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I vote BFG as often and as much as you can, but I love seeing all the old games still being played.

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Brilliant blog, such a trip down memory lane. GW games were my first wargames I was introduced by a mate to Blood Bowl 2nd edition. From there he introduced me to Dark Future. We moved into Man o War and I got into epic in a big way with Adeptus Titanicus first up.

It's cool to see these games being played.

Somewhat predictably, real life gets in the way of my gaming ambitions and delayed the anticipated start of my Man O' War battle but I managed to get half of it done today so here is a brief write up for your consumption:

Opening shots

The Black Ark heads straight down the middle whilst the Elf ships use their superior seamanship to quickly get up to speed and manoeuvre themselves ready for action. No shooting this turn as ships are all slightly out of range.



Ships close to engage. The Black Ark seems to take the worst of it initially as it gets hammered by shots from the Dragonship and Eagleships. The smaller Hawkships use their sharp turning ability to fire off shots at the Doomreavers and then scraper out of range. In reply, the Death Fortresses impart some damage to the lead Eagleship. The Dragonship takes some hits in reply from the Black Ark, but nothing too serious at this stage.





Some unfortunate shot placement and subsequent lucky rolls on the critical hit table means the Black Ark takes 5 below the waterline hits already at this early stage. Things aren't looking too hot - or rather, they are looking a bit hot as several fires break out and spread too...



Movement and counter-movement. The Black Ark is dead in the water at the moment, at least if it wants to move under magic power anyway - the below the water hits it has taken reduce its speed to 1" - it desperately spins around and tries to catch the Dragonship but to no avail.



The three Eagleships sense a weakness and fire their weapons at the Black Ark rather than the closing Death Fortresses. One of the rolls causes a critical hit that in turn causes a roll on the Captain chart - the roll is a 6 which is the Mutiny! result and this ends up with 5 crew counters abandoning the ship, leaving it with 1 crew left. On the other flank, the Doomreavers catch up to the Hawkships and ram them and engage in boarding. One of the Doomreavers is killed but in return, 2 of the Hawkships are sunk and the third is scuttled after it's crew are killed. The Death Fortresses continue to fire at the Eagleships and cause some more damage but not enough to sink any. The lead Eagleship is the worst of, losing 2 of it's 3 broadside batteries.



The game is at a temporary halt at the moment until I can finish it but it is very finely balanced. Thoughts so far? Well, based on my first game, I thought it would be more fun with more ships and so it has proven. The Elf ships are interesting to play with, being as they can move twice in one turn. I haven't used them fully to their abilities yet; I foolishly allowed the Hawkships to get caught by the Doomreavers rather than stay out of range plugging away and I have been sucked into the trap of trying to sink the Black Ark when in reality, it is the 3 Death Fortresses that are inflicting all the damage. They are monsters, so have no turn restrictions making them ultra-manoeuvrable and they have 360 degree firing reaper catapults meaning the 3 of them can pump out up to 18 shots per turn which is quite a weight of fire. It will be interesting to see how this one pans out.

Cool game and very interesting islands...

The islands are from Dreadfleet, you may want to rescind those words

They are OK for Man O' War - a little out of scale but workable. I freely admit to buying Dreadfleet but in my defence, I bought it cheap off Ebay and mainly for the mat and scenery.

As you can see, I am a world-class undercoater. If they gave out Golden Daemons for undercoating, I would be right up there with the best of them...

The ocean mat and islands look pretty good. I liked a lot of the ships from Dreadfleet as well (when Ifalna painted them). I'm not going to buy a set though since I don't play sea based games other than the old Pirates game by Wizkids.

Part two of my Man O' War battle:

Endgame

Things finished a bit quicker than I thought. The Dragonship broke away from the Black Ark in an attempt to engage the lone Doomreavers but missed its shots, got too close and was subsequently counter-rammed. The below the waterline save was failed and since it only had 1 damage point left, promptly sunk.



