Serpent Army is Finished

I think I must be violating some law of the wargaming universe - recently projects are being completed at a faster rate than new ones are started.

Latest project completed, the Serpents for 15mm sci-fi.

Apart from the core infantry units, the formation has two heavy weapon sections. First, a heavy direct fire unit.

And second a mortar battery.

While completing the last units I also improved the basing and details on the Nest-Queen (which is now officially the commander of the whole force).

I'd really like to add stuff to this model - some armor, comms, maybe weapons or something that could represent shield generators. But that would depend on my modelling skills, which I'm not sure are up to it. For now the naked model looks decent, so rather than risk ruining it I'll use "psychic powers" as a convenient excuse to give it the capabilities I want it to have on the table.

The next step for this army will be to find a game system to use them with. My googling hasn't turned up any 15mm sci-fi systems that look interesting, so I'll likely end up writing one myself. Possible working title - Sierra Foxtrot. It's likely to be very strongly influenced by (if not to start with just directly a sci-fi version of) my favorite 15mm game system, Flames of War / Team Yankee.

Terrain Update

While the Serpents have been my main focus recently, I've also had a few side projects for a change of pace. The hills for my terrain collection are improving.

I still haven't mastered a good technique for flocking large areas in a nice even layer. So for now the method is to do an initial coat as evenly as possible, then touch up any patchy areas. This produces a decidedly uneven layer, but the end result looks decently realistic. I'm tempted to start experimenting with patching using alternate flock types (particularly some sandy/rocky textures) and see how that looks.

Robotech Reinforcements

I've added some new units to my Robotech forces. On the Zentraedi side, a couple more heavy weapon battlepods.

And for the UEDF, a couple of Phalanx destroids.

The models are actually Huo-Che battlemechs from Steel Warrior Studios, but they're more than close enough for me. I've also acquired 4 Apache helicopter gunships from GHQ. Right now they are still in their packaging (only received today), but once assembled they can either reinforce the UEDF or be part of a 6mm modern force.

A Growing City

Lastly, as part of the same order with the "Phalanx" destroids I picked up a few more buildings from Steel Warrior Studios to add a couple of extra tiles to Sixmillopolis.

A River Runs Through It

Saturday afternoon's project was completing the river/coast sections. They came out well, and were surprisingly fast and simple to do. It helps of course that they consist of only a couple of large areas with simple boundaries, with no fine details to worry about.

As the images show, the concept of having the sections usable as either coastline or (in pairs) as a river works very nicely. Next thing to add will be some bends or curves so I can do more interesting layouts than just straight lines.

One other good thing about these water sections - they are basically scale agnostic, usable at 6mm as seen above, but equally suitable for 15mm or 28mm. They'd also be useful if I decided to look at a naval games, like getting back into Dystopian Wars or trying out Victory at Sea.

Maybe Not Complete After All...

So after having declared the Robotech/Sixmillopolis setup complete and started looking into new projects, naturally the next thing I end up working on is additional Robotech stuff.

As mentioned in my previous blog post I was having difficulty finding somewhere that would cut MDF tiles to 8" x 8" for me. Well I had also told a friend this... and the next time I saw him he handed me a stack of 8" x 8" tiles he had cut with his power saw at home. The tiles are hardboard rather than MDF (which he couldn't find in 1/8th inch), but that doesn't matter. They're more than structurally strong enough, and size wise they fit in perfectly. Once finished they are indistinguishable (from above) from the MDF.

New tiles checker-boarded with the old to check size match

So much thanks Todd, I owe you a beer or two. And since he'd been kind enough to make that effort it seemed appropriate to complete tiles for at least the buildings I already had. After trying out a few different layouts, I settled on a set that mostly filled 4 tiles. The tiles are based, so now it's on to detailing and highlighting the buildings.

New layouts I settled on, all suburban tiles

The other addition to Sixmillopolis I've started is some water sections, which could be laid out as either a river or a coastline. While at a craft store picking up some other materials, I discovered they sold 1/8th plywood in 12" x 4". Which was absolutely perfect. Two of these side by side will match the 8" of my city tiles. Two placed end to end will match 3 city tiles. And 4 or 6 lined up will cover the short/long edges of a standard 6' x 4' gaming table.

Work in progress river sections

In the image above pairs of water sections have been placed next to each other forming a river (the goal is to make at least 12, so as to have the option of a river running the long dimension of the board), but they could also be placed individually to create a shoreline. Stretch goals after that could include things like bends, lakes, river mouths... there are a lot of possibilities.

One big challenge for the river sections is that it will be the first time I have tried making a water feature. The technique I'm going to trial is to paint the feature in whatever shade of blue or blue/green wanted, then apply multiple layers of gloss varnish to get a water look.

In addition to expanding Sixmillopolis, opportunistic lurking on a few gaming web-stores turned up a box of Zentraedi artillery battlepods at a decent price, which were duly ordered. They arrived and have been assembled as two light artillery battlepods and two particle-beam cannon battlepods.

