Showing posts with label DBM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DBM. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

First project(s)

For my first contribution to the pimping promotion of DBMM, I am working on an article on austerity miniatures wargaming. When I was involved in 2mm model railways, I was amazed at the creativity of depression era and post war modellers. They created rolling masterpieces out of scrap tin and cereal boxes. We can do the same with miniatures. Since I intend to submit this for publication, I won't got into details here yet.

The second project I hope to feature here. When I first picked up DBMM, I had a general historical understanding of what troops performed what roles. In actual play though, I always wound up with pitting my troops against the exactly wrong sort of enemy. George's skill had something to do with that too though.

What I plan to do is to write a series of articles each focussed on one troop type and discuss who the predators and prey of each type are. I want to keep it high level to avoid the legal and moral implications of re-printing the rules in a blog.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

DBMM 100 Ancient Briton List

Based on the DBM Ancient British list, this is a possible army list for DBMM100:
Troop TypeCost Per Element in APME Per ElementNumber of ElementsTotal Cost of Elements ME
C-in-C Irr Wb(S) 5 4 1 5 4
Cavalry - Irr LH (O) 51 2 10 2
Foot warriors - Irr Wb (F) 31/2 16 48 8
Slingers - Irr Ps (O) 21/2 6 12 3
Chariots - Irr Cv (O) 61 4 24 4
Totals:
9921
Disheartened: 15 1/2           Defeated: 10 1/2

The slingers will screen the main force, attempt to break up the enemy line and retire through the main force as they are able. The CinC will keep the warband in check from the back rank until they can be released. He will then hang back to plug any holes. My standard formation for the main body will be a block 6 wide and 2 deep with 2 extra elements in column on each wing for easy expansion or in a third rank with the CinC as a reserve force along with any surviving Ps.

The Lh will take one wing and the Chariots the other. The Lh will carry out the usual flank protection and harassment duties. The chariots will attempt a flanking move and if prudent will dismount as Wb(S) per the list once pips become available after the main body goes impetuous.

Well, that's the plan anyway.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Re-Rebasing

Ok - I'm cheap I admit it. I have been holding off on buying the DBMM army lists because I have a perfectly good set of DBM lists.While my intent is to play primarily Ancient Britons, the old pack of miniatures I am refurbishing also contained a Pict option and I have acquired a handful of new Essex Welsh spear who could pass as well. Under DBM, the Pictish spear were graded Irr Ax(X) a grading that does not exist in DBMM. So off I go to the errata in the 1.0 DBMM rules looking for an update. Naturally I find that Ax(X) are now Pk(F).

When last I based them, I wanted to keep a generic warband feel so I liberally mixed the round and square shield Pict spears in with javelin and sword armed figures thinking that irregular auxilia could be a mix of types. Now pike, at least to me, are a different beast with spear men standing close together presenting a hedge of points to the rampaging horse - an image not well supported by one spear on a base with two javelin. So, off the bases come the spears to be re-mounted as spear only groups. Thank the gods the base depth and width didn't change. These new all spear groups should still be usable as warband when sprinkled into a larger formation.

Now where's my glue gone?

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Painting and Basing

The 39 odd 15mm ancients I now have based up are due to a need to work out a triplet of British chariot generals. Under DBx, chariots  Cv(O) can dismount as Wb(O) or in the case of the Britons, Wb(F) with chariot general Cv(S) dismounting as Wb(S). The Britons, Scots/Irish and Caledonian lists all have chariot generals, so I thought that getting the mounted and dismounted pairs based up was a good place to start.

In my purchase from George, I acquired a largish number of figures with the Battersea shield - a singular ceremonial artifact. Some were armed with spear and some with sword. Beautiful figures for sure but it's rather like having a handful of Napoleons at a Waterloo battle. I took three pairs and painted each pair identically. The sword armed for the foot commands and the spear to go in the chariots. I based up the foot commands as Wb(S). Getting four figures onto the 15mm deep DBMM bases involved some careful figure selection. I use five minute epoxy for final basing mostly because it's what I have and secondly because it is very solid bond yet will peel off if I need to re-base. I made up too much and scrambled to select the best of the remaining painted figures and base them up as well. I now have very nearly a DBA's worth of based warband. That left the chariot generals.

My four current chariots are Minifig - I think - and not wide enough to handle the Essex generals. This leaves me with two unpainted Essex chariots to work on and another to purchase. Oh. Dear.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Future plans

Marc and I had a great game of Hordes of the Things the other day. My freshly painted dwarves managed to squash his flat goblins though we made a couple of mistakes with the rules.