The Black Ark at this stage was irrelevant; it had no reaper batteries left at all , was largely on fire and since I had 1 crew counter left, I didn't dare risk it in any sort of ramming or boarding action. This left the 3 remaining Death Fortresses to harry the Eagleships and continue to inflict damage on them. In return, a combination of lacking fire-power due to damage and poor dice rolls meant the Eagleships weren't inflicting any damage in return other than the odd wound here and there.



The damage is creeping up on the Eagleships. At this point, since the game was effectively over, I decided the Eagleships had fled off the board to fight another day and the Dark Elf fleet had carried the day.



It wasn't all one way traffic - you can see how close the Black Ark came to sinking and in fact, with a little more luck and on a different day, it could have sunk more or less right at the start of the battle.



Thoughts

Definitely better with more ships. I am still feeling my way into the rules and perhaps could and should have used the two fleets in a different manner but that is a learning process for another day. The Elf ships are less of a glass cannon than you would think; they can pump out some fire-power but the Dragonblades on the Dragonship practically cry out for a ram attack so it's not all stand off and shoot.

Ironically, given its star billing, the Black Ark did more or less nothing, other than soaking up a bunch of shots that might otherwise have gone elsewhere but maybe that is the point? In retrospect, the Elf fleet would have been better concentrating on the Death Fortresses first, given how deadly they turned out to be. Other than the Black Ark, which is more or less a conventional ship, the other ships in the Dark Elf fleet are monsters and don't take damage in the same way as ships. It is perfectly plausible for a single shot to hit the right area, fail a saving throw and the monster 'sinks' and on another day, this might have happened. As it turned out in this game, the Elf shots landed on the monster or non-critical parts and caused wounds rather than causing the monster to flee or 'sink'.

Where to go next? Well, at the moment, I have 4 complete and roughly equivalent fleets - Imperial, Dwarf, Elf and Dark Elf. I would like to expand on them and add more races; I have all the rules and cards from all the supplements, but Man O' War suffers greatly from the 'Ebay Epic Tax', that is to say, whenever you see something on Ebay, it is invariably priced at a ludicrous mark-up. It's a phenomenon first observed with 2nd Ed Epic stuff but it extends to other Specialist Games too. I need to do some digging around and see if I can source some alternative ship models. The other thing I would eventually like to add to, is to have some decent terrain, like coastal pieces, forts, lighthouses, that sort of jazz. You get a load of card terrain in the Man O' War box and while it will do at a pinch, I would rather have some decent made stuff. I generally try to buy terrain pre-made; I have no aptitude for making it myself but obviously, specialist Man O' War terrain makers tend to be thin on the ground.

Next up, some more BFG, this time applying the same reasoning from Man O' War; more ships means more fun.

Some of the Spartan Games stuff might work for Man O' War.

They use to (and may still have) a fantasy navy game.

It's a different scale, I believe. Man O' War stuff is 1/1200 or thereabouts. The Spartan Stuff is considerably bigger, I am led to believe.

Apparently, the best place to get alternative Empire and Bretonnian 'counts as', are from here:

http://www.rodlangton.com/

Unfortunately, there are very little photos on that web-site so it is difficult to know what to buy and from what sub-section.

Spent a relatively productive hour or so last night prepping my miniatures ready for my upcoming BFG battle. The pressure is on; I have a gaming buddy coming over at the weekend for an Epic battle so I need to have the BFG battle over and done with beforehand so I can set the table.

Like I guess pretty much every BFG player, my fleets (and my Chaos fleet in particular) suffer from that perennial bane, the snapped crappy GW flight stand. As much (in fact, all!) of my BFG stuff were ebay rescues, a great number of ships arrived with flight bases that had been glued and had subsequently snapped, meaning the holes need to be drilled out both in the ship and sometimes in the stand itself where the peg snaps off in the base. For a number of ships, I have eschewed replacing them with new flight stands and have instead gone for metal rod - this provides much more stability and security but it doesn't work for every ship and I have to use a power drill to drill out the ships and bases which can be very frustrating - the drill bit slips or the flight stand hole is in a particularly inaccessible location. Quite often, you have to be very careful not to drill right through the ship. Anyway, after much toils and tribulations, I finally have both fleets on stands as nature intended. This brought into stark focus another problem - with both fleets on the battle mat things were looking a little cramped. My mat is only 4'x3' rather than 6'x4' (I originally bought it for X-Wind) so with both fleets on the table, it looks a smidge too small. I might have to scale back my plans to fight a battle with both full fleets and perhaps half the forces on both sides so there is room to play. Both fleets in full come to approx 3000 points so I think 1500 points will be adequate enough to have a fun battle.

