2017 Retrospective

With 2017 done and dusted, it's time for a look back at what I've worked on over the last 12 months, whether I achieved any of the goals I had set for myself, and look ahead to what 2018 might hold.

As always, the year began with the Early War FOW competition at ValleyCon. I ran a British Motor Company themed on 1st Armoured Brigade in Greece. I won four games out of seven, placing mid table, and winning Best Army.

Item three on my list was Team Yankee, and this was one of my main painting efforts for the year, putting together 100+ points of Soviets. There are only two of us at the club that play in 15mm, but we had some enjoyable games in March and November.

In May there was also a big multiplayer TY game in 6mm.

The major change during the year was FOW V4. I finished painting my Comets, although have not yet added the Cromwell CS tanks, and played a couple of enjoyable 1750pt 8x6 games with them in April. The plan had been to rebase my desert Brits and finish off a few odds and ends, but this didn't happen, partly because after the initial glow of some excellent tank battles using the new system, I became concerned about how it handles infantry combat. More on this in a later post, probably.

The last item on my list for the year was related to Impetus. I didn't add any light cavalry to my Florentines, so that task will roll over yet again. I was encouraged to play in V3 in June, despite hardly knowing the rules and only having a renaissance army to take to a competition that was classically themed, and had a great time.

My goals for 2018 are:

1. Finalise my FOW list for ValleyCon 18 - I will be running an Afrika Korps list, but the details are not yet confirmed. The fact that I'm still at this stage of the process when the competition is only four weeks away is a pretty clear reflection of my feelings towards the game, given that in previous years I'd sorted my lists out in August, and spent the last three months of the year painting for it. I have the feeling that my interest in FOW will either live or die by how V4 performs at ValleyCon. 
2. Actually buy and paint some Italian light cavalry and Landsknechts for Impetus after two years of just talking about it.
3. More Team Yankee. I want to add a NATO force for both the 30pt and 100pt formats, and hopefully lure a few more locals into at least trying the game in 15mm.
4. I will be taking a close look at 'Fate of a Nation' when it is rereleased. The original version missed the mark in terms of game balance, but hopefully the extension of the game to 1973 fixes this.
5. Not entirely unrelated to Item 1, a couple of us are going to be trying out Battlegroup and Chain of Command. I have picked up the core rules for Battlegroup, plus the Normandy and Market Garden supplements, but haven't put it on the table yet.

So happy new year, thanks for reading, and I wish you well for the year ahead.

Desert Basecloth

For the Team Yankee games last month, I had purchased some curtain fabric for a basecloth that I thought would be a good deserty colour. It wasn't, as soon as it was out from under the shop lights it turned out to be shiny and gold. After the games, I put some thought into what would make a better basecloth for a desert table. The commercially available mats look amazing but are quite expensive, so I set out to see if I could make my own.

All of the examples of homemade terrain mats that I could find on the internet use a canvas drop cloth covered with a thin layer of caulk, impressed with sand then painted. I couldn't understand why caulk was used, as to me this would add a lot of weight and expense, so I decided to try gluing sand directly to my golden curtains.

Materials Used:
1.4m x 2.0m curtain fabric
2 x 250mm test pots of Resene 'Camouflage'
60mm test pots, one each of Resene 'Triple Akaroa', 'Half Stonewall', and 'Half Mountain Mist'
1 x 1.5kg bag of bird cage sand
Small amounts of flock and GF9 medium basing grit
PVA glue

With a standard house painting brush, I applied PVA to the fabric in manageably-sized sections, then sprinkled on patches of the GF9 grit followed by covering it with the budgie sand. I use budgie sand for all of my basing because I like the grain size and it's sterile. Once the glue dried, I recovered the excess sand, then repeated the process until I had the whole cloth covered. I learned quickly to avoid applying the glue in rectangular pattern, as I ended up with noticeable borders where one section of glue stopped and its neighbor started. 

I painted the mat with Resene colours that are close approximations to my desert basing colours: Vallejo Brown Violet, Khaki, Stone Grey, and Deck Tan. The entire mat was first covered with a coat of 'Camouflage' to seal in the sand. 500ml was just enough to cover the mat, with some slight dilution towards the end when it looked like I was about to run out. The basecoat was followed by progressively lighter drybrush layers of the others colours, finishing with small amounts of flock as an accent.

First coat of paint

Working through the drybrushing

Finished mat

The total cost of the project, including the fabric I started with, was about $70, half of that being the paint. I can't really answer the question of why caulk would be needed, but it may be something to do with the weight of the material - mine is quite heavy, whereas a lighter fabric may require caulk to give it a bit more substance. At this stage the mat seems to be able to handle being rolled up without the surface being damaged, but we'll see how it looks after a bit of use.

Of Gauge and Scale

There was a recent question on the TY Facebook page asking about what railway track to use for terrain, and the discussion that followed has driven me to write this post on the topic.

The first key concept for railway miniatures is scale ratio, which relates to the size of the rolling stock relative to the full sized original.

The other concept is track gauge, which is the distance between the inner edges of the rails. Half of the world's railways, including those in France, Germany and Poland, have a gauge of 1435mm, which is known as Standard Gauge.

All model railway track, rolling stock and accessories are sold at a particular scale, which in this context refers to a specific combination of scale ratio, track gauge, and other factors that makes up the parameters of the system as a whole.

Scale	Scale Ratio	Track Gauge	Scale Error for Standard Gauge
O	1/46	32mm	+6.4mm at 1/56
S	1/64	22.5mm	-3.1mm at 1/56
OO	1/76	16.5mm	+2.2mm at 1/100
HO	1/87	16.5mm	+2.2mm at 1/100
TT	1/120	12mm	-2.4mm at 1/100
N	1/160	9mm	-5.4mm at 1/100
Z	1/220	6.5mm	+1.7mm at 1/300

For most scales, the scale ratio and the track gauge combine to create an accurate representation of a Standard Gauge railway. OO is a bit of an oddball where the track is underscale compared to the rolling stock for historical reasons. There are a multitude of other specialty scales, usually for narrow gauge prototypes. An example is NZ120, which is 1/120 on 9mm track, to represent New Zealand's railway network which has a gauge of 1067mm.

Obviously none of these are a perfect match for representing Standard Gauge in common wargaming scales. In 15mm you would require rolling stock with a scale ratio of 1/100 running on a track gauge of about 14.3mm, so it comes down to what compromises you are prepared to make: do you accept something too large, too small, do you go and scratchbuild your own, or do you simply avoid the problem?

I don't know why Battlefront chose to base their 'Battlefield In A Box' railway track on TT, but it seems to have led to an apparently widely-held but incorrect idea that TT is the perfect match for FOW. In reality, neither the track nor the rolling stock are any more accurate in 15mm than HO. As noted before, not all railways have the same gauge: in Russia the gauge is 1520mm, so for Eastern Front terrain the TT track is even more underscale than it is for the vast majority of rail lines in Northwest Europe.

From my perspective, what would be ideal would be a range of 1/100 rolling stock and accompanying 14.3mm track to use for 15mm wargames, with the next best thing being 1/100 rolling stock that sits on HO track, but alas as far as I can tell there is no such thing on the market. As such, wanting to have railway lines in my collection of TY terrain but being too lazy to scratchbuild, I have chosen to run with HO because of its price and availability, and am happy to accept that everything will be slightly too large.