Franks on the Frontier

Pasha Dan was available Saturday night for a game and he'd been working on a host of Migration Era Franks. So he brought them over for a game of Midgard. 

His army mustered in at 450 pts and 11 Reputation. So I jigged the list for my A&A 3rd century Romans to match.

Some of Dan's Franks. He's gotten them all very nice sabot bases now, instead of the bare card you saw in previous games.

My cavalry wing maneuvers against Dan's wing that has a unit of mounted Nobles. I'm using the glass beads for Mighty Deed tokens. Dan is using replica ancient coins.

Center and left closing. You can see my super posh square of cereal box that is the "Killing Zone" template. Dice in the holders are marking stamina hits.

My cavalry have gotten stuck in and as you can see are taking a lot of hurt, but so are the Franks

Disaster! Equus is alone, his horsemen dead around him. I should have challenged the Frankish chieftain to Single Combat, which might have at least gained me a Reputation Point before he died.

Oof! Worst "Risk to Heroes" roll ever! Centurion Secundus goes down. The Roman numeral dice are from Dan. Felt nice to roll, but took some getting used to to read. A couple of times 'IV' instead of 'VI' was an issue.

Pushing hard in the center. Carolianus is in the upper right leading a century against the Frankish King and his hearthguard

Pushing hard on the left too. The arrows are my super posh "winning/momentum" markers

The Frankish chieftain on the left, having destroyed my cavalry is now sweeping around to engulf my infantry. That lonely century, attacked front and flank manages to survive and hold out long enough.

Action in the center

The decision point. Eastern archers are getting stuck into hand to hand. Both sides are equal at 5 Reputation tokens still in their goblets.

The Frankish king (marked by the blue draco) takes a 3rd and final wound, causing Frankish Reputation to plummet!

In a desperate attempt to get some Reputation, Dan's mounted chieftain charges Carolianus and challenges him to single combat. Carolianus wins the fight!

All very exciting. At the end the Roman Reputation was still at 4 or 5, and the Frankish Reputation was now at -5. I'm sure I was helped by Dan operating under the dreaded New Army Curse. He'll probably thrash me next time.

I really do need to do a rummage through the Bitz Box and make some nicer "winning" and "shot" markers. And Stamina Loss markers. And measuring sticks. And maybe a nicer Kill Zone template.

But this was Game 15 for the year! I'm doing pretty good on that front for sure.

The Doomed Convoy

Had a solo game of Snorkers! (Good Oh!) last night. Another attempt at a convoy scenario. This time a British convoy being ambushed by Italian light forces.

The Regia Marina had 6x Soldati destroyers in two flotillas, and 6x Spica torpedo boat/escort destroyers in two flotillas. Each flotilla diced for random arrival around the end of the table.

The Royal Navy had 2x K class and 1x G class destroyers as convoy escorts.  There was also a cruiser squadron as a Covering Force consisting of 2x Town class and 1x Dido class CLs. 

Each fleet came in at 240 points and 20 Force Morale (before the deduction to Force Morale for the merchant ships).

Spicas making a high speed approach. Soldatis coming in from corner. Cruisers wheeling to cover convoy 

 

Lead torpedo boat pinned by a searchlight and smashed by gunfire 

Remaining Spicas dodge around the flaming wreck and launch torpedoes but miss

The convoy has changed course, hoping to get some cover from a fog bank and avoid oncoming Italians. A flotilla of Soldati rushes in for a torpedo attack sinking 3 merchant ships!

HMS Sheffield and Glasgow move in and sink all three destroyers with a combination of guns and torpedoes. HMS Cleopatra is hanging back to engage the Spicas.

The second flotilla of Spicas, hiding until now in a fog bank, dash forward to launch a daring torpedo attack! 1 merchant explodes. The other 2 torpedo spreads miss.

The Convoy Escort destroyers have pounced on the daring torpedo boats, sinking one, crippling another. But the Second destroyer flotilla, which had been hanging back, changes course to port and weaves between the remains of the First Torpedo Boat flotilla to intercept and torpedo the remaining merchant ships. By the time the British can turn around and enage them they will have disappeared into the night.

And so ended my fourteenth game of the year, with a stunning Italian victory. The British escorts took very little damage, but lost the entire convoy. The Italians lost 3x of their destroyers and 5x of their torpedo boats (3x sunk, 2x crippled). Although the one survivor may not escape from the middle of the British force!

After my last game with Brett and Dan I asked the designer Philip for some clarification on the torpedo rules and it turns out I had been too generous with the "best torpedo arc" template positioning, resulting in a lot of undesrved +1 DRMs. Consequently, there were more torpedo misses this game. A heavy swell and rolling an appalling number of 1s and 2s didn't help either. Fortunately for the attacker, the merchant ships are +2 to hit and +3 on the Critical Hit table.