Pics and report to follow - maybe not tonight as there is a World Cup qualifier on but hopefully within the next couple of days.


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Just to show - this is the full 3000 points per side so I think I need to scale back a little or get a bigger mat!

WOw! Did you bite off more than you can (or should) chew?

I think you want slightly smaller fleets so you have some room for manuevering.

You should totally play out that battle. I expect that's how space battles were fought at the height of the Horus herersy. Full fleet crammed into tiny systems with no space to manoeuvre firing full broadsides into each other!

Well, I would ideally like to play a battle with the full 3000 points per side but realistically, it isn't going to work on that size mat so I will probably end up getting a bigger space mat in the future.

Seeing as it is only my second BFG battle and I am still easing myself somewhat into the rules, 1500 points and less ships per side is a bit more of a manageable task.

So far, I have played 1 turn of the battle - hopefully, I can get the rest of the fight finished today and get a report up.

Managed to get the battle done, well, finished to my satisfaction anyway! Report:

Opening Shots

The first turns started off much as expected, with both sides trading fire and inflicting moderate damage. The Space Marine Battlebarge started a trend that would continue for most of the battle by failing its command check to go onto special orders - lock on. Bit of a nuisance, as most of the strike cruisers and the Cobra escorts loosed off their torpedoes and then found themselves unable to reload because the command check kept being failed in subsequent turns!



The Imperials drew first blood with the destruction of an Infidel escort from massed torpedo fire.



Midgame

Moving on, as the sides closed, things hotted up. All the capital ships started taking hits of some description. The Gladius escorts on the left flank too ka beating an 2 were destroyed. Meanwhile, the Battlebarge continued its tradition of failing Lock On command checks, thus denying the rest of the Imperial fleet the chance to use special orders to manoeuvre or reload. This had an effect on the escorts primarily who were reduced to taking pot-shots with their rather puny weapon batteries instead of firing torpedoes.



The battle lines mingle and shots are traded between the capital ships.



Over on the right flank, the Chaos fleet started to gain the upper hand through sheer resilience and firepower, destroying a strike cruiser, a Cobra cruiser and several Gladius class escorts. The remaining Nova escorts and Strike Cruiser fared poorly in trying to fire back - although the lances on the Nova escorts were useful.



For the first time in the game, the Battlebarge gains Lock On and gives the Desolater and Murder class cruiser a broadside each from close range, scoring something like 8 hits on the Chaos battleship, crippling it as well as crippling the cruiser.



The strike cruisers continue plugging away at the Infidels but do little damage. The Cobra escorts manage to reload and then contrive to completely miss with all their torpedoes against a nearby cruiser...



Endgame

The Chaos battleship is almost out of it, crippled and drifting in the wrong direction. It can do little except prod the nearby Strike Cruisers. On the next turn it is finally taken down by a combination of fire from the Battlebarge and the Strike Cruisers.



On the other side of the table, the other Chaos battleship and cruiser finish off the job and destroy the Nova escort and Strike Cruiser



At this point, the battle is more or less done. Both sides have taken a pounding and my time has run out. The Chaos side have possibly shaded it but if so, it's a pyrrhic victory. The Imperials have inflicted severe damage in return and the Battlebarge escaped with barely a scratch. However, it must be said, most of the Imperial fleet is gone, bar a couple of Strike Cruisers and a Cobra escort. The Chaos fleet has perhaps a bit more left in the tank with some Infidel escorts and a couple of cruisers left - one is crippled though.



