Galleys R Us (Part 1)

 I know very little about Ancient naval warfare, and I've never been inclined to research it or buy any toys for it. I've played a few galley games however, and my recent foray with Mark Cordones Pelepponnesian Wars campaign got me thinking about doing some naval battles in the context of the campaign, particularly as Archduke Piccolo went and built a bunch of lovely galleys to fight some battles.

Now, I did toy with the idea of just buying some Navwar galleys, but I don't really have a clue what I'm doing. At last years Society of Ancients conference I picked up a copy of Corvus, mainly because it came with a bunch of ship counters and I thought I could do something with those. 

Corvus by Richard Lee, a whole game in a bag thanks to the SOA. Richard was a member of the Sheffield club until he emigrated to Bulgaria.

Now the supplied ship counters are 1/600th scale so quite big. I scanned the A4 counter sheets and reduced them by 50% to produce 1/1200th scale ship counters (ie the same size as Navwar) and then printed them out in colour. This produced quite a lot of potential ship counters, this is just the Red Fleet, there are also four sheets of Green Fleet!

I had a lot of thinking about bases. I really didn't want to do individual ships on the bases, but multi-basing to represent squadrons, and equally I wanted them to be flexible and be able to represent lines and columns. In the end I settled on 40mm x 40mm bases which would accommodate even the largest 10 bank battleship.

I had a go at colouring in some card to match the printed ship counters, but it ended up looking pretty awful (see above) .

So instead I bought some Marine Blue artists card, which is almost exactly the same tone as the ship counters. It may have been a mistake going with such a light blue, but it is much easier to darken things down than lighten them up.

The card is very thin so I stuck it to some artists mount board and did enough for 48 40mm x 40mm bases.

Then it was a case of carefully cutting out ship templates are trying various arrangements. In the end I decided each unit/squadron would have two bases, each with two ship templates apart from the 10 bankers with one. I'd already sketched out some 'army lists' for the Hoplite campaign and aimed to do for each side four light squadrons (3 and 4 bank), four medium (5, 6,7 bank) and a pair of huge galleys (9 or 10), or eighteen bases to start with.

The ship counters have big coloured blobs on them (see image above) , the colour being fleet colour and various numbers showing if they have a Corvus, how many banks of oars etc. I wouldn't have minded them except they are at the front and not the back of the ship counter. Why? That is completely counterintuitive! I always mark bases at the rear, only the deranged or enemy agents would put them at the front. Each to their own I suppose, but this setup certainly didn't suit me, it looks like the ships are rowing backwards. 

So off they came. That looks much better, and it looks like ships are actually sailing forwards again. I'll just mark up the bases myself, and or now I just did temporary markings on the underside of the bases until I sort out a proper marking scheme.

And after an afternoon of cutting and glueing, here is red fleet deployed for battle. That doesn't look too bad at all. The counters still need marking up, and I shall ponder whether I need to go over the 'sea' with dark blue.

I've sketched out a simple set of 3x3 galley rules based on Dominion of the Spear so I just need to base up Green Fleet and give it a go.

To be continued!

Sheffield CALF 2025 - overview

 After the success of last years CALF at Tapton in Sheffield, Tim organised another one for this March. This was a Wargames Developments event, and as our main conference is the Conference of Wargamers (or COW), a CALF is a small version of COW...

Woo, jazzy name badges. Unlike last year I was able to attend the entire event this time, although I missed out on the Thursday trip to Newark Air museum as I've been there before.

There were around 20 attendees (perhaps 25?), and we had two full group sessions in the morning and then breakout sessions in the afternoon. Timetable above. I was putting on Eylau with my One Hour Napoleonic rules in the afternoon.

There were COW style signup sheets for the breakout sessions, and they all got pretty booked up.

The introduction and first session were in the rather psychadelic surroundings of the main Masonic Lodge call. We have played the odd game in here too, but some of the other rooms have a rather more relaxing carpet.

The hall was also were we stashed all our Bring and Buy stuff, all competitively priced for a quick sale. This is just a small selection. I didn't have a huge amount of stuff left to sell as I've shifted tons in the last few years, but duplicate copies of various rules I'd acquired were popular as were some (very) old OO/HO unbuilt cardboard model railway buildings. My own purchases were modest, an interesting looking set of Napoleonic rules, a walking guide to Normandy battlefields and a copy of 'My helmet for a pillow'. I did receive some more free donations from the never ending heap of Tims old 15mm stuff which will feature in a painting post in future.

Tim addresses some of the assembled multitude to outline the day.

The first session was a talk by Lloyd Powell about King David and a comparison of his Biblical description with contemporary accounts from Egypt and Babylon, and various asides into ancient middle eastern history. Very interesting stuff, and outside my usual scope of historical interest.

The plenary session was another of John Bs polmil games of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, so it was a big multiplayer strategic role playing game. It followed on directly from the game we played at the Society of Ancients conference last year, which covered the immediate aftermath of Caesars assassination, and instead this time as focussed on the Phillipi campaign. 

Tim and I were once again cast as the the winning duo of Mark Anthony and Octavian respectively.

The action here was much more focussed on Asia Minor. In brief the 'Liberators' (Brutus, Cassius et al) had fled to Turkey and were raising legions, while the goodies were shipping our own troops into the Balkans. Complications being that we didn't have enough transports to lift our entire army in one go, we also had to keep Rome fed as Sicily had been captured so were entirely reliant on Egypt and our navy was somewhat smaller than the traitors. Various other minor kingdoms (Rhodes, Cyprus etc) were floating around trying to work out which side to back, and some bloke called Herod was wandering around asking if we could help reclaim his kingdon. 

