Chinese on Chinese Action

Promoting pages which are not even on this blog, here's a report of a game in our current club competition featuring my army comprised of 650 points of Han Chinese against a somewhat different composition of the same army. My stuff is the least well painted !

The Shop is Back!

In a development welcomed by literally some people, the Madaxeman.com merchandise shop is back! Yes,your chance to buy t-shirts and mugs with FoG and other wargaming-themed slogans and graphics, wherever you are in the world.

The range of products will grow steadily as and when I come up with any ideas (if you have ideas of stuff you'd like designed and produced just email me and I can create them for you), and so keep checking - navigation to The Shop has been added back into the top menu on the main site.

This might not rock your world, however let's face it - where else can you buy a t-shirt bearing the slogan "Morally Bankrupt? Moi? Surely some mistake Centurion!" ? 

1/144 Scale bombers for BKC anyone ?

I've added a new page which has constantly updated eBay listings from the Altaya range of 1/144 scale planes, which seems to have grown rapidly recently, and come down in price - both of which are good things for 12mm and 10mm WW2 wargamers wanting bombers for BKC. There are some obscure planes - for example, the early war French Marcel Bloch MB 210 and the Liore et Olivier LeO 451 - as well as some mad Italian stuff and the like. You could even get a Lancaster or a Wellington and use it as a downed plane as a bit of scenery I guess?

Usk Doubles 2012

A Huguenot army takes the field in un-sunny South Wales for matches against Austrians, Muslim Indians, Early Danes and some fearsome Imperial Spanish Tercios.

See all 4 glorious battle reports from Usk Doubles 2012 , complete with Hannibals commentary, and 2-minute video summaries of all the armies strengths and weaknesses from Madaxeman TV's new presenting team, Phil and Fernando.

FoG:AM after a 1-year break! Thoughts and observations..

I played a game of FoG:AM last night, for the first time in probably over a year (Warfare 2010 was my last competitive game of Ancients). Having been deeply submerged in the world of FoG Renaissance for the past 12 months it was a very interesting experience to get back on the Ancients horse again, and try and compare the two sets from the perspective of FoG:R.

Firstly, it wasn't a "standard" game - instead it was in our club competition which involves 2-hour 650 point games played out on a 4x3 playing surface. My pick for the competition was Han Chinese, selected as I own the army but I don't remember ever using them in FoG Ancients at all (well, certainly not as Chinese... I think some of them have pretended to be Koreans or similar!).

My opponent was a Classical Indian army, with rather a lot more units than me (13 to my 8) and who had (also) selected the "Regular" (or is it called "Drilled"?) option for the 9 units of foot bows and warriors in the army. Another interesting angle to the competition is that it is a league, with the same choice of army throughout but the opportunity to change the list each game - so you can pick an army to match up against your opponents choice each game. Knowing I was facing Indians I had therefore elected to take 6 units of armoured foot, 1 skirmishing foot and the compulsory 4 Cavalry - and an IC, giving my army a shield of invulnerability to shooting. I had also picked some portable obstacles, but then found out they had no effect against Elephants (doh!) so that was 27 points wasted straight away!

The 4x3 board (with 8"/12" deployment zones and only a 4" "zone of fear" near each edge) certainly reduced the amount of messing around before we got stuck in, although both armies had brought only one unit of skirmishers along anyway. It certainly added weight in my mind to the argument that 800 AP and 6'x4' is not the optimum mix of troop numbers and table size for 15mm FoG:AM games. 

As a comparison to FoG:R the biggest thing that struck me right from the off, and again and again throughout the game was  was just how incredibly maneuverable both sides units of infantry were. With all that drilled medium foot on table, the 1-base sidestep, forming columns, turning and moving sideways and expanding out either side. At times it seemed like we were playing a mega-sized DBA game in which we could just pick up and move the individual bases as we wished, as there seemed to be nothing that these highly trained circus performers could not do!

The upshot of this was that in the (rather limited) pre-combat manoeuvring phase of the game I was able to almost totally reorganise my army so the mix of units when the two lines clashed was almost entirely different to that when I deployed - again reminiscent of that bit in a DBx game where a good set of pips allows you to do a huge element-by-element matchup reshuffle just prior to combat. My opponent also did a fair amount of this too, and was only constrained from doing more by the physical logjam of 13 units on a 4' frontage and of course the futility of swapping one 8-strong Bw/Sw infantry unit for another !