Thoughts

Well, much like my Man O' War battle the other day, BFG is definitely much more interesting with more ships and different types of ship. They complement each other and I can definitely see a synergy involved in a combined arms approach - its not all about whaling on the largest ship with your biggest ship. Book-keeping is a pain - I dislike having dice or wound markers on the table as I find it clutters the playing are and looks messy, however, I am paying for my lack of painting speed here. If I had a fully painted force (and one day I hope to do so!), my intention is to have all ships named. I would then have a pen and paper to one side to keep track of stuff that way. As it is, I have a print out roster from Army Builder with ship classes on it and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of which Strike Cruiser is which, hence the wound dice.

Not sure if it is just me, but I thought the Strike Cruisers were pretty 'meh' in terms of their performance. They have 1 shield and 6 damage points so can absorb a fair bit of damage but their bombardment cannon and weapon batteries are severely low firepower, I felt. They struggled to do much damage, even at close range, and if you are at close enough range to shift left on the gunnery table, chances are you have taken hits getting there. Maybe I am using them wrong? I didn't get too much chance to launch torpedoes or attack craft, purely because I kept failing the damn command check for the Battlebarge. The game may well have been different if I had passed more command checks for both sides - the Battlebarge did a shocking amount of damage in the one turn that it was on Lock On orders.

The Chaos fleet probably should have focussed a bit more on the Battlebarge in hindsight. They instead spent time taking out the various escorts and Strike Cruisers, which, as it turned out, didn't do much damage in return so they could have comfortable eaten that damage whilst pounding away at the Battlebarge.

Anyway, a lot of fun - a lot of effort and a lot of rules to learn for sure, but I think I am getting there. Perhaps in the future, I might try and get hold of an Ork fleet and an Eldar fleet just to add in some variety. Oh, and a bigger space mat too!

Next up, Mordheim - although there will probably be a bit of a hiatus whilst I gather the relevant material and miniatures.

Really fantastic battle report, great fun to read

How did you find the performance of the escorts on both sides? I've always found them to be underwhelming, but perhaps I'm using them wrong?

Anyways, now to rope a buddy into some BFG....

Looking forward to more!

 prime12357 wrote:
Really fantastic battle report, great fun to read

How did you find the performance of the escorts on both sides? I've always found them to be underwhelming, but perhaps I'm using them wrong?

Anyways, now to rope a buddy into some BFG....

Looking forward to more!

The escorts were rather craptastic on both sides, to be honest. I think they are mainly just there to provide a minor distraction and to soak up some fire - certainly, on both sides, the escorts didn't last very long and didn't do much damage in return. When you only have a low firepower weapon battery, firing abeam, even with a column shift, you might be lucky to get 2 D6 to try and roll a 5+ or a 6+ - not very good odds. Most of the time, they didn't inflict much damage. On the flip side, they only have one shield and 1 damage point so aren't especially durable. This was also compounded during the battle above by my command roll failures. All the Space Marine escorts fired torps on the first turn and then had to go 3 or 4 turns without a reload.

I found the Nova class escorts to be the best for me - they have a 2 firepower lance (if I can remember the stat line from here at work!) which provides a slightly better opportunity of hitting than a weapon battery. A squadron of 3 can dish out some damage. Not sure how the Gladius escorts perform as 5 of the 6 I started with got wiped out almost straight away before doing much.

On the Chaos side, I only have Infidel class escorts and they were a nuisance, nothing more. 4 of them managed to take down a Strike Cruiser that had 1 damage point left - that's about as good as it got.

Edit: Actually, thinking about it, if I had been able to pass command checks a bit better, a squadron of escorts with Lock On orders might actually be capable of doing some damage - say 4 ships firing at a cruiser, that might give you 8 d6 rolls (with rerolls) to roll 5+ which is slightly better odds. Of course, with Lock On orders you sacrifice your mobility so you would need to get into position unscathed beforehand...

Set up my game table ready for my first ever Mordheim battle - although there won't be any actual fighting done tonight as Borussia Dortmund play Arsenal!

I was forced to raid my rather paltry stash of Fantasy miniatures in order to round up some ropey old 6th Ed starter set Empire soldiers to double as my Reikland warband. They will be going up against a Mantic-composed Undead warband with an early Mantic metal mini Necromancer and a stand-in metal Mantic Elf price thingy which was the closest thing I could find that looks vaguely like a Vampire! But it'll suffice until such time as I can get some more appropriate models.

