I’ve added this a description for the games I’m proposing to run for Crucible 2023 in Orlando, FL. The submission description box is short, so I figured I’d add a place for a bit more detail. I’ll update this page as I get more firm time blocks and any added details.
Continue reading “Crucible 2023 Planned Games”Tag: Wargames
Embrace all change, all the time
Last post on at the beginning of May?! Okay… well… so… some things have changed. Personally, I feel it’s very important to have all of your most life changing moments in a single year… you know shake things up a little…
Been a while since last check in
Funny I look back and it’s been a couple months now I think! I’ve been trying to make as much progress as possible in a couple of fronts, so I that’s prevented me from writing all that much. Big news is:
818’s motor is in!
Joan might have snapped.
We join Joan of HVT having just recovered from the med bay after her ill fated encounter with the Tohaa to find yet a new alien threat nearby. This time an invasion of combined army soldiers in a small scouting mission (Recon+). Being the ever faithful (bloodthirsty) Joan of Arc, she was ready to combat the combined army at any time and any place… especially since she brought a Seraph.
Mission: Acquisition…
Specifically acquiring all of the OPFOR’s bullets into the Military Order’s faces.
A rough mission for the mighty forces of PanOceania and the Military Orders! We decided to Acquisition as there’s an upcoming local tournament and I hadn’t played it before. My list was an interesting one and in spite of its poor performance (dice and some of my mistakes) I actually really think I like it. Might make some changes and shift a few things around, especially with the order groups, but it seems to have a lot of good tools.
Unfortunately I totally spaced taking photos until about midway through Turn one. Summary: I spaced the Magisters across the board. Order Sgts link went left to try and take high ground. Joan possible link and Xenotracker went right to try and head that direction.
Turn I: Magisters sprint up the board, then use their groups orders to power the missile launcher into the backfield. I try to blast template his link team of Sakiel, Sukeul, and Makaul, but fail miserably and have to stop and hide out. Definitely mistake one, I should have sent the shotgun Magisters instead, I just thought I could do better with a circular template.
We also both forgot about Acquisitions 16” deployment zone. I think that would have made a big difference in that first turn.
Days of our Knights Part II
A first in a bit, I actually managed to get a game in on the weekend! It was nice to actually get two games in this week, just wish I’d been able to during the Kurage campaign. Which to me felt too short and far too laced with drama. So today we got a game in to play Supplies. A really fun mission and one I would definitely play again.
For deployment I’ve got two Seraphs yet again, my opponent was kind enough to loan me a BUNCH of models because I forgot to bring my box of Nomads that has drones and TAGs, so today I’ve got an O’Yoroi Seraph as well as Songbae Yaokong (posing as a repeater bot) and a Husong Yaokong posing as a forward observer bot. I also realized I haven’t finished painting my machinist and bot so they get to be an Auxilia today. I made sure the snowy auxilia is my palbot.
Deployment was interesting. We had some really good corridors, but nothing very long. So I posted the sniper on the roof with Lt Fusilier. On the ground was the FO fusilier to ‘hopefully’ claim objectives. With a Seraph on each side, plus the Machinist and palbot spread between Seraphs I was reasonably happy. I just dropped the TO FO Sgts next to objectives so they’d be ready.
My opponent was using Aleph for the first time. I think I’ve only played against Aleph once, so this should be fun. Roger Van Zant as the Aleph HVT observed the proceedings.
That said… I realized I was facing a bucket full of Aleph Myrmidons…without any MSV… this I realized on the bottom of Turn 1 though, so that’ll be later
2 Seraphs No Orders
After just having played in an Infinity campaign that was waaay too short (only 4 weeks and work was busy, so I only made two reports). I decided it was high time I started doing more battle reports! This time on my own site! So to catch you up, I played a couple of games now with Military Orders. Here’s my two Kurage Reports:
Episode I: A Lesson in How Not to Use Knights
Episode II: Days of Our Knights
So we embark upon a new mission! Powerpack against the ever capable Jon (Wisekensei) and his cadre of filthy Nomads. Here’s a link to his report as he was quicker than me!
Meanwhile back at PanO local HQ:
Mission IV – Start your engines! On Bakunin!
[Updated 9/4/18 to make the title match the other ones]
Place ya bets folks!