Overlaps - counting both ranks - were also a bit of a nasty surprise, as I found myself assuming wrongly that my better quality troops would win out against wider formations of enemy bases. 

With my own shooting being almost useless (1 rank of crossbows at best...) my game plan relied on doing everything I could to survive the enemy shooting (placing my IC in the right place, working hard to ensure rear support and especially to narrow my units frontage as they charged home) and crossing my fingers, as the opposition rolled lots of dice and hoped for me to fail the Cohesion Tests. The IC played a huge part in surviving the enemy shooting (which is still odd really when you come to think of it) but ultimately this phase of the game was a lot more one-sided than FoG:R as it was all about my opponent rolling lots of dice and hoping I would fail a test - my role was kinda passive.  

Then, once I had committed my forces to combat it was all about the dice, winning by small margins and hoping to force the enemy to take lots of cohesion tests. This is what decided almost all the combats, as in a mutual destruction (yes!!) I can only remember one (or maybe two?) units breaking from base losses, which is again a massive difference to FoG:R where I suspect most of the broken units in the games I have played in break through base losses rather than three consecutive Cohesion test failures. 

What was the biggest difference to FoG:R? Out of all the things I've listed, the biggest one I keep coming back to is the extreme, nay, ridiculous ability of (drilled) units to hop,skip, jump and shimmy their way around the table. In FoG:R infantry simply don't do that - formations stay as fixed-width formations (by and large), infantry don't move as far anyway, and they certainly cannot turn and move. That to me makes FoG:R a far, far better game for recreating the look and feel of a historical battle. 

Having the ability to redeploy pretty much at will (Drilled MF + an IC means you can turn and move on a roll of 5 or more) was kinda fun, but it also meant the rules would have worked almost as well if the bases were representing squadrons of X-wing and Tie-fighters clashing around the gravity well of a rogue planet somewhere in deep space, rather than Han Chinese Close Combat infantry charging home against Indian Longbowmen on the edge of a forest on a battlefield somewhere presumably in the Himalayan foothills!

Playing AM at 650 AP on a 4x3 is a lot more fun than chasing LH around a 6x4 - but I think I'll still be sticking with FoG:R for any full-weekend competitions the foreseeable future ! 

Godendingdag FoG:R Lists

5 lists from Godedingdangdag 2012 now added into the "still in beta but you can try it" FoG:R Wiki. They include Hugenot, Early Imperial Spanish, Hindu Indian, Early Danish (which came 1st) and Later Imperial Austrian

Oh Wallenstein, what a big ...... you've got!

Big Boys Toys in action at a 25/8mm FoG:R Competition, Wallenstein 2011 - see Thirty Years War Germans actually do quite well indeed.

Warfare 2011 Match Reports

See the theoretically unbeatable TYW Swedes disprove a theory in grand style in 4 reports featuring opponents such as Later Swedes, Imperial Spanish, TYW Swedish Civil War and Dutch.

Happy Hannibal-tastic Christmas

This video was created for free at the eCards guys JibJab!

Hannibal Knows it's almost Christmas....

It's now almost Christmas, and if you are a typical wargamer that probably means a last-minute panic session on Amazon to pick up a few well-thought-out gifts for your loved ones.

Well, if this is your way of spreading festive cheer, please consider Madaxeman.com this Christmas as well. Simply by clicking into Amazon via the links below before starting your shopping you will be helping support Madaxeman.com, at no extra cost to yourself.

You can shop on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com by clicking on these links. Go on - you know Hannibal want's you to !

Blogger Integration at last !!

I've finally worked out how to integrate the design of Madaxeman.com into Blogger (which loads of wargamers use for their websites and to keep track of what;s going on).

This may not sound like a big deal to any technophobes out there, but the practical benefit is that this site now has loads of additional ways for you to pootle around finding obscure, forgotten and random stuff that my lack of a coherent navigation system means might otherwise be forgotten and lost.

It also means that anyone with a Blogger or Google account can do some clever linking and friending stuff to Madaxeman.com.

Have a look for yourself !

(there are also lots of new ways for you to automatically and easily send links from the site to your mates - via Facebook, email and all sorts of other systems - see the new row of logos at the top of each page!)

Oxford Doubles Match Reports

Four New FoG:Renaissance match reports now on this site. See a Siege of Vienna Lifting Austro-Polish army take on the Anglo Dutch, The Dagestanians, the Ming Chinese and Someone Else.

