Warlord Games General Historical Discussion

[buglips*the*goblin]

 

 

I know there are a few of us here who have been poking around in this line, so I thought a general thread might help us find each other.  I know @lowlylowlycook and @SisterMaryNapalm have done some Bolt Action wips and show-offs, but given the volume of the board these posts may sometimes be easily lost.  Here you might provide some links to them so they at least catch interested eyes.  

 

As most of you know, I'm a Reaper guy.  I love Reaper, I've bought (and buy) lots of Reaper, I'm a lifer and I've been here practically forever.  I sort of fell into Warlord by accident after my house fire.  I'd been poking around the interwebs looking at assorted minis, and when I went to ReaperCon, Frontline Games and a Bolt Action demo team were good enough to hook me up with some stuff.  Initially this was mostly so I'd have something to do when I got back, since whatever I didn't lose in the fire was going to be in storage for a bit.  That's why there's so many US Infantry sets above, I was mostly picking based on what looked fun.

 

Gradually I started to get more interested, and I realized that this might be a good way for me to build a collection of historicals.  I've long ogled ancients and napoleonics in assorted figure catalogs, but my primary focus was fantasy - and while a regiment of redcoats might look classy and cool, they were expensive and difficult to get into.  At the same time I was mulling this, the house got finished and my stuff came back from storage.  The results were... rather grisly.  My ~300 painted figures suffered quite badly, and would need to be redone.  I was starting over from scratch.  This is something I intend to do, but if I'm honest I don't have the heart for it right away.  

 

So to tide me over and keep me working, I bought the Hail Caeser and Black Powder starters.  This is a good fit for right now, because there's a lot less pressure to paint more than tabletop - given that there's a bazillion figures in that picture.  I can relax, paint some army men, and work up the will to do the dreadful sorting and culling of what remains of my fantasy collection (presently I've hidden them away in boxes).  At some point, I might even play one of these games!  

 

I don't have Pike & Shotte... yet... I figure I should finish some of what's already here before going deeper down the rabbit hole.  

 

So if you've been poking around with this stuff, too, please join in!

 

 

 

 

 

[Lord of the Dish Pit]

So far I've only done some of their Weird WW2 stuff, the German Vampire, British Hunter,and Werewolf with handler. When funding allows though, Pike & Shotte is definately on the list, there's several units that'll be perfect for a Witch Hunter army, not to mention they have a Matthew Hopkins with sidekick. I'll have to do some digging, but I think they might still have the "Witchfinder General" ruleset. 

[buglips*the*goblin]

Just now, Lord of the Dish Pit said:

So far I've only done some of their Weird WW2 stuff, the German Vampire, British Hunter,and Werewolf with handler. When funding allows though, Pike & Shotte is definately on the list, there's several units that'll be perfect for a Witch Hunter army, not to mention they have a Matthew Hopkins with sidekick. I'll have to do some digging, but I think they might still have the "Witchfinder General" ruleset. 

 

Pike & Shotte vexes me because of the way they designed the starter.  For BA, HC, BP I bought the starter and also bought the hardcover rulebook.  My eyes aren't what they used to be and I already had the Hail Caeser softback from RCon and the print was just too small to be comfortable.  And anyway, they come with a neat free figure.  But the P&S starter comes with the hardback rulebook (and no free metal figure), which makes buying a second one redundant, and on top of that comes with no bases.  They don't even tell you what bases you might need.  So that's why that one fell to the bottom of my procure list for the moment.  I mean, it looks amazing and it's an era I definitely want a piece of, I'm just not sure what way I want to go about jumping in because that starter set design is, IMO, a pretty miserable thing.  It'd be more attractive with included bases, I think.  I think this is down to it coming with the hardback rules, probably because it's a bit too niche to make a softback for, and because this eats up a lot of the starter set's value the rest of it is a bit... meh.

 

I should note that this is also my criticism of the Band of Brothers starter, with the house ruin model essentially nibbling away at what could have been more useful components.  Well, that, and it's a freaking Market Garden starter with US Airborne and Grenadiers.  Why is every starter box Market Garden?!  Flames of War's Open Fire box was the same.  I may be a bit too picky here, though, on account of Late War being my least favourite (at least after Falaise) era.  Since Early War is my preference, I have to accept I'm probably a weirdo and most freshly recruited players will be more effectively lured in by 1944+ with Shermans, Big Cats, and stuff from the movies rather than pugnaciously puny Panzer I's and adorably obsolete TKS tankettes.  

 

 

[Glitterwolf]

I'm not a gamer, but I love to paint.

Mostly fantasy and some scifi.

I started out with historicals in my youth and found myself to be too much of a perfectionist to keep enjoying painting them and so I switched to fantasy.