A few days after heading out of the caravansery the team makes their way to the C3 Circular bound for Svalarheima. That isn’t their final destination though and the team makes their way from the circular to the ever flying Bakunin mothership, currently rocketing its way from C3 to C2 and from there to Varuna. The ship flying at 1 G thrust to maintain gravity aboad ship for the duration of the flight.
As you approach the lower landing docks of Bakunin, the true scale of the ship finally becomes apparent. The circulars are truly massive ships, but it’s shocking to believe something as big as bakunin can still attach. The three drive columns trail massive jets of superhot plasma, behind the two primary domes. As you get closer you can see the small city that lies beneath each dome… Small is a relative term though as some of the skyscrapers in that dome are over 100 floors…then there’s the Megascrapers close to the city center. Just below the domes and covering the drive columns in an Amoeba like blob are the individual environment modules that the various Bakunin sects call home. As you approach Bakunin a message pops up on your ship.
The message is just voice, no image, which is unusual, but the voice says: “FINALLY! You’re here! Oh man, I can’t wait to meet you guys. Unfortunately I am just super duper busy right now [you hear some very unsettling noises in the background], but see my assistant in Vaudeville! She’ll get you all set up! I sure hope you guys do a great job on this. I was just oh so disappointed when I had to airlock the last crew that failed me! Anyhoo! Have fun! See a show! Get some tail! Get A tail! Welcome to Bakunin! Just remember this old adage and you’ll do just fine: “Man is much like something something something you’re mom”
As the players approach they’re hailed by the Bakunin landing system and Doctor-Pilot-Engineer Aziz (the paranoid paramedic) manages to pull off an excellent roll and neatly dock the as yet unnamed ship to Bakunin. As the docking clamps clip in and the umbilicles connect a happy little Lesser AI named Archie pops up in their AR to welcome them to Bakunin! And also remember we have a no weapons policy!
Continue reading “Mission IV – Start your engines! On Bakunin!”
Less than a week…yet so much has happened!
Wow… I must say this has been a pretty spectacularly eventful few days. Since I last wrote, the Mazda has had it’s alignment and then served as a faithful companion on a 6 hour road trip to visit my wife’s best friend in Joseph, OR. It was a nice trip. I made some delicious steak and skewers (care of our friend Heidi’s excellent purchases), then I remembered that of all the things I’ve done in my life so far, rode motorcyles and driven cars on racetracks, jumped out of perfectly good aircraft, learned…mostly how to windsurf and kite landboard, worked in machine shops on live explosives…no…the scariest thing to me is F—ing cable trams… I find them deeply, deeply unsettling. I love a good rollercoaster, but sitting gently swaying at 20-50 feet off the ground…not okay. Not even a little okay. I guess it’s just kind of funny, I’ve done things that I though would terrify me and not really felt affected, but then something that shouldn’t bother me at all, like the Joseph tram or pop-sickle sticks, no…that’s what’s really scary!
Anyway, I digress… the real news is that one of my long term projects is closer to fruition than ever before. As of Friday I committed to purchasing a project Subaru WRX! I cannot wait for this machine to arrive (luckily as we were soon to be leaving, the current owner agreed to hold it and deliver it next Sunday). So here’s the deal. It’s a 2003 WRX that had the headgasket blown, so the current owner sourced parts to build up a forged internals version of a 2.5L STI motor. In WRX circles it’s known as a hybrid build, Standard 2.0L WRX heads with a thickened gasket paired to a 2.5L bottom end. He had a machinist assemble it. I’m hoping for receipts to prove it…we’ll see. That said, the motor looks great. It’s still in the plastic packaging. Yes it is a jumble of parts and one hell of a big project, but I have plans brewing. Regardless this machine looks like it’s got a lot of good parts. Tein Coilovers (one needs a rebuild), a turbo or two, the original block, actually a pretty nice shape interior, and one hornet nest as a bonus! Okay not so much a bonus, but the current owner’s willing to deliver, which makes my life WAY easier. Can’t wait to tear this monstrosity apart and rebuild it in my own design. I will also admit with a delightful sense of…history? That this is nearly identical to the one my brother had back in the day… so if I can rebuild as something substantially more impressive that’ll just be icing on the cake of a very fun car.