The battlefield:







Mordheim is a game that I am really looking forward to playing being as I missed it first time around (along with Necromunda which I hope to visit soon in the not too distant future as part of this blog). Mordheim is one of those games that you hear much about, with people eulogising how it plays and lamenting the lack of support it got, but strangely enough, you very rarely see or hear of it being played, even here in the Specialist Games forum so I am keen to examine just why that is.

Nice terrain.

I can hypothesize about why you don't see much of it being played:

1. Terrain can be a real bear for this one
2. It is better as a campaign game
3. Individual games are not balanced at all
4. Campaign power creep
5. Hard to keep a group of players together and playing games

 Easy E wrote:
Nice terrain.

I can hypothesize about why you don't see much of it being played:

1. Terrain can be a real bear for this one
2. It is better as a campaign game
3. Individual games are not balanced at all
4. Campaign power creep
5. Hard to keep a group of players together and playing games

I will pile on to what Easy E said above.

I enjoy Mordheim but I move a lot so I cannot keep a lot of terrain for it on hand. Once I settle down in a few years, I expect to build a lot more ruined buildings from foamcore.

It is better as a campaign game.

Some warbands are terrible against some of the others. That power gap often gets overwhelming wide as a campaign progresses. My experience over two campaigns with six to eight warbands was that the Dwarf and Skaven bands became devastatingly powerful very quickly. We didn't have any Lustrian warbands, however.

The campaign system is nice but it does get out of whack very quickly (3-4 games in?). EDIT: It might have been double that many games as we played two games a week for almost about a month and a half. I seem to recall things getting out of hand by the third or fourth week.

It is easy to find players as my wife and daughter both enjoy the game. And when I lived in Tulsa, OK, the gaming group there played a Mordheim campaign once a year for about 6-8 weeks.

I wonder if some house rule modifications could improve Mordheim's balance. It would take quite a bit of playtesting though.

Bit of a delayed update - various childcare issues and other things have got in the way of gaming recently so I have had very little time to squeeze anything in but I have managed to play the first couple of turns of my Mordheim battle. A couple of pics:



The Reiklanders intended to advance in a two pronged attack, covered by a marksman sniping from the top of the tower. This proved less than effective as the marksman didn't live up to his name, being unable to hit the proverbial broadside of a barn, even in the face of an advancing conga line of zombies.



As the two warbands converged, two spearman and a marksman found themselves charged by the Vampire. He managed to take a spearman out of action and stubbed the marksman. In return, he lost 1 or his 2 wounds. On the other side of the street, my necromancer was proving useless - I had chosen a spell at random and wound up with the lifestealer spell; the hardest one to cast at difficulty 10 so I have failed to cast it on every occasion so far. Meanwhile, a zombie falls to an attacking spearman but he has a couple of mates backing him up so things look bleak for the spearman.

What do I think so far? Well, I have only played a few turns so any conclusions I can draw are fairly limited at this point but I can certainly see why people rave about Mordheim (and I guess by extension, it's counterpart Necromunda) because they offer so much more scope for flexibility and possibility outside of the somewhat restrictive framework of 40K and Fantasy. Obviously, I can't comment on the balance issues as campaigns progress but I gather it is something both games suffer from and something that community rules have sought to cure with expanded 'living' rulebooks. But I am having fun so far and I want to expand my warbands and warband selections in future (I hope to get some Skaven and a Free Company set at some point).

Anyway, I will try and finish the battle off soon and see how it progresses.

that is a nice table indeed, looking forward to the next installment, will the spear man make it we wonder?


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that is a nice table indeed, looking forward to the next installment, will the spear man make it we wonder?

As noted, that Mordheim table is indeed awesome! And the BFG game looks like it was great. I always wanted that game to take off around here, the few times I got to play it it was really fun

Where did you get the star mat, by the way?

Very nice table!

Another game I would love to get into

Radu Lykan wrote:that is a nice table indeed, looking forward to the next installment, will the spear man make it we wonder?