We like the HotT rules but I at least find it a bit of a bother keeping HotT, DBA and DBMM in their respective rules boxes. This threw us off in our game because the HotT 1 rules don't appear to specifically disallow multiple moves per unit per turn so we had Goblins and Dwarves flying across the board using the equivalent of DBMM march moves.

While looking for something a little more complex than HotT, I came across Luke Ueda-Sarson's Middle-Earth Army Lists for DBM. He has done some great work on these lists and they should be adaptable for DBMM. Marc and I would like a little more magic without getting to the Warhammer level. - Stay Tuned

While poking around for more HotT information, I came across Alan Saunders wargaming page. A great resource for a number of games and periods, it features a set of quick play gladiatorial combat rules:  Munera Sine Missione. So gladiators go into the pile of games to play (Nothing to do with Spartacus Blood and Sand featuring Lucy Lawless aka Xena in the all together).

Saturday, March 13, 2010

New Recruits

Here are the new boys ready for priming:


Terrain

Though the ground cloth wasn't the best for table top use due to cats, it has worked well as a cover for the redneck gaming table. To go on that, I have started working on some terrain. I purchased some 1/8" MDF sheet, cut some rectangles to DBA, 1/2 FE, 1 FE and 2 FE sizes then free handed some ovals and cut them out using the band saw. I then beveled the edges using the belt sander. If you are going to do this, a dust extraction system and mask are highly advisable. I put a 1/2 FE and a 1 FE aside to become swamps for my Scots-Irish. The rest were painted green giving me generic tree or hill blocks.

The swamps had their centres routed out for the water bits. Even more dust and honestly not really necessary. The deep routing caused the boards to warp and I had to back fill the large central cavity with wood putty to provide a surface for the troops to stand on. Next time I will just route out a few selected pools - much less work and dust that way.



The next project was trees. Back in my model railroad days, I had been given a pine forest. I dug these out and prepared them as per instructions. Since I would need to be able to move the trees around the the troops on the field, I cut out some MDF disks using a blind hole saw and beveled the edges using the belt sander. Small MDF disks can really fly. I painted the disks green and drilled mounting holes to spec for the trees as I epoxied them into place. A quick snip for any trunks projecting  from the bottom and a kiss from the belt sander and they were flat and ready to go. Last step is to put the flocking on the branches.
I'm well pleased with the result.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

So much for saving money

I gave in and ordered DBA and DBMM 1.0 from The Keep via their E-bay shop I overpaid the shipping and Paul was kind enough to refund the extra - liking the service so far.

Armies on the Cheap II

I found that I could get full colour printing on medium card for $2 a page so I went for full armies.


Early Imperial Roman










Early Imperial Romans


Scots Irish / Celts










Scots Irish




It worked out fairly well. With the Scots, I positioned the individual elements by hand with space to cut between each. This meant two cuts were needed to remove the white space between elements and thus sore hands. For the Romans, I used a grid to position each element on the page with a touch extra to allow for trimming. To make things even simpler, I used a guillotine to cut - bad move. despite my best efforts, the card slid around on the guillotine,the cut line was hard to see and as a result, a couple of imperial foot commands came up a little "short".

In future, I will use the grid and black cut lines but trim by hand. Once you get the rhythm, its straightforward and accurate. Still - DBMM card armies are a lot harder on the cutting hand than DBA.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Armies on the cheap

Before going after a full set of minatures, I thought I would make up some paper troops to experiment with the DBMM rules. What I did was to grab some of Michael Krein's barbarian and Roman top down ancients pictures from Junior General, cut them out from the background and re-arrange them on 40mm bases in DBMM appropriate numbers. I then took the files down to thelocal printshop and had them print in colour onto card stock. The results are good enough for mucking around with the rules.

See also De Bellis Planorum for DBA armies that can be used with DBMM

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Future plans

The 1.1 DBMM revision draft is out but it's been a long time since I have played. Thanks to a suggestion from the DBMM list, I'm going to start off with a couple of low point solo games and see how things work out.

Since I don't yet have the DBMM lists, I'm going to use DBM values for both sides and (bring on the inquisition) use card bases only for most of the troops.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

New Beginnings

Having long ago played a bit of WRG 6th/7th and DBM, I have decided to get back into miniatures.

While not wedded to DBx, I can't justify spending the money on Field of Glory just yet so DBMM 1.1 it is.