Great War 1914 - Big Battles Terrain - Part 3

It's really starting to come together now.

I completed all the woods (almost) and have laid out all the bits and the troops in their starting positions. A few more machine guns are needed on both sides.

I'm quite pleased with how this has come together.

The first try out of the rules and scenario will be on Monday night!

Great War 1914 - Big Battles Terrain - Part 2

Over the Easter break I managed to get further with my small scale 1914 terrain.

The fields, roads and hedges are now complete on all the boards and the town and villages are in progress.

The board is modular and can be rearranged for variety. Getting the fields to line up properly was complicated, but the result hides the regularity of the pattern quite well.

I'm undecided what to do with the edges. Certainly putting the edging strips that came with the mats helps a lot with the look. But should I just leave them as is (i.e. grey), paint them black, flock them or do half and half. I'm unsure... What do you think?

I'm tempted to just leave the edges grey.

The next stage is to add on the woods. After a bit of experimentation I think the best way is to have some black felt pieces coated with my favourite brown acrylic sealant on the upper side. I get a nice texture and the pieces conform to the terrain well.

I will be changing the trees to be just lumps of clump foliage as they are completely out of scale! Also there will be painting and other texturing added to the wood bases, they won't just be brown!

I did try thicker cotton canvas patches, but the edges curled up. The felt does not do this.

I have tried putting the 6mm minis on the boards just to see what they look like. Obviously way bigger than the towns, etc... but I think it'll work...

Since the weekend I've finished off all the town inserts, but this weekend I'm away re-enacting, so progress on the boards will recommence next week.

Great War 1914 - Big Battles Terrain - Part 1

I'm finally working towards being able to use the 6mm WWI 1914 British and German minis I painted last year. This project has been planned for quite a while, but is just starting to come together.

The main goal was to create a set of boards for doing the 1914 Retreat from Mons scenario for Bloody Big Battles. However I wanted the terrain to be usable for more than just that.

Since it's a very large area that is being portrayed on the battlefield I've scaled it up to about the same scale as I have used with the Battle of Britain game, and in fact used the same base for the terrain, EVA foam mats. However this time I'm going to town with the terrain.

I've just completed the first of the six 2ft square boards I'll need for the game.

The total plan for the board consists of 6 of these tiles; modular allowing the battlefield to be varied. To do this the roads have to go off at the same places on the tiles and there are left-hand and right-hand oriented tiles. This is the arrangement for the Mons scenario:

I've now started on the next tiles. The first job was to cut out the rivers, which I did with a soldering iron and some 3d printed templates. Breathing equipment was worn so as to avoid the horrid fumes of the melting foam.

Once that has been done it's a case of cutting out spaces for the towns and river crossings to go in. The roads marked will not be in those locations and are a rough guide. They will need to enter the removable parts in the same locations to allow the different inserts to be moved around as needed.

One of the inserts is for the fortified town of Maubeuge.

Next I fill the river beds and mark the roads using brown acrylic frame sealant, which I use a lot!

I use it so much, that I've run out again... I'll have to pop down to Screwfix again in the morning. 

And here ends this episode...

1914 German Army in 6mm

The second part of my 1914 6mm project is the Germans. Again these are prints of the files from Henry Turner.

There are actually more infantry than I show in these photos...

English Civil War 6mm - New Rules - War is Our Homeland

Last night we played our first English Civil War battle using a new set of rules, "War Is Our Homeland" by Joshua Rowe

The rules concentrate on the command control aspect of the battle experience using decks of standard playing cards to apply different "postures" to units. The postures being:

• Offensive - allowing charging 3" into combat. This is an extra move on top of the very basic move of 6" (or 9" for cavalry).
• Defensive - allowing an advantage when receiving a charge
• Firing - increasing the number of dice when shooting. Units can always shoot, this just increases the chance of doing damage. Range is just 3"
• Mobile - allowing extra movement. Units can do very simple 6" forward movement even when not in Mobile posture, but not through difficult terrain.

Shooting and Melee is resolved with handfuls of d6 against a target number of 4+ and combat resolution is very simple. There is just two states for units other than fresh; Fatigued and Shaken. A unit can be either, neither or both.

Play is fast and simple, but very tactical. Choice of when and how to use the postures and cards is probably the most important factor. 

The scenarios in the book and expansions are all historical and we decided to play Cheriton in 1644 from the "A Clash of Three Kingdoms" scenario book as it was the smallest scenario. We used my usual minis and didn't bother rebasing or rescaling. My basing is different from the basing described in the rules, but not significantly and we decided it would be fine. We still think it was. Of the other scenarios most had far more units than I have available, so I'm either going to have to paint some extra models (a lot in some cases) or scale those battles down.

The game flowed well. I played the Parliamentary forces and had to break the Royalists to win. Any other result would be a Royalist victory so they decided to stay where they were and defend. Seeing I only had 5 turns to break the Royalists I used a lot of my command cards to move forward quickly. The Royalists were instead able to hold on to their cards to use in the ensuing combat and when we did contact I was soundly beaten. I think on reflection I should have not rushed so much and just used my commander's free postures to advance along with the basic move. I also had moved my Dragoons into the wood on my right flank and this meant they were pretty much unable to go further without me having to concentrate my postures on them. This was a mistake and they should have been out in the open.

