US Battle Report - Two Games, One Night Part Two

We had 5 people show up on Monday night for US, which meant we had a two 1 on 1 games going, which meant someone was watching.  The spectator was kairaven, who suggested we have a group game after the individual games were finished.  EV had just been violently introduced to the Bone Griffon gunline and understandably didn't want a piece of the action.  The BG player had to go, which left just kairaven, vatank, and myself.  We settled on a starter box game, knocked out some deployment zones and went at it.

Paint on a human ship

It's been a long time coming, but I finally have some non-primer paint on a Human ship.  I picked up some paint last night, notably the GW foundation yellow that was the reason I took on painting yellow in the first place.  I just did the base coat, and not the entire ship at that, but I wanted to get an idea of what my scheme will look like in reality instead of just how I imagine it.  I think it will turn out like I wanted it to.

Behold the base coated beauty.

The brown will lighten up a bit, but I want to keep it dark to contrast the lighter wood of my ID.  The yellow will brighten up as well, but the blue is about what I intend it to be.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the railing, and I want to put some squadron/fleet markings on the hull, and then there's the base to do as well, but it's a very nice feeling to make some actual progress.

I should also mention that despite my initial reluctance I've settled on Space Wolf transfers for the sails.  I found a big sheet in my box, and EV had another, that have a bunch of different wolves in roughly the same size.  I plan on using a different design for each class of ship and varying the sail striping to differentiate between squadrons.

US Battle Report - Two Games, One Night Part One

We had a good turnout at the FLGS last night with 5 US and 2 Firestorm Armada players.  I got in two games with the humans, the first an Elves vs Humans battle with vatank.  I hadn't played him 1 on 1 yet, so it was good to get a game in. 

The new between classes list

The new list looks an awful lot like the old list.  I'm abandoning the ID spreadsheet because tech7 already created a whole program to build fleets with that trumps any crappy spreadsheet I would produce.  I probably mentioned that I finished book 12 of Wheel of Time the other day, so that's the first item crossed off the list before I even write the list.  Speaking of lists, here it is.

US Battle Report - Premiere Night

The turn-out at Game Parlor wasn't so hot tonight, just me and EV.  While it was a shame that we went to the store just to play each other, I think it's important to keep a presence going on Mondays, so chalk this one up to fighting the good fight.  Tonight was the debut for my Imperial Humans.  I must have been extra excited because a lot of pictures are blurry, so I'll do a blanket apology for that upfront.  Since it's late (Starcraft 2 is compelling), I'm going to cut right to the chase.  Lists:

A productive morning

Title says it all, I got some good stuff done this morning.  I sculpted two more frigate bases, which I wanted to get done in time for tonight so I could tell frigate squadrons apart.  I worked on the "case" for my humans, cutting actual holes for the frigates instead of just cramming them between layers.  I'm also in the process of printing out the Martyr rules to have on hand, since they'll be coming up in the near future.

I've been skewing towards terrain-heavy tables of late, so I wanted to go back the other way and have some more open tables.  With 9 islands (and one lonely rock), I have enough terrain to put out two sparseish tables worth of islands.  I only have one table cloth though, and that's EV's to boot, so I set out to Joann's to get some material for another cloth.  I'd take a picture of it, but I'll just wait until gaming tonight and get a picture of it then.  It's a light-ish blue/lighter-ish blue/white wavy pattern that I think looks a lot like a rough sea.  Since my frigate bases are very textured, which I'm going to call storm-tossed, so the wavy print is going to work out well I hope.  It's significantly lighter than EV's cloth so there'll be no getting the two mixed up.  Having the option to setup two tables could be useful tonight, and on Game Parlor nights in general, in case we have an excess of players and a deficit of table dressing.

In non-gaming news, I finally finished the latest Wheel of Time book, not quite a year after I got it.  I'll post up another list of things I hope to accomplish before the fall semester starts sometime, but that would have been the top item on the list and I can cross it off before even making the list, which is nice. 

Actual progress

Seems like it's been a while since I did any modeling or painting, so it was good to get some done this morning.  Since I started up the New Fleet Challenge on the Spartan boards to provide myself with some helpful pressure to get my new Imperial Humans done, I figured I should actually abide by the guidelines I set down, which means having pictures of progress.  Which requires actual progress.  While I did glue the frigates to their bases and prime the hulls of the larger ships, that doesn't really count as progress in my book.  With my now-open schedule and this "deadline" hanging over my head, it was time to do some work.

Tournament prep and general housekeeping

While I should have been learning about recent American literature this morning, I was considering what I needed to add to my bag for the tournament this weekend.  I added some smaller dice to my bag to track crew damage, as I only had 2 in the bag previously, some other small dice to mark the odd port/starboard AD reduction, a d8 for wind direction and a scatter die to mark my airship's placement and heading if it ends up on terrain, as it often does.  I found a smaller, keyring-sized tape measure that I'll stick in my bag in case my opponent comes without one, as well as a small bag of glass beads from some TCG that I'll use for activation markers.  I still need to make some wind templates, for my opponents if necessary in the immediate future, but also for my Humans in the not-so-distant future.  I also assembled a second bag of dice thinking that my friend may have been interested in the tournament, though as expected he declined, but I'll bring it along anyway just in case.  It's always better to be over-prepared than get surprised. 

US Battle Report - The First Team Battle

I had a couple new experiences tonight at the FLGS.  We had four show up for US action again, and thanks to a bit of pre-planning we got a team game up and running.  It was my Iron Dwarves and EV's Shroud Mages facing off against Kairaven's Orcs and VAtank's Imperial Humans.  This meant it was also the first time I played in a game where the wind actually mattered.  We played 700 per player, so 1400 a side, which was another first for game size.  We nearly didn't finish before the store closed, but managed to scrape under the wire.  With fleets as big as they were, it shouldn't surprise me that I ended up with a lot of pictures, but it surprised me all the same.  Many pictures, plus all the other battle report goodies, after the break.