Obligatory (and late) 2012 Planning Post

As is the normal convention with wargaming blogs, it’s time for my “what I plan to do” post. It’s doubtful I stay focused throughout the year to finish these, but it never hurts to have plan.

Napoleonics
My main focus remains fixed on Historicon 2012. Our (mostly Connecticut) group will be running a large Borodino game with somewhere around 4,000 28mm figures. We still need to finalize the 2 additional games from the invasion of Russia that we plan on running.

After Historicon there will be more Russians to paint as we start planning for the War of Liberation battles Peter is planning to run for Historicon 2013. I’m sure I’ll need to paint at least a Brigade of Prussian’s for that as well. Plus I’ll need to continue building my French forces which are currently vary lacking in Cavalry. And my Russian’s can always use more artillery. And there will still be a few units I need to paint after Borodino to complete the 2nd Army of the West.

Renaissance
The Hartford Area Historical Gaming Society is talking about running an Italian Wars Renaissance campaign which I hope to be able to participate in. My current Renaissance army is modeled on the Hungarian army that held the hordes of Islam at bay for a couple of centuries. Most of the figures will fit in well in Italy so I have a good start on that. I have a small lead pile of Crusader miniatures Pikemen and Knights that I bought a couple of years ago when Warweb was running a great deal on them. Hopefully, if this moves past the talking stage my participation in this campaign should motivate me to start painting this lead pile.

Fantasy
I also plan on starting a solo fantasy campaign using Piquet’s Hostile Realms rules. Don’t get turned off by the word fantasy, I envision this being something along the lines of Tony Bath’s Hyboria world, but on a much smaller scale. My goal is to be able to use all of my ‘non modern’ armies; Imperial Romans, Picts, Barbarians, and Renaissance.

Space / Science Fiction
On the back burner I’d still like to do a Science Fiction project. I blame Jack Campbell and his “The Lost Fleet” series of books. This series is what reenergized my science fiction ‘bug’. If you like gritty, space combat I strongly recommend you read the first book in the series. They start to get a little predictable around book 4, but I really enjoyed them.

At this point I envision this project including both space combat and ground combat (15mm?) as well. Ground combat would probably be 15mm as there are some great new 15mm Science Fiction figures out there. Of course if I go with 25mm I could use my 40K Imperial Guard figures. The space ships will be from a variety of different lines.

I have some ideas kicking around in my head for the background on this. And I’ve started working on the campaign rules, “borrowing” ideas from several different systems. I still need to decide on a rule set for this before I can really move forward, for the space combat I’m leaning towards Full Thrust. For the ground combat I’ve looked at Future War Commander and few others but haven’t really found one that gives me the feel I’m looking for.

A couple of months ago I started mapping out the universe and suddenly realized I had created something that looked very similar to the Battle Tech universe so I had to start over. While I enjoyed the original (1980’s?) Battle Tech background, the space combat doesn’t fit what I envision and the giant ‘mechs’ don’t fit my view of future combat. I really need to devote some serious thought to how I want to approach this and get my final ideas down on paper.


Then of course there’s Space 1889 (using the original back ground material). And I still have all that Sash and Saber 40mm American Revolution lead that I bought 4 or so years ago and never could get motivated to paint.

But in all reality I’ll probably end up focusing my limited time on a project I haven’t even considered yet.

I promise the next post will have photos.

So much lead, so little time.

I'm still here

Wow, it’s been a while since the last post in September. No real excuse other than the normal work and family health issues taking time away from gaming. I hope to get back to a somewhat more regular schedule.

We managed to get in a play test of a portion of the Borodino scenario since my last post. Peter did a nice after action report that can be found at http://blundersonthedanube.blogspot.com/2011/11/ellis-con-2011-doubts-and-redoubts.htmlI’m really glad we were able to get this in as it pointed out some (very) glaring errors in my initial scenario design. I think we’ve managed to rectify those and we hope to get in another play test before Historicon.

2011 wasn’t a very productive year for me. Painting wise I completed 292 figures which was down from 2010 and about 150 less than I had hoped to complete. I did manage to get a few more games in then I did last year, in particular a couple of games generated by our local “imagi-nation’ Napoleonic campaign. If I ever finish my moves for the next game ‘week’ I expect to have many more battles generated.

I still have many ideas rattling around in my head for next year after Historicon. I’ll post more on those ideas in the next post which hopefully won't take too long.

So much lead, so little time.