Well, as it turned out - no. The Vampire chipped away and disposed of the Spearman and Marksman attacking him



Meanwhile on the other side, a gaggle of zombies did for the other Spearman. The Captain wasn't able to do much in return and then to compound it all, the Reiklanders failed their rout test and fled.

RiTides wrote:As noted, that Mordheim table is indeed awesome! And the BFG game looks like it was great. I always wanted that game to take off around here, the few times I got to play it it was really fun

Where did you get the star mat, by the way?

Star Mat is from Hotz mats. The shipping takes a while from California to UK but well worth the wait I think - the mats are very reasonably priced and look very good.

Conclusions

Surprisingly, I enjoyed Mordheim. I didn't expect to. I haven't really ever been able to get into Fantasy for various reasons but Mordheim is fun to play. It helps that I already have the terrain and a board for it - I can imagine that this game would suffer for lack of terrain. I would like to expand on it and get some ruins and things to allow for greater flexibility - you know, like models on second floors, roofs, that sort of thing. I guess Mordheim appeals to the part of me that is slow and crap at painting - you can easily get a warband together cheaply and it doesn't take a huge effort to paint up 5 or 10 figures. The cynic in me thinks that is why support was quietly dropped for it; it isn't really the sort of game that drives sales beyond the core set and a few warbands.

Moving forward, I need to learn some internal warband dynamics and tinker with lists a bit more. The Reiklanders were pretty hopeless against the zombies and ghouls who could bring simple numbers to bear. Obviously learning what to take and how to equip is part of learning the game, the beauty of it being that I can collect a couple of warbands and have them to hand for anyone to come along and pick up/play without needing to invest in it themselves.

I can see how the ongoing games can suffer from balance issues. The Vampire is a bit of a beast already - with a little experience and some skills I could see him being nigh on unkillable. Of course, the tactic then shifts to tying the Vampire down whilst you munch the rest of the undead instead and pick off the easier to kill zombies and ghouls. The Reikland warband composition was forced on me purely because they were the only Fantasy Empire models I had.

The fact I enjoyed Mordheim makes me eager to repeat the process with Necromunda, another game I haven't played before but have always meant to. I will probably play that next, just need to set up a few things. I have enough cultist models to bodge together 2 forces so it will be Cawdor versus Cawdor I think.

I personally much preferred Necro to Mordheim. Like you I'm not much of a Fantasy guy though.

The key to Necro is lot's of cover, terrain, and various levels/walkways.

Trying Necromunda next sounds great and I have heard good things about Hotz mats before, except regarding their availability.

Cheers for documenting all this!

 RiTides wrote:
Trying Necromunda next sounds great and I have heard good things about Hotz mats before, except regarding their availability.

Cheers for documenting all this!

Hotz are great as long as you don't mind waiting - and to be honest, I have never been *that* desperate for a mat. It's just one guy in a garage I believe so I can sympathise with him regarding turnaround. Considering he sends them transatlantic, the price is very reasonable.

Glad you get some enjoyment reading the blog. I don't think there is a 'point; or end to it; it's juts me playing some games I fondly remember and some I never had time to and sharing that experience therein. If I'm honest, I hope it prompts some people to check out these old games and give them a go - there are some gems in the GW back catalogue.

A brief addendum to the blog today - no new gaming done but thanks to a very generous endtransmission who answered my plea for various Epic bits and who sent me a veritable treasure trove of Epic stuff, I now have been inspired to pick up a paint brush for the first time in well over 6 months. I now have the nucleus of an Imperial Guard army which I will start to build up over the next few months as well as some welcome additions to my Chaos force, including enough marine stands for me to use the Emperor's Children company card. With that in mind, I was inspired to see what I could do:



And whilst my painting could only be charitably called amateurish at best, I am happy with the results. This is the first time I have painted Epic models since approx 1995 and it brings back a few memories including just how jolly easy it is to crank out painted forces as opposed to my journeys in 28mm which are an exercise in frustration! Now that these test bases are nearly done (obviously basing to be done) I am hopeful that I can sustain the motivation to finish the rest of the company and the rest of my Chaos force therein.