So for the next little while at least these new additions will be what I'm working on. But after that I'll be back to deciding on a new project. I'm extremely pleased with how Sixmillopolis has turned out, and on the one hand after having put so much time into it, it seems a shame not to find something that lets me use it as much as possible. On the other hand, I've been working on 6mm stuff for a while now and feeling like a change of pace - maybe something in 15mm or some naval or space stuff. This second thought is likely to win out. After all, Sixmillopolis isn't going anywhere, and I can always come back and use it as part of another 6mm project in future.

Robotech Project is Essentially Complete

For the last couple of months while we've been under Stay-At-Home order/recommendation, my main project has been my Robotech Tactics setup. This project had three main elements - the two opposing forces (the invading alien Zentraedi and the UEDF defenders), and Sixmillopolis to provide suitable urban terrain for them to fight over. All three elements are now essentially complete.

The United Earth Defense Force

The human defenders consist of the veritechs/destroids from the Robotech: Tactics starter box set, augmented with some conventional military forces from GHQ's Modern Micro-Armor range.

The overall UEDF force

Army commander, a VF-1 Valkyrie officer

Tomahawk and Defender destroids

Flight of 2 VF-1's from Grey Squadron

Conventional tanks and mech infantry

If I want to expand this force, I have two more veritechs from the RT starter box I could put together. But these are quite fiddly models to assemble (the battloid mode especially), so that's unlikely to happen unless some external motivation comes along. I'd love to add some more destroids - a couple of additional Tomahawks or some Phalanxs would be perfect. Unfortunately the boxed sets of these go for quite high prices on Ebay ($50USD or more for 4 mechs) so again I'll probably leave this for now. 

The cheapest and most convenient expansion option is unfortunately in many ways the least satisfying - adding more conventional forces, like a second tank company, or maybe some Apache helicopters. These are readily available cheaply from GHQ. The downside is adding them would dilute the sci-fi aspect of the army. But looking at it glass half-full, they would also be usable in non-sci-fi modern games. 

The Zentraedi

The invading Zentraedi are also complete. Again, this force consists mostly of the units from the RT starter box, but this time augmented with a RT Artillery Battlepod expansion box. I've also added in a couple of starship models I had lying around. As with the ship I'm using as an Earth ARMD carrier, these are not canon Robotech vessels, but their overall design aesthetic looks about right for the Zentraedi, so I'll use them to represent orbital fire support.

Army commander in Officers Battlepod

Overall Zentraedi force

Light artillery battlepods

Heavy artillery battlepods

To expand the Zentraedi force I would like to add a second officers battlepod and/or a couple more artillery battlepods. Both of these are available as official RT expansion packs, so it's just a matter of lurking on websites until I see them available at a reasonable price. 

The other thing I'd like to add would be some dismounted Zentraedi infantry. Palladium did have plans to release these as part of Wave 2, but that never happened. However finding a suitable stand-in shouldn't be too difficult - any kind of sci-fi armored trooper with a full face mask could potentially work. Now by Robotech canon the Zentraedi are supposed to be 30 ft tall, so I should be looking at 25mm or 28mm miniature ranges. But I've found a couple of 15mm models that look just right, so I may deviate from canon a bit and have my Zentraedi be "only" 15 ft tall. (Maybe they're from a different fleet that was gene-engineered slightly smaller, or something like that).

Sixmillopolis

My initial nine tiles for Sixmillopolis are basically complete. In the end I decided to glue the buildings down to the tiles. This does limit the possible layouts quite a bit. But still, with nine tiles able to be re-arranged and rotated there are still a huge range of possible cityscapes, and having fixed tiles just makes setting up and packing up so, so much easier. 

Hospital tile

Example suburban tile, with some shops in the lower half of the image and houses on the other side of the street

Another suburban tile, this one a cul-de-sec of all houses

I still have some un-based resin buildings left over. Depending on how many buildings I place per tile, enough for around half a dozen more tiles. Unfortunately I have not found a source for the 1/8th inch MDF tiles. These first nine were cut to size for me by a hardware store in New Zealand. But when I went down to Home Depot they told me OSHA rules don't let them cut pieces smaller than 12". Not sure I believe them (I suspect they just couldn't be bothered), but regardless they wouldn't cut to 8" x 8" for me. Will try a couple of other hardware stores (including other Home Depot branches) and see if I have better luck with them. 

So, Robotech gaming setup is essentially complete. There are still details I could tidy up, and plenty of expansion options. But I have all the elements I would need to set up a demo game at a convention or FLGS which I think people would think looks pretty cool. So now to decide on my next project...

Sixmillopolis Update

Latest burst of gaming enthusiasm has been further progress on Sixmillopolis. I now have roughly six tiles completed.

At this stage, having tried a few things and found what works and what didn't, I have my tile making methodology fairly well down. Initially I planned on painting things like roads and rivers directly onto the MDF and putting the buildings on that. But what I've found is working pretty well is to cut out sections of cardboard to size, paint these up first, then glue them to the board using PVA.

