely to be treatable than most others.  Fortunately mine was caught early but as it showed signs of being aggressive surgery was decided as being the best option.  That took me out of the loop for most of the first half of 2018.  Tests, surgery, recovery and recuperation left me with little interest in sitting in front of a computer screen for more than the time I had to for work purposes.  Work on the house went on the back burner.  Since the surgery we have slowly caught up and for the first time in what seems like years (it is actually a couple of years since I posted anything!)  I'm feeling like I want to blog again.

I haven't been totally idle, Facebook interest groups kept me in touch with my hobbies and its easy to put a couple of lines on FB compared with a blog entry!  At August bank holiday I was able to take part in a battle re-enactment as a combatant for the first time this year.  Things are coming back to what passes for normal in my life.

There is a lot to catch up on, 6mm figure painting,  games of  my 2mm ECW rules, re-enacting,  comments on other blogs I like.  And I have one night a week most weeks when I'm in digs in Northamptonshire with a good Wi-Fi connection and not much to do.

Hello world, I'm back.

World War One Air combat rules

In my last post I was waxing nostalgic for the "beer and pretzels" games of yesteryear. I suppose I should come at least partially clean, when it comes to some types of war game, simple rules are all I can manage to write.  I spent a couple of mind melting days attempting to come to grips with formulas to allow me to calculate snap turn rates and sustained turn rates from basic aircraft statistics.  It tuns out that Mrs E's oft made comment "your not as smart as you like to think you are" is more true than I like to accept because I had to give up.  I fell back on the stats one of the other members of Hull University's war gaming society came up with back in 1975.  I will try to see if I can find an easy set of correlations between the real world stats and the game stats from those and extrapolate the results for the airplanes I don't have game stats for.


My favourite WW1 flying ace.  The late great Charles M Scultz's Snoopy from Peanuts.


The rules are pretty much done and I just need to wrote them up.  The original rules Jim Dunnigan wrote for SPI's board game Flying Circus all those years ago didn't really need much adding to them.  I have simply added  energy gain in dives and loss in subsequent turns to allow "Boom and Zoom" combat to be a little more doable.  The game handles "Turn and Burn" pretty well I only needed to penalise sustained moves in tight turns with some altitude loss to make it more accurate.  The dive rules were the biggest issue but as part of the energy gain/loss rule I think I have something that will work.  Lastly I have added structural failure rules both to the combat result tables and the over speed diving rules.

All I need to do now is finish creating the game statistics for the 60 or 70 airplanes my obsessive mind set says I need to have.  Then its on to creating a game map and some height adjustable flight stands.  Then its off for a few games.  Mind you I expect it to end like this!

 

I hope they walked away from this one!

Nostalgia News

I was painting some figures a few days ago and a friend of mine came around and spotted some 1/300th biplanes in the lead pile. He was far more interested in them than any of the other figures.  That got me thinking about World War 1 dogfighting rules.  Now I know they say nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but I started thinking about some old air combat games that might have stood the test of time.

The game that came to mind was the SPI board game Flying Circus.  It was published way back in 1972.  By modern standards it wasn't a complex game and the flight mechanics are very basic but when I was at University it was a firm favourite because it was easy to teach to new players and they could get right into the action.

Back then Flying Circus was our Sunday evening group game.  It was something all the club members could join in with without too much trouble.  We put an extended map together to make a bigger playing area and created statistics for additional aircraft.  Sometimes there are unexpected benefits to having mathematicians in a wargames club.  He also created some additional rules for combat results to add some granularity to the game.  We ran a campaign where the calendar moved forward a month each week.  This gave us a way to introduce new aircraft as they became historically available.  we also had a campaign rule that meant the current highest scoring pilot on each side got first refusal on new planes.  This gave us a motivation to get stuck into the action.

A bit of digging in my archive (OK its a big cardboard box in the spare bedroom) and I found a copy of the original rules.  I ran a copy of them off back in the day so I had all the statistics for the planes that came in the game.  It still holds up as a basic starting point for a game with 1/300th models.  So its time to draw up some additional rules to create a game using models.

So now I'm into nostalgia gaming and  I think I want to play Starforce Alpha Centauri again.  Time for a trip down to the archives.

Where have I been of late?

No posts in four months what a disgrace!  Apologies are due from yours truly but in my defence things have been manic at work and Mrs E and myself have been house hunting.  Not that we wanted to move house but it was forced on us as our landlord decided that they wanted to sell the house we rent here in Northampton.  If they had waited a few months we would have sold up in Yorkshire and been in a better position.  The real problem was finding somewhere that allowed us to have dogs in the property.  We have now succeeded in our quest and will be moving to Corby in a few weeks.  All I need to do is find a wargaming club or some local players.in the area.

In other news I have played through a refight of the Battle of Whalley and I just need to get the pictures posted onto my PC so I can include them in the next blog post.