All That Remains - Big Reveal!

Time to let the cat out of the bags methinks. I'm putting some actual effort behind trying to make the post-apocalyptic rule set formerly known as Aftermath, a reality.

I've got a project blog and have teamed up with Xander to put this together and hopefully take it to Salute next year.

I'm not going to give many details here as I've given a pretty good summary in the About page on the new collaborative project blog, go check it out!

I probably won't do much cross posting, if any, so if you want to stay in the loop, you should follow All That Remains.

BAOR driven back by Soviet armour

MoD Spokesman: Challenger not as OP as previously thought.


NOTE: This post might make more sense if you've read this thread.

Today, Challengers and support elements from the BAOR were driven back by a division strength Soviet armoured formation.

The local commander was apparently overconfident in the ability of the new tanks and broke from the standard doctrine of waiting in a gunline, and went "for a cheeky T-72 hunt."

British troops are said to be regrouping at a second phase line.

Images have been coming through from our European correspondent.

Soviet armour is reported to be advancing in force

 

The local commander was, unfortunately, surrounded and destroyed by surprisingly nimble T-72s

 

Rear echelon units were also caught up in the Soviet advance.

I had to tun these photos through 3 filters to get this effect. First they were taken with a programme called Camera 2 using it's 1980's setting, then the top two were run through a programme called Glitchr and finally through Androids own photo editor to add the frame. It's not exactly a slick process, and I may not bother in the future.

As for the game itself, both Stu and I had fun, Stu no doubt more-so because he one. I definitely made some grave tactical errors, but a turn of appalling shooting should have salvaged things for me, id my return fire hadn't been equally appalling.

Challengers are not invincible and Stu's rapid advance and quick gamble with his T-72B's placed him behind my front armour in 2 or 3 turns.

A few metagame elements probably also helped. At this scale the units are much smaller but the terrain footprint (especially buildings - admittedly we used Epic buildings) is the same as 15mm. This meant it was relatively easy to hide entire platoons behind a single building in the centre of the board.

The rules need a review, and possibly a few hotfixes, but I think they'll certainly tide us over until Battlefront stumps up Team Yankee. It certainly will be interesting to see how thing stat up in the official rules compared to this homebrew.

For the record we used normal distances, so we were essentially playing Flames with smaller units. We agreed that this felt natural.

Thing a Week 9

Whaddya know dear readers? Another week, another thing.

This week its the Hawker Typhoon I've been proxying a Spitfire for for years... yes, years. This thing has been sitting in the paint que for a while. A recent trip to our friendly local modelling shop yielded a ready to buy range of Vallejos, so I stocked up, both for my French infantry, and to get this wee guy done.

The model itself is a cheap as chips Revell Micro*Wings kit, and it shows. It was fiddly to put together, and the plastic was some strange consistency that meant the paint rubbed off when I handled it. Still though, good enough for was is essentially a token, rather than an actual unit.

Have some pics.

Operation Overlord

So, back on the 6th of June - which should give you some idea of my turnaround for this blog, we at the Bristol Vanguard had a game day focussing on the D-Day landings.

We had three boards, one representing the airborne landings, one the later battles in shore, and one, the landings themselves.

Normandy, where the beaches are fine...

A bridge. Pegasus not included

Meanwhile, in the future...

I, obviously, got tasked with kicking the sleeping Germans out of their billets very early in the morning, and to this end played a Seize and Hold mission from the Normandy Battles book.

I don't have many pictures of the battle itself, but it was a very close thing. I had to advance against Fearless Veteran SS occupying the only buildings on a mostly empty board, after most of my force - against the laws of probability - decided to turn up on the opposite side of the board from my pathfinder.

I moved quickly in the darkness and launched what I thought were some prudent assaults under the cover of night, quickly gaining a foothold near one of the objectives.

Setup on the right. My forces forced to attach the more heavily defended strongpoint.

On the left, a single platoon left to handle the 'weak' strongpoint, which none the less had two MG's in it.

The actions quickly ground to a halt as my troops were stopped in the open by machine gun fire, and unable to assault such heavily defended positions (even under the cover of darkness) dug in (or in one notable case, failed to, repeatedly).

My opponents heavy armour turned up and made a nuisance of itself, until wiped out by some lucky fire from my 6pdrs.

In the end, I wiped out all his support elements leaving him to fire at my dug in troops with small arms, while my artillery dropped barrage after barrage on his positions, until one objective cleared...

Seriously we must have played 30 rounds or so just trading small arms and 75mm howitzer fire...

... and the Tetrarchs rolled in for the win

Despite my uninspired victory, things went even less well for the allies on the other two tables. In the future, some British armour was junked by Panthers, and some very lost Soviets, unsupported by specialised landing equipment, and carried by the worlds worst landing craft (it took something like 3 turns for them to unstick) got machinegunned off the beachers. 

Overall a 2-1 victory for the Axis.

Everyone had fun though and the proceeds went to charity, so in the end are we not all winners?

It was especially great to have an operation specific theme event that worked so well. The organisers are to be congratulated, and indeed have been, profusely. They probably don't need any more...

Thing a Week 8

More things!

This time it's the Renault R35, which means that I finally have a legal minimum strength Early War army.

I think they're a slight improvement over the Char B1's, mostly because I thinned the Devlan Mud I used for "detailing" at the end.

The plan is now to accelerate through the Across the Dead Earth band, in order to get them to a playable state.

Here's some pics.

 

The company command vehicle

Thing a Week 7

So I've finally cleared the yari rabbits and the Char B-1 bis' off the painting table. I even got some decals on them.

Have some pics.

I have no current use for these guys. Furry mutant warband?

So if you know anything about the marking scheme for Char B-1's you'll notice that I screwed the platoon markings hard.

I only read the paragraph regarding special markings for Char B-1's after I'd marked them up and applied the melty decal overcoat. The only way to get them off now would be the take the paint off too, and to be honest, platoon marking debacle aside, I'm really quite please with the way they turned out.

Yet more Across the Dead Earth Goodies

So the latest set of figures from the boys at Across the Dead Earth just arrived (and by just, I mean about a month ago, but I've been busy!) and they are great.

I'm not joking, these are the best yet. The details great, the moulds are clean, and overall they really square a lot better than the vaguely cartoonish sculpts being produced at the start. Even the old guy with the assault rifle is pretty nifty.

So yeah, no complaints whatsoever... Nope... None whatsoever...

Pfft! Who am I kidding? What is that thing on her head, the cow lick from hell? Can you imagine the metric tonnes of hair gel it must take to keep that think up? She looks like Wakka from Final Fantasy!

Luckily, the one blemish on an otherwise spotless group is easy to get rid of. Now if only I could find my cutters...