This technique has a couple of advantages. Painting the card separately means you get very tidy, sharp borders. The thickness of the card creates a nice kurbside, making the buildings a millimeter or so above the roads, and also making it easy to flock the non-card areas. And it gives room to experiment; I can paint and model things on scrap card first, and don't glue anything down until I'll happy with how it looks.

Product Review - Steel Warrior Studios

Today an order of 6mm buildings from Steel Warrior Studios arrived. This is my first time ordering from this company. I will recommend them and would order from them again.

The complete order, with existing Sixmillopolis for scale

Steel Warriors sell a range of both terrain and miniatures, in a number of different scales. Their product line is very focused on sci-games (particularly Battletech or mech games) but some of their buildings would work for modern cities as well. The buildings are 3-D printed resin. While I've ordered resin models before, I think this is the first time I have ordered models manufactured using 3-D printing, and the results are excellent. The detailing is very crisp and there are no voids or imperfections.

I ordered a range of different buildings, and this should be enough to complete Sixmillopolis (barring any special tiles I might make, like say an airport or somrthing).

First up, some small and large apartment buildings to create some suburbs. Looking at Google Earth views of cities you see they always have their suburban belt of residential housing, so I wanted a few tiles of shorter buildings to surround my existing downtown area. I ordered 18 of the Small Residential and 9 of the Large Residential buildings, which will be arranged (with driveways, yards, maybe some small parks) into suburban tiles.

Small and Large Residential Buildings

Example surburban tile

Next up a hospital, which just seemed like something a city should have. As a decently large building this will probably get a tile to itself.

The mech has an owie :)

Next up, a shopping center. It's laid out as one L-shaped row of shops in this image, but it's actually seven separate pieces; the six-sided corner piece, four smaller square stores, and two larger square stores. I'm thinking of splitting these, to create two shopping centers to put somewhere on my suburban tiles.

The last building I ordered is a High Rise Residential Block. This is again a multi-part kit (hence why it looks like it's going to fall over, the pieces are just sitting on top of each other at the moment) - a two-story base block, as many levels as you wish, and the roof section. Hint when ordering this model, the floor count is actually the number of middle sections included. So if you order a "one floor" kit it will in fact be 3 floors high, and a "6 floor" kit will actually be 8 stories high.

So I think I now have about all the buildings I will need to complete Sixmillopolis. Just need to get some more tiles (9 should do it) and get working. One thing I definitely want to do for the remaining tiles is include more flocked area, especially on the edges of the suburbs. Real cities aren't built by covering huge squares in concrete and asphalt. While that looks fine for the city-center (which even in modest-sized cities are essentially filled in) , I'm wanting the edges of Sixmillopolis to be more irregular, and blend more naturally into the mat I use as my gaming surface.

All the new buildings placed out with the existing

Product Review - GameCraft Miniatures (and Sixmillopolis Update)

Still being in lockdown I managed to make some decent progress over the weekend, including adding road markings (which involved a lot of masking tape and touching up) plus added the curbsides to a couple more tiles.

On Monday an order of additional buildings arrived from GameCraft Miniatures. This is a company I will certainly recommend. They have a great selection of model buildings and scenery in a range of scales. They use a range of materials, including laser-cut MDF, acrylic, resin, and mat-board. This is my second time ordering from GameCraft, with the first being some 15mm MDF buildings for use in Team Yankee.

In this order I had;

• 1 x Best Buy Electronics Store
• 1 x Airport Control Tower
• 2 x 7-11 Convenience Stores
• Various 1/285 GHQ moderns (for a future project I will likely blog about at a later date)

The Best Buy model was in two main sections. The main body of the store is an acrylic box. It comes in five pieces (4 wall sections plus the roof), all nicely tabbed so it can be easily glued together in seconds. The second section is the front facade. This is a single piece of solid resin, which just attaches to the body of the store. The raised detailing made it easy to paint up and get a good result. In the kit I received the resin front was slightly bowed, but I suspect once in place the glue will have enough strength to hold it flat against the store body.

Next we have two 7-11 convenience stores. These are single piece resin models, and just as with the Best Buy the store logo is cast into the front of the model. I'm going to paint one up as a 7-11, but the other I'm not sure yet. It's definitely going to have some gas pumps out front, and may end up being painted as a BP, Shell or something.

The last building I ordered was an Airport Control Tower. Like the Best Buy, this was a combination acrylic and resin kit. The acrylic pieces were all tabbed and fit together well, making it quick and easy to assemble. The top of the control tower itself is resin, but I'm probably not going to put this on the model. After placing this order I decided to hold off on adding an airport to the city. However without the top the model could fit in well as a number of other buildings - it would make a good city hall or courthouse, and I'm going to paint mine up as a high school.

So, steady progress being made. There is another batch of buildings on order from another company, mainly a whole bunch of single-story individual houses to create some suburbs. But once those arrive I'll start running out of space, so I'll need to get some more tiles. Home Depot is open for curbside pickup orders, so I'll have to give them a call and see if they can do some cut to size MDF for me.