95th rifles

   While the general rule, when it comes to pretty much anything in life, is to save the bits that you really want to paint until last as a treat for getting through the bulk (see the IA Royal Guard), the post conspired against me and these arrived before my basic infantry.

   Here  my first unit of British infantry for Sharp Practice, the 95th rifles, plus officer* and sgt**. As I mentioned before, if you are painting a small model count Peninsular war British force there are a couple of wargaming laws that you have to abide by; 1. There has to 95th rifles. 2. The red coats have to have yellow facings. Who am I to start disobeying the law?

*Obviously not Sharpe as his sword is wrong 

and he is actually in the full correct uniform.

**Obviously not Harper, either, as the gun is wrong

and he isn't big enough.

   The one big this I have done on this unit is something I really should have done for my French too, make the troops look like they might actually be on campaign, so in the 6 rifles I have two with patches on their knees and 2 in the completely wrong coloured trousers and this will carry on through the rest of my redcoats.

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Grenadiers showing them how it is done

   Carrying on from the last post and maintaining my Coherent and Focused new mindset are two units of French Grenadiers. I hadn't planned to use any of these in my first few games, planning instead to see what the basic troops were like and building up to some elites but as the British list had to include a unit of rifles (I think this is basically wargaming law) I needed a way to bulk up points without giving me too much more to paint.

   Keeping it simple, these are the plastic Warlord Games French infantry with the elite unit backpacks* and painted in Grenadier company colours to set them apart from my orange (3rd) company basic line.

* They have swords

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Engineering a solution

   As I mentioned on the last post and after a spate of painting space ships and Star Wars figures I have decided to return to something a bit more traditional. Again, in another of those quiet periods where you get a chance to do some proper thinking I decided that much as my normal opponent has been making some noises about painting up a British Peninsular war force to give Sharp Practice 2 a try, I doubt that it will ever actually come to fruition, so a couple of quick orders and I have a British army in the post, this however, means I need to get my French finished.

   An hour or so sitting in the sun clipping sprues, filing metal models and sticking the results together and I had the last things I needed for my planned first game's list, plus the normal extra bits that had annoyed me enough that they got included. The first results from this particular drive are below;

First are the last unit of basic line that I plan to do in the immediate future. I got this weird idea in my head a while back that I needed to make my basic infantry seem a bit more varied, so I picked up a single sprue of great coats from Warlord games, stuck my usual heads and backpacks to keep the uniforms as correct as possible, and painted as normal. I plan to mix this into my units rather than have a single block of them.

Two French infantry sgts from Front Rank Miniatures to remedy my lack of leader 1 status figures.

While not in my list, I had to get a unit of engineers painted up while I was still motivated. When Sharp Practice 2 was first announced and the hype online started I got excited and ordered a few bits that I figured were 'dead-certs' to either be in the list, or look cool enough that I would just be able to use them, chief amoungst these was the engineer's wagon. I only found out while I was painting it that I needed a unit of engineers to go with it, so here they are, a mix of Warlord Games and Front Rank Miniatures to get the unit to the required size.

Now I need to get back to painting French.

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Rounding off the the corners

   This is going to be the last Imperial Navy Battlefleet Gothic post for quite some time as I have a hankering to get on with some other projects. I spent an evening last week sitting in front of the tv staring at my painting tray with a complete lack of inspiration while I decided what to paint next, until the obvious answer dawned on me, finish the one you are currently blogging about and be Mike's Focused Coherent Wargames Blog for at least a few posts. So I went through my lead mountain and pulled out all the remaining ships for my Imperial BFG fleets, no matter how much work they needed.

First up is my second Emperor class battleship. I picked this up really cheaply on eBay as she was in one hell of a state and I had been joking a lot, recently, about having a squadron of battleships. I doubt she will see the table all that much, but I like the threat just having her can give me when I play. I named her Universa in homage to Battlestar Galactica as she relies on her squadrons as much as her main guns.

As part of my plan to make my fleet as punchy as I could make it, I decided I had to bulk up my escorts to better sized squadrons. My cobras were all painted in one go, but finding a pair of Firestorms for a sensible price meant they were picked up after the rest of the squadron had already been painted, but better late than never.

Sword class escorts are pretty much the most over looked escorts in the Imperial fleet, and for good reason, but I knew I had to have a squadron for sheer flexibility if nothing else.

If my painting desk at the sec is anything to go by, Mike's Focused Coherent Wargames Blog should carry on for the foreseeable future, but with the welcome return of another project I just can't seem to finish.

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Tactical flexibility

   Carrying on from the last painting post, there is a second part to the fleet which hasn't seen the table quite as much yet. These ships are either much newer or more recently painted, so with no further ado. While I got slightly distracted by new toys at Broadside I am carrying on trying to get projects finished and this fleet is an easy one to get to that point with.

Lunar Cruiser.
The all round cruiser of the fleet, give it a job and it will be able to do it.

Dauntless Light Cruiser.
This was more of an experiment for me. With the way you build fleets relying on having a set amount of basic cruisers before you can buy the next ship, a light cruiser was a cheap way to fill one of these slots in points sensitive space. So far my opponent has used his twice and had more success by squadroning it with some escorts for extra punch.

Cobra Destroyers.
Like the Firestorms, these are the same ones from my Space Marine fleet repainted and bulked up with extra numbers.