I may in the next game move the convoy off table, and the attacker will need to get a certain number of ships off the defender's edge with a certain number of torpedoes still onboard. My reasoning being that expending all of your torpedoes to defeat the screen and then have nothing left to sink the convoy doesn't do you any good.

I also note in the rules that Italian and British torpedo bombers can be used at night, which will add a fun dimension once I get some Italian CANT Z.506 or SM 79 torpedo bombers printed.

Stukas and Stringbags

Now that I've got quite a few ships done, I thought it was time to add some aircraft. The aircraft in Ghukek's Wargaming 3d catalog are FREE!, which is cool. They are scaled at 1:900 to go with the 1:1800 ships. He does the smaller fighters and carrier aircraft as singles and flights of three, joined at the tails or with overlapping wings. Large bombers, scout planes etc are all singles. 

Some he modeled with tiny propellers, which are weird. I cut them off where present.

Picture from Ghukek catalog of Bristol Beaufighters. Note individual model and flight of three model

The flights of three is how the Mad Padre printed my aircraft for the 1:2400 project a couple of years back.

Dauntless SBDs (joined wing tip to tail) and F4F Hellcats (joined at the wing tips) fly over a CVE early in the project.

It was easy enough to paint them. Clip off the peg on the post, glue the flight on, brush prime and paint.

Except, due to some casual storage, my flights of aircraft have taken some damage. Flights of three reduced to two, or even one, model with shortened wings.

The SBDs (far left and far right) if you look closely are in rather poor shape.

Don printed me the single models, not the flights. So I had six of each aircraft. These were going to be a bugger to paint and how to base them? And after all that effort, how to keep them from breakage? So solutions needed to be found.

For painting I hit on the idea to superglue them to some sprue. Easy to just pop them off the plastic, right? RIGHT???!!

Painting in progress

Wrong. A lot of wings and tails snapped as I tried to gently pop them off the sprue, even after I put a bunch in the freezer for 24 hours.

Carnage!

Some I was able to repair, because the breaks were simple, clean, and I could find the errant piece.

But many airframes were a complete write off. 2 out of 5 Do17s survived. I managed to repair the damaged Ju88s, so I got all six in service. Of the Me110s and Ju87s I only saved half, 3 each. The rest were unsalvageable.

Do17s attacking HMS Cleopatra off Crete

Two flights of Ju88s make a bombing run

Swordfish from HMS Illustrious attack the Armando Diaz off North Africa

For the British I only lost one each of the Swordfish and the Beaufighters, so I made a flight of three and a flight of two for each.

The British have 4 flights of attack aircraft. The Axis have five flights. One of Me110 fighters, two of Ju88s, and one each of Do17s and Ju87s. The Axis will have to wait until I get some Italian aircraft before they get torpedo bombers.

Me110s

For the flights of three, I cut a triangle of clear plastic from a food packaging clam shell and punched a hole behind where the lead aircraft would go. Flights of two got a rectangle with a hole punched in the center.

The aircraft were then hot glued into position. I left some overlap so the plastic would protect the wings.

Ju87 Stukas!

Beaufighters attacking a convoy in the North Sea, or maybe the Mediterranean.

I think with the next round of aircraft I'll hot glue the models to a popsicle stick, or a wooden skewer. They might be easier to pop free from the hot glue. Painting the bottoms isn't really needed. You don't see them.

The bases wobble a bit on the stands, but they come free to lay flat for storage. The angles also add a bit of drama to the scene as well, and helps you imagine attacking aircraft swooping around, dodging flak, as they pounce on their target.

In Which They Served

The second batch for the Royal Navy has finished their working up and are ready to deploy to the table top.

This group includes two Fiji, or Crown Colony, Class light cruisers from Lee MColl stls printed for me by the Mad Padre. These are insanely detailed, and Mike printed them on an FDM printer. I think better results might be had with a resin printer, but separating masts and guns from supports would be tricky as well. 

So who knows? Shan't look gift ships in the gun turrets so to speak.

Also two Dido class light anti-aircraft cruisers, which were terribly useful in the crowded Mediterranean, where allied shipping was never far from German and Italian airfields. These are the more robust, gamer friendly, stls from Ghukek.

Finally, six J,K, and N class destroyers. Again from Ghukek. These will be formed into two flotillas. One of the J-series and one of the K-series. 

That is the nice thing about many RN destroyers from WW2, you can tell what class it is just from the name.

With this batch I pushed the boat out a bit further with more complicated camouflage patterns which I think turned out well, even though the destroyers don't give a lot of room to work with.

Of course I'm trying to keep this project to light forces. Heavy cruisers were only with Force H in Gibraltar. But I already have a RN battlecruiser and a couple of Italian battleships in the pipeline, because I got the stls for free. So the temptation to get a couple of Queen Elizabeth class battleships keeps singing it's siren song.  The Mediterranean did after all feature one of the very few times that opposing battleships engaged each other in the Second World War.