 

However, Ancients are almost like fantasy, truth is there is very little knowledge about the true colours of Celts/Romans etc.

Even Roman shield designs are under debate.

So those are still interesting to me.

I always had a soft spot for Napoleonics, I have purchased some Historical Busts and Large Scale minis.

 

As for Warlord, I have been eying the Pike and Shotte minis.

When given the proper paintjob a lot of those could be of use to me to incorporate into my Conquistadore army in my Lost World Project.

And lately I started a Fantasy Asian Army, lots of Undead and Oni, but Samurai and Japanese/Chinese Historical minis will find there way in there as well.

 

So, maybe I'm not part of the real target group here, but I will be looking.

As a History buff I like to see this evolve.

 

Have fun!

 

[buglips*the*goblin]

1 minute ago, Glitterwolf said:

However, Ancients are almost like fantasy, truth is there is very little knowledge about the true colours of Celts/Romans etc.

 

This was a selling point for me, because I didn't need any new specialist paint.  I bought a lot of Vallejo for my Bolt Action stuff to save mixing and make life easier, but for Hail Caeser I have a lot more flexibility.  That part about Celtic colours also gives me some cheat room, as the starter set is 40 Romans to 80 Celts, making the Celtic portion not only twice as large but more difficult to paint on account of greater individuality and more mixed "uniforms".  So exploiting the historical grey area lets me paint a goodly number in solid colours and then scatter through the ranks some individuals with more tartan/plaid clothes.  With future sets the proportion of "lumberjack clothed" celts could be a lot higher since there's less urgency to get a playable force fielded.  Were I to paint a lot of "plaid" and woad tattoos on these it would take me two years to finish them.  That might be effort I'd like to spend later, but not effort I'd like to spend right now.  It's a proportion that makes sense, but as a painter I'd be a lot happier if it was 80 near-identical Romans and 40 uniquely individual Celts.  

 

Also, on my first square of 4 Romans I never noticed that some bodies have sheathed swords and some have empty sheathes.  As a result, some of my front rank using their swords have extra swords in their sheathes, while the back rank using their pilum have no swords in sheathe at all.  Quality work and observation on my part, I must admit.  

[Glitterwolf]

1 minute ago, buglips*the*goblin said:

 

This was a selling point for me, because I didn't need any new specialist paint.  I bought a lot of Vallejo for my Bolt Action stuff to save mixing and make life easier, but for Hail Caeser I have a lot more flexibility.  That part about Celtic colours also gives me some cheat room, as the starter set is 40 Romans to 80 Celts, making the Celtic portion not only twice as large but more difficult to paint on account of greater individuality and more mixed "uniforms".  So exploiting the historical grey area lets me paint a goodly number in solid colours and then scatter through the ranks some individuals with more tartan/plaid clothes.  With future sets the proportion of "lumberjack clothed" celts could be a lot higher since there's less urgency to get a playable force fielded.  Were I to paint a lot of "plaid" and woad tattoos on these it would take me two years to finish them.  That might be effort I'd like to spend later, but not effort I'd like to spend right now.  It's a proportion that makes sense, but as a painter I'd be a lot happier if it was 80 near-identical Romans and 40 uniquely individual Celts.  

 

Also, on my first square of 4 Romans I never noticed that some bodies have sheathed swords and some have empty sheathes.  As a result, some of my front rank using their swords have extra swords in their sheathes, while the back rank using their pilum have no swords in sheathe at all.  Quality work and observation on my part, I must admit.  

 

Hm, some Romans might have lost their swords during battle?

You could always cut off the offending sword grips and glue them on the ones who need them if it annoys you.

Most people will either not notice or care during a game though.

 

[SisterMaryNapalm]

1 hour ago, buglips*the*goblin said:

 

As most of you know, I'm a Reaper guy.

 

 

Hm ... Weird ... that's the same thing Max Decker said ... Are you - are you by any chance Max Decker pretending to be buglips? Not sure if heresy ...

 

//

 

Well, to be honest: I never wanted to do WWII or something similar, when guys in my area started to do Bolt Action, but well - couldn't help it. So I did the Russian girls. Then guys in my area stopped playing Bolt Action again, so I created a second army (the Germans). I will paint both and do some background on the weapons and uniforms here - and now a friend asked me if we could do some warhammer 40k using the bolt action rules ... that could be interesting. We will see how that will work out.

[Lord of the Dish Pit]

Thanks for the heads up on the lack of bases with the starter. That seems a very odd thing to leave out on their part.

As to the Celts, seeing as how records from that time are sketchy at best, paint half of them and round out the rest of the force with treemen or Elder Things.Lovecraft did a story fragment something along those lines once and I think there might be published rules somewhere for such. I came across somewhere a series of photos of someone who'd made a mythos force of I think Romanians for Bolt Action, counting the shoggoths as tanks and using cultists to depict conscript infantry. 