Report #2 includes Borat's analysis of the Dagestani Army, given in an exclusive live studio interview with CNN's Larry King.

New Feature on Madaxeman.com

I've added a new widget to Madaxeman.com, which you can now see in the right hand sidebar of most pages. It shows the 10 most recent visitors, with details of where they are from, how they found the site and what pages they have visited.

Each entry links to the page they have been looking at, so it's a great way to see what other people are interested in - and maybe you'll stumble across a few "hidden gems"* on the site too?

(* "hidden gems" translates as "yes, I know the navigational architecture is shocking. But whaddya expect?"

Britcon 2011 Match Reports

Finally - the 6 match reports from Britcon 2011 are now completed and published on this site.

Marvel at the skill of the Louis XIV Frenchies as they line up and advance to the sound of the guns, usually swearing violently in French as they go!

Gasp at a fabulous array of almost incomprehensible battle maps !

And luxuriate in the insightful post-game analysis of Sir Henry "Renaissance" Hannibal !

A real World of Tanks

A new set of museum photos, this time from the Imperial war Museum in Duxford. Oddly enough whilst there are a load of planes in the photos the bulk of the photos are of tanks from the Land Warfare Hall 

Enjoy!

Ambush Alley - A Game !!

Yes, photos from a quick introductory and over ambitious game of Ambush Alley, complete with some comments on the rules. Almost a review if you like!

Forged in Battle WW2 American Infantry

I've been tempted into buying a WW2 American company for PBI - adding in some Command Decision half tracks and some tanks from Battlefront. There are some pictures here

New Website for Testudo in the UK

Pete Dalby now has an online site for his fledgling Testudo distributorship in the UK - PD Miniatures. UK-based online ordering, photos and payment by Paypal for the Renaissance 15mm and the Tannenberg 28mm ranges

World of Tanks

Just on the odd chance that some of the visitors to this site also play World of Tanks, my username in World of Tanks is "madaxemandotcom" - feel free to connect....

5 More Renaissance Lists Posted

This time, 900 AP lists from the Oxford (Abingdon) BHGS Doubles - Siege of Vienna, Ming Chinese and Dagestani among them.

7 FoG Renaissance Lists

Yes, all the lists from my 7 games at Britcon are now posted to this site.

Renaissance Battle Reports

Reports from all 4 FoGR games at Devizes now posted - see the Match Reports link on this site for full details.

Sir Henry Hannibal in da House!!

Great Service from Old Glory 15's

Not really news as such, but I just wanted to post a public thanks to Old Glory 15's, who managed to get an order fulfilled, out and posted to a US address I was due to be visiting (to take advantage of their US post-free rate for large orders) - and all during the week before they went on site to Historicon as well

I'm now the happy owner of a huge number of 15mm Renaissance Old Glory figures - watch out for them being painted over the next few months!

Force on Force

I've had a load of 1/72nd scale plastic soldiers lying around in boxes for ages, but the new Force on Force rules from Osprey & Ambush Alley have prompted me to dig them out - and buy a few opponents for them too. Of course, project creep inevitably sneaks in, and now I have the thick end of 200 modern 20mm figures. Just need more time to play !

Renaissance Flags Sites

Now added to the 15mm Renaissance Figure Directory, a list of sites offering Renaissance flags - both free to download and ones to buy.

Antietam!

10mm Fire and Fury Antietam (for the second time...) fought in an art gallery - all the pictures and analysis here...

New Baueda Norman range now added

Baueda's new Normans have been added to the 15mm Supplier Directory and also to the 15mm Photo Gallery. The range is now sold in the UK by Vexillia

Timeline Miniatures added to the 15mm Manufacturer Directory

Timeline Miniatures, a new UK based company with just one range - Burmese - added to the 15mm Manufacturers Directory.

Central London Club News

Central London Wargames Club has a second night - we now meet on each and every Monday and now also Thursday at "Escape" which is just by Mornington Crescent Tube.

On the weekend of June 11th some of the club members will also be playing a big Fire & Fury game (Antietam) as part of an art project in an art gallery in Piccadilly. This is part of an installation by Swiss artist Christoph Buchel, and has been reviewed in both The Guardian and The London Evening Standard. Come along and meet us between 10am and 6pm. How wild is that!

(Or, just read Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam by Stephen W Sears)

Renaissance Figures size comparison page

Side by side pictures of a load of Renaissance figures all now on this site, allowing you to compare sizes of the various allegedly 15mm manufacturers.