 Transports and a system ship.
Just about making it on this post are a batch of transports that I picked up so we can, theoretically, play any mission from the core rules. I added in a single system defence ship in the hope that my opponent doesn't spot it early enough and I can get a cheeky surprise attack.

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Broadside and weekend gaming

   What was supposed to be a weekend with a single game in it, turned into one hell of a hobby weekend. Let's start at the beginning, Saturday was supposed to be a game of 40k Apocalypse, a chance for 4 players to get all their big toys onto a table to see the 7th edition out in style, but as the only person that didn't end up bailing, this didn't happen.
   So, instead, on Sunday one of my mates and me took a trip to the Broadside show in Sittingbourne, aiming to try out a couple of things, see some familiar faces and buy some more models, then maybe carry on our Imperial Assault campaign in the afternoon. This went, broadly, to plan;

The first game we go involved in was 4th edition Flames of War. Honestly, (and I am bound to offend someone with this statement) I have have never heard anything good about Flames of War, but the 4th edition seems completely different and we really enjoyed ourselves. So much in fact that my mate bought himself two copies of the starter set so we could replay this game in the future.

The second game we tried was a game that is still in development called Valhalla. It is a good little game, but I don't know if it is bringing anything new to the genre, being somewhere between Open Combat and Saga in complexity and game size, and not being better than either. 

The last game we played at the show was an escape from Jurassic Park game. Described to us as 'like Yahtzee', it was brutally simple but a great show game. And, yes, I got away - just.

   With the limit of 4 hours in the car park, we made our move fairly soon after this, aiming to play some more games at home. Carrying on the weekend's tradition of not sticking to plans, we decided to play Thunderbirds (probably still my favourite board game at the moment) instead of Imperial Assault and, like normal, lost more games than we won.

   The other great thing about the Broadside show was that it had a proper bring and buy stand, so, obviously, this is where my money went. I went with all the best intentions, knowing that with the 8th edition of 40k coming out this weekend and my normal gaming mate really pushing to start playing 40k in a real way again, that I needed to save some money to at least buy the rulebook and a codex but that went out the window as soon as I saw there was some Battlefleet gothic on the stall. A quick trip to eBay and I now have a 1000 point fleet ready to paint. Suffice to say, mistakes were made and 40k looks like it can wait another month. . .

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Assemble the fleet, Admiral!

   I was organising my normal Monday night game last week and it dawned on me that I had done quite a lot of work on my Space Marine Battlefleet Gothic fleet and had painted up a Navy fleet too but hadn't blogged about any of it*.
   First up is my Imperial Navy fleet as it is the one I am using the most at the moment. Again, like my Space Marine fleet, I have been buying whatever was cheap on eBay, rather than planning a fleet and paying full whack to get them, this has led to my fleet being a bit of a mix of things.

* I assume this is due to the models being painted and packed

 into foam straight after varnishing ready for an immediate game.

Emperor Battleship.
This is the one big ship that was not planned at all. I had something a lot more 'shooty' on my shopping list, maybe a Retribution or an Apocalypse, but this was the ship that was cheap. While unplanned, it has turned out to be one hell of a ship, she has just about dealt with whatever situation I have put her in and (mostly) come out fighting.

Overlord Battlecruiser

The 3 cruisers were a sorry looking job lot that were so badly looked after that I couldn't tell what ships they actually were from the photos, but a bit of time spent tidying them and a new paint job can do wonders.

Dictator Cruiser

Gothic Cruiser

Firestorm Escorts
These Firestorms should be pretty familiar as they are the ones I used for my Space Marine fleet, stripped and repainted, they look much happier in the grey of my Imperial Navy. I am currently in the process of bulking up all my escort squadrons to 5-6.

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The most unnecessary guard in fiction?

   On Friday night, I found myself staying up later than planned, fixed to the tv watching the modern A-Team film, the only reason I mention this is that it was extra painting time that I hadn't expected, the unit below are the result.
    The Royal Guard are another unit from the base box set that haven't been used yet but I wanted to make sure were painted before they came up in the campaign. Naturally, I added the Royal Champion as it made sense to make sure their red's all matched properly. These guys were a pleasure to paint, I forgot how much fun robes can be to do.

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Keeping the cause alive

++ Many Bothans died to bring you this post ++

   More Imperial Assault and another vague theme to justify why I have picked the models that I have painted at the same time, in this case rebel infiltrators. I decided to ignore the established colour schemes for both the two rebel saboteurs and the Bothan hero, instead tying them into my rebel rangers from a few months back. I am aiming to create a coherent looking generic task force that looks like it might be capable of doing the everyday missions that keep the cause alive, rather than what films are about, which follow rag-tag bands of heroes doing the big missions.
   So the saboteurs are in full ranger gear of camo and brown packs, while I gave the Bothan hero the camo trousers and brown details but a black body glove top to suggest a slightly more stealthy nature but also so he still stands out as a character.

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Droids

   The last time we played Imperial Assault we played a mission that used the Assassin droid, and I was gutted that a model that was one of the main stars of that game was in his basic grey colour when every other model we used in that game was painted, so something had to be done about it.
   Keeping to a theme I painted the two more famous droids up at the same time, even though their colours didn't match at all, just as having a single model actively being painted at one time seems to be a bit of a waste unless you can paint to a higher level than I do. The biggest issue I found painting the 3 droids was that R2-D2's colour scheme seems to be different in every reiteration, he is different in 1-3, 4-6 and in all the bits in between, so I picked one picture online and went with it, hence the odd orange bits (which I think makes this an early version of him?).

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