[buglips*the*goblin]

7 minutes ago, Glitterwolf said:

 

Hm, some Romans might have lost their swords during battle?

You could always cut off the offending sword grips and glue them on the ones who need them if it annoys you.

Most people will either not notice or care during a game though.

 

 

It's not really worth the effort to fix, particularly as they are now firmly affixed to the base so it's a bit crowded around the affected area, it's just something I wish I'd noticed before I finished the stand.  That stand of Romans is lower quality anyway, because I didn't yet have anything to really work the moldlines with* and, in any case, the ink I used to wash their armor reactivated with the sealer and made the finish a touch sloppy anyway.  

 

*It took me way too long to realize I could just buy some cheap emory boards and cut them to size to use as sanders.  I've had a real ripping case of the dum-dums ever since the house cooked off.  

[Glitterwolf]

1 minute ago, Lord of the Dish Pit said:

Thanks for the heads up on the lack of bases with the starter. That seems a very odd thing to leave out on their part.

As to the Celts, seeing as how records from that time are sketchy at best, paint half of them and round out the rest of the force with treemen or Elder Things.Lovecraft did a story fragment something along those lines once and I think there might be published rules somewhere for such. I came across somewhere a series of photos of someone who'd made a mythos force of I think Romanians for Bolt Action, counting the shoggoths as tanks and using cultists to depict conscript infantry. 

 

Celts will also make great Barbarians for any fantasy setting.

[Zink]

7 hours ago, buglips*the*goblin said:

Also, on my first square of 4 Romans I never noticed that some bodies have sheathed swords and some have empty sheathes.  As a result, some of my front rank using their swords have extra swords in their sheathes, while the back rank using their pilum have no swords in sheathe at all.  Quality work and observation on my part, I must admit.  

 

I have an army of those romans and did the same thing on a few of them before noticing. After that I tried give the empty sheath bodies sword arms. At least it's not real noticable once you put the scutums on. They mostly fight goblins as I haven't bought a historically accurate opponent for them. That's a bit of a problem in my collection because I only have one army for the periods I play. I just use them in fantasy games so it's not a big deal. 

 

Would really like to get into WW2 and Napoleonics but I'm not good at dabbling. I'd want to buy way too many minis so for the time being I'm sticking to fantasy with some ancient/medieval armies. 

[Doug Sundseth]

I really like WWII, particularly early war.

 

If you ever want to play Spearhead in 1/285 .... 

 

And for anything up through Napoleonics, I work almost entirely in 15mm.

 

Except Seven Years War; that's 25-28mm. So how about some hot Prussian on Austrian action? 

[Heisler]

Do you realize the potential monster thread that you have created? The Warlord plastics have been getting better and better with every release. But they have some serious competitors in the field that should not be ignored, although just like metal there can be some size differences. Perry Miniatures has WWII, Napoleonic and American Civil and Revolutionary War in plastic. The other large player is Victrix, primarily Napoleonic and Ancients. There are a couple of others out there that play in the Ancients/Dark Ages realm. So don’t feel like Warlord has cornered the plastics market.

 

Like Doug I prefer 15mm for large battles whether that is WWII or Ancients (and why don’t we have plastics in 15mm yet?). However, you don’t need to paint hundreds of figures in 28mm for any of those periods either, it just depends on what you want to do. For instance, Bolt Action is primarily a skirmish level game, pretty standard for 28mm and the period. But you can do the same with almost any period from Ancients to ACW. If you play skirmish level games in any of these periods you can get away with a box of infantry and a box of cavalry and maybe an artillery piece and you are good to go.

 

Rules, of course, are a matter of personal taste. However, I do feel like there are much better rule sets out there, especially for WWII. For WWII I prefer Chain of Command by TooFatLardies. They also produce a set of rules called Sharp Practice with is a set of Black Powder skirmish rules, which currently run from Napoleonics up through the ACW and wild west eras. Again, Warlord’s Black Powder rules cover the same eras but I really like the TooFatLardies rules much better. For more of a Dark Age flavor they produce Dux Britanniarum which averages about 40 figures to a side. Another very good set of rules for small scale ancients and dark ages are the SAGA rules.

 

What this really means that if you want to dabble in a period that is usually thought of only for big battles then look at one of these rulesets and dabble away!

[lowlylowlycook]

Don't forget Blood Red Skies and their new range of Naval games Cruel Seas and Black Seas...

[Doug Sundseth]

Well for WWII skirmish, let's not forget WFG's Frontline, which is designed for 1/35 figures. The range available is pretty wide.

 

And let's just say that the range of a long 88mm or 90mm ATG in 1/35 is ... notable.