To that end within hours of arriving home (as soon as the temperature dropped a bit) I spent a few more hours in the garage and managed to secure myself a new engine workspace! The garage, sadly still needs a lot of work. The triumph today was that I made a new home for large power tools and really cleaned off the former CNC workbench. I think it’ll do the job nicely for an engine/rebuild bench. I still need to go through the stuff underneath. There’s a kiln a single stage compressor and a bunch or other terrifying items below. Nonetheless…progress!
Oh and Thursday I had a fun game of Infinity! With a similarly detailed/cartooney battlereport. Those are pretty fun to make.
Busy and not busy!
In seemingly alternating bursts. I’ve actually been up to quite a bit in the last week or so since writing here. In relatively chronological order, I’ve been playing a good bit of Infinity! Undeniably my favorite miniature wargame. It kind of catches me coming and going because I love the ‘orders’ system. Then you add to that my love of the futuristic (but good future) sculpts and background…it’s pretty much a solid hit for me. I just don’t feel the appeal for the ‘grim darkness’ of the future…because if we’re looking from even the 1950s to today, things have generally gotten a lot better in my opinion. It’s definitely not perfect, but in my tiny corner of the universe the people I know and work with really seem to be trying to make it better. Hmmmm… Actually retyped this several times after waxing too philosophically! Opinions are not in fact like assholes, because everyone has LOTS of opinions, and I’m determined not to make this some opinionfest… Evidence! That’s what we need! So here’s evidence of my most recent Infinity games in the StrikeZone Wotan campaign. I decided to put them all in one place so far. Might come back add new ones or just make new posts. We’ll see.
Proper Care and Feeding of Pupniks
The Triumphant Return of Zombie Salty Bob
The Combined Army Could Not Care Less
Those have actually been properly fun to put together. I’ve been using Prisma for the filter and then PicSay Pro to add captions. It’s just kind of entertaining; I know what ‘happened’ in a game, in terms of X shot Y, Y punched Z in the face…but when you sit down after the fact and try to write out what actually happened, you find yourself starting to name the characters and making up a more cohesive story of what happened.
Bonus! I also learned more about photo editing in GIMP. It’s how I made some of the images like the featured image for this post. As I’ve learned taking close ups of miniatures on a camera phone, depth of field is a complete jerk, so what I’ve now learned to do is take multiple photos holding as still as possible (yes I should have a tripod…but that’s pretty inconvenient in the middle of a game), then go back later import them into Gimp and try to overlay the focus of each photo. Kind of a fun process and pretty new to me.
Oh…lastly…more work in the garage today… It feels like a bit of the end of an era. I decided it’s finally time to dismantle the CNC machine. Amazing how quickly something like that comes apart…and sad in its own way. The poor CNC machine was just a victim of too many problems. On the one hand it could only cut plywood and some hardwoods…very very slowly… It also had a ridiculous toolchain ie: design the part in whatever CAD, import to Heeks CNC, basically extract the outlines which sometimes mostly sort of worked, then make sure you have the right bits, speeds, feeds, etc set up, run the G-Code creator… put the file in the shared folder… shut down windows and boot into Linux to run Linux CNC… realize you made a mistake… boot back into Windows… screw with the gCode… etc… Also as an added bit of wonderful functionality, the lack of breakers in the garage meant that I had to power up specifically and I could not operate any other devices on that circuit… I also had to watch it to make sure it didn’t light itself on fire… you know again… It was also insanely loud. So that left me with an overall process that took a long frustrating time to get the part to start cutting THEN left me sitting there staring at it, because I couldn’t do much of anything else while it ran…
All that whinging on though…the CNC did its job. I did learn a HUGE amount about CNC, gCode, toolchains, tooling generally…and I had a lot of fun building it. It’s also left me with the confidence to design or build one again…this time knowing SO much more. So yeah…Project Success! Not a brilliant success, but still a good one!
It is amazing how months of work went into it and it took…oh maybe an hour and half to have it pretty much disassembled and any of the valuable components stripped off… Admittedly a CNC machine made of MDF and some bolts does not have many valuable components remaining…
Spiderwebs are nonconductive right? I’ll definitely keep all the stepper drivers for the next project…that serial controller though…what a pain to deal with! Either use linux or Windows XP…Linux is fine it’s just all my other CAD/CNC stuff is Windows only…
Bah! I’ve been typing too much! Time for bed!
It Rhymes with Hockey 