Initial deployment from the Parliament side of the battlefield.

Parliament forces rush forward towards the waiting Royalists

Combat is joined. The Parliament forces take are pushed back and only a single unit of Royalist Dragoons is in danger.

Royalist forces fight back inflicting Fatigue and Shaken results.

In the end the game was a victory for the Royalists: Royalists routed 3 Parliament units to Parliament routing just a single Royalist unit. 

We did have a few rules questions for the designer and I'm going to list them here. Hopefully with answers in time... I've also listed what we arbitrarily decided to do so we could continue to play.

1. Can you pre-measure movement, charges, shooting etc? (We allowed premeasuring as we prefer that.)
2. There don't appear to be any rules for deployment. Who deploys which units in which order?. (We deployed as shown on the Cheriton page of the British Battles website)
3. Its unclear if a unit's whole move is halved, or if a unit halves their movement only for that part made in difficult terrain. (We decided to just halve the proportion of the move in the difficult terrain.)
4. Is the bonus Firing posture die for dragoons doubled or is it applied after the normal dice are doubled? (We assumed not doubled)
5. Do units shoot independently or combine dice when considering Fatigue or Shaken results? (We assumed not combined.)
6. If a charge is incomplete (ie the 3" move does not result in contact or a support position) can the unit still make the move or does it remain stationary? (We assumed that it stayed stationary.)
7. If multiple units are in contact or a unit is within range to provide support at what point in the turn and in what order is this decided? (We had a phase before combats were resolved where the owner of each unit decided for each combat.)
8. When a unit breaks off 3" from contact is it them inside or outside of shooting and charge range from that unit (this matters in difficult terrain). (This didn't happen for us, but we realised that it is not covered in the rules.)
9. Are leaders displaced if a their own unit overlaps them. (We manage to move units to avoid them, but it was not clear what would happen if the unit could not..)
10. We read it as clear that shooting dice are unaffected by shaken or fatigue statues but this did not 'feel' right, especially for dragoons which shot at full effect despite both. (We carried on with what we thought the rules said, but Dragoons on firing posture getting 7 dice even with Fatigue and Shaken seemed off.)

Despite the above questions we thoroughly enjoyed the game and will be looking to try these rules again. First off a reverse of the Cheriton battle. I'll get to play the Royalists.

1914 BEF in 6mm

Back, last Christmas, when I first got hold of a resin (SLA) 3d printer I decided that I was going to attempt to do a WWI 1914 in 6mm for the Joy Of Six show. I decided to use the excellent range by Henry Turner which had everything I would need. 

Unfortunately other things distracted me from this project and it didn't get too far. It didn't help that I'd decided to use water-washable resin for the minis and this was very brittle and the models broke very easily. 

Roll on to August, and I could get back to the project. I started again with some Sunlu High Toughness Resin, which is really flexible and takes paint well without a primer. This has worked really well and my 1914 BEF force is now ready.

I initially looked at Great War Spearhead II as the rules to use, but these seem overcomplicated for what I need so I've been looking at other systems. Peter Pig's Square Bashing was suggested to me and that looks to be good for fun pick-up games at the club, but really I want to run a scenario game based on the whole or some part of the retreat from Mons. The "Bloody Big Battles" rules set looks promising with the modifications available as a free download and there is a complete retreat from Mons scenario.

So I've tried to be relative rules agnostic and have based my units on 30mm squares (3d printed) with enough to make a Square Bashing army or the army for the BBB Mons scenario.

I'm now on to my Germans... there's loads to do!

 

The Battle of Roundway Down at "Joy of Six"

Yesterday we ran the Battle of Roundway Down demonstration game at the "Joy of Six" show.

I had originally booked in to the show 2020 to run my Blücher Vyazma game, but since Covid happened that was cancelled. With my 1812 armies re-organised for my 1813 campaign, a different game would be needed, so I've been spending the last couple of months preparing my first English Civil War game, with Roundway Down, 13th July 1643 as the chosen battle and Liber Militum : Tercios as the rules being used.

I'll not go into the detail of what happened at the real battle, the British Battles website gives an excellent description of that, but suffice to say, that yesterday the Royalist Troops did not have the massive success they had in 1643, but instead suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Roundheads. This was blamed on bad dice rolling, of course, but also a bit of unfortunate general-ship that lead to the death of the Royalist commander.

Anyway, we had a lot of interest from the public at the show and had a great day.

The terrain was based off the real-life contours as found on modern Ordnance Survey maps of the area, blown up to the right scale.

Hills were cut out from these following the contour lines;

MDF shapes cut-out and the edges bevelled;

and contours applied with 5mm thick expanded polystyrene floor insulation, before being covered with Sculptamold, plaster, paint and static grass.