Unlike the game last year, there were lots of military units in this. Big stacks on the areas of the point to point map. The pink ones are various types of Romans. On the left side you can see the Caesarian forces, Antonius (Mark Anthony), Caesar (Octavian) and our admirals and generals, Calvinas, Agrippa and Saxa.

We could only ship one third of or army across the Adriatic at a time.

So the first thing which happened after a few weeks of ferrying was that the Republican navy tried to intercept our ferry operations. As movement was along the coastline and ships did not have the endurance to stay at sea for weeks on end, Agrippa and Saxa intercepted the beached ships and battle ensued. 

Battles involved the (hidden) stacks being revealed and everyone getting stuck in. It turned out that choosing to fight in the front rank was a very bad idea, despite the combat bonuses, and Agrippa bit the dust. After this, the Republicans decided to fight another round, but the numbers and quality of our remaining forces told and the enemy were defeated. In fact so badly defeated that all their admirals were killed or captured and we captured the remains of the entire Republican fleet. Result!

Unfortunately we had attained naval superiority a bit late, and the Republican Army had crossed the Hellespont, taking Phillipi and marching towards Athens. Saxa wisely fell back to the outskirts of Athens and the rest of the Caesarian Army linked up with them.

We then fought a huge battle north of Athens. 

Our stuff is nearest the camera. Pink units are Legions of varying quality, yellow are Auxilia of various types. Brutus and Cassius figured out early on that they were outnumbered, but didn't realise quite how many Raw units we had.

Brutus tried to even the odds by leading from the front and just managed to get himself killed. Cassius was a bit more canny and led from the rear, as did the rest of us after the fate of Agrippa.

After two more rounds, the writing was on the wall for the Republicans and Cassius withdrew with the remains of their army. Getting back to Asia would have been interesting as they now had no navy, but we wrapped up there.

The general situation at the end.

After a large buffet lunch, it was time for the afternoon sessions.

I was signed up for one session and putting one on, but I had a quick run around beforehand.

Russell was putting on SPIs old game 'Dallas' - the game of the TV series. A sort of back stabbing RPG set in the fictional world of the Ewings.

Not many props needed for this one.

Jim Roche put on 'Dark Ages Slog' using some rather nice paper figures - not Peter Dennis.

And I signed up for James Langhams 'Officers don't Duck'. Tactical infantry combat around Arnhem.

There were two games running in parallel. I'll do a write up of this is a separate post as it was an interesting game with some neat ideas.

I ran Eylau again after my solo effort. I used a very minimalist version of the rules and it was nice to try the scenario with actual humans. I'll also write this up as a separate post.

That was a great day out, it was nice to play some games f2f and catch up with people. Some of the attendees had travelled long distances and I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did.  I even came out ahead on the Bring and Buy. Many thanks to Tim for organising it and hopefully there will be another one next year.

1/100th 172.5mm K18 (Battlefield 3D)

 The main reason for my recent order from Battlefield 3D is that apparently they are the only makers of 15mm WW2 German heavy artillery! I can find 150mm howitzers, but I wanted something for Corps level. Ideally a 210, but a 170 would do. 

And here we go, a resin Battlefield 3D 17cm K18 (although it is actually 172.5mm). This weapon used the same chassis as the 210mm moerser but had a much longer range and strangely, more explosive power despite the shell being lighter. 

This is a beast of a gun! It makes my US 175mm look like a tiddler. It is partly due to the carriage which shares the recoil between the recuperator and springs on the carriage itself, so the entire gun assembly slides back on the carriage. As a result the carriage is very long to accommodate the recoil grooves. 

When deployed, the gun sits on a turntable, and in theory just two men can traverse it. Looking at the size of the thing, they must be very strong men...

And what a stunning model it is. It is vast, as you can see from the crew. It comes in five parts - carriage, barrel, limber, turntable and the trail support, but essentially the main parts are just the carriage and barrel. It has lots of exquisite detail with springs, panel  lines, rivets etc and didn't need any cleaning up at all. 

The only part I struggled with was the trail traverse support which has a sort of angled flange on one side. I just couldn't get it to fit despite looking at lots of photos, and in the end trimmed it down. It is largely hidden under the trail anyway and the missing g flange isn't obvious.

You can see the crisp detail on the breech, and the grooves the gun runs back into on the trail. The crew have these little platforms to stand on, which are moulded on each side of the trail, as I don't imagine it is very healthy putting your foot into the recoil groove.

I'm not sure who the crew figures are, possibly QRF, Forged in Battle? They are out of my bag of German gunners, and tbh they look a bit nice to be QRF, I'm sure they aren't Peter Pig although they are metal so probably FiB. I particularly like the guy on the left in his shirtsleeves. We need more gunners in shirtsleeves! It is hard work lugging 170mm shells around.

Although it is a large model, it is also very narrow, so I managed to fit it on a standard 30mm wide base, even if it is 90mm long. My 5.5" guns are on much wider bases as the trails are so far apart. I didn't bother with the limber, it can go in the spares box to be made into a cart or something in future.

I was just going to paint the gun in plain dunkelgelb, but it seems to have been pretty common to camo huge artillery pieces so in the end I did in three colour. I painted the bases on two of the crew to match the trails as they are standing on the platforms either side.

One of the nice things about it being a 3D print with a bit of flex is....

The barrel elevates! The trunnions and trunnion locating holes were so well printed that I could just clip the gun into them and they fitted well enough that there is enough resistance to hold it in place. The only kit I've ever managed that with before was the old Airfix 88mm.

What a great model. Now I just need a write a scenario to use it, although traditionally something like this usually serves as Arko 104 with DAK. My 6mm one does anyway.