Reserves have arrived!

Meet this guy!

You might think that this is some sort of WWII Scottish piper in some funny colours, and you'd be right. The mini is a WWII piper, but painted in the colours of the Manchester Guard.

You'll notice that the bagpipes have no tartan. This is partly because he isn't a Scottish piper (not that pre-fall polities have any meaning) but mostly because I'm lazy.

So why bagpipes? Why not bagpipes? In my opinion they are the premier battlefield portable instrument, producing a cadence that is both uplifting and driving enough to make you want to plunge a bayonet into Johnny Foreigner for the vested interests of your ruling classes King and Country!

The Horde clashes with the Guard

Two years down the line, I finally get to play a game of All That Remains against my original parter in crime and creator of the Horde, Xander!

The Manchester Guard deploy on a smaller that usual and somewhat unconventionally shaped battlefield

The Horde forms up behind a ruined office block

The Horde concentrates itself in the centre, ready to die valiantly for their Carn

It was something of an experience coming back to my baby after almost a year.

Xanders plan was simple, drive at my forces and murder me in melee. My plan was likewise simple; gun them down before they got to me. This may be the first time that the obvious dichotomy between the two forces has been explicitly exploited, with previous players trying to set up firing lines or making extensive use of cover.

The nomads did manage to hide from the majority of my fire-power admittedly, except for the spear-men who were wiped out in pretty short order.

Machine-guns will do that to you...

On my left flank, the nomad musket group approached through the wood.

In the centre, nomad melee units closed the distance fairly rapidly, dodging defence fire and slamming into the Highland Spring Water clansmen.

The clansmen fell back from the fury of the assault, taking relatively few casualties.

Leaving the Guard elite to handle the remainder.

The Lancers wheeled about to face the right flank and charged the nomad assault group, driving them off.

Meanwhile the nomad musketeers exchanged shots with the Guard infantry, while the cannon sent a shot directly into the Guard machine-gun. Seizing on this, the musketeers killed the gunner before he could recover.

The Lancers dealt with the cannon

 On the right the Carn and his brothers hit home, annihilating the clansmen and driving them back into the woods.

The elite Guard fell back fire ineffectually at the remaining Horde

The Carn and his command advance but go down in a hail of gunfire

So while the rules still haven't been written we've already identified a number of changes that need to be made. As I've been thinking for a while, suppression is way too clunky. Armour should probably be rolled into one check, rather than having separate checks for different classes of weapons. And as I've been suspecting for a while, the forces we have are relatively well balanced, despite the Horde being, on paper, significantly more expensive; the price of firearms definitely needs to go up.

Anyway, it was an enjoyable afternoon, with actual positive feedback. Watch this space; I hope to get an actual ruleset finished by the end of the year.

All That Remains at IPMS Thornbury

A much delayed post about ATR at IPMS Thornbury last month.

Real life and other painting priorities are delaying work on the game for now. You can check out the other work and more pics from Thornbury on my main blog.

Have some pics!

---
Sebastian

Setup

 

Note: Do not leave cavalry exposed, apply directly to enemy

Penants

A quick update, I've given some pennants to The Flying Squad.

So what now?

Things might be a bit quieter here than they were pre-Salute, but there's still plenty to do.

Painting wise I'm going to be focusing on other projects for a while, mostly Flames of War, 6mm modern, other Post apocalyptic stuff and misc. RPG models, but I'll get back to the coalition after the break. I've got extra figures for the Cartel, to bulk out their squad and I want to put together a second rifle squad for the Manchester Guard - after finding a less labour intensive manufacture process of course!

I also want to expand the HQ selection for the guard.I've got a flag for a standard bearer all lined up, and one of the takeaways I forgot to mention in the last post is that you need a robust command structure or a good counter-sniper setup. Otherwise your going to have a bad time.

The obvious goal for now is the rules. I think I'm going to need another two months or so.

I will, however, be uploading a pdf of the Fog of War cards this weekend.

Salute roundup

Salute was certainly an experience.

The support from various friends and acquaintances was outstanding and I never found myself there alone.

I managed to run two games and get a small amount of time to look around the show myself. Interest from the public was muted but constant and I managed to give out a reasonable amount of cards.

It was also a learning experience as far as the game was concerned, especially as this was the first time it had been played.

Both games were rather a-typical however.

The first resulted in a the slaughter of the coalition, with minimal horde casualties, but this may have been compounded by the fact that my lovely assistant had a rather liberal interpretation of 6" and seemed to have trouble understanding the phrase "no doubling through terrain". I let this slide as I didn't want to start being belligerent that early into the game. Adding to this, his young opponent seemed to have a rather lax grasp on tactics in general and managed to wander his cavalry into charge range for the Karns command group.

The second was a complete reversal, with the horde being mowed down while charging SMG armed veterans across open ground. Apparently, early on, the players mistook me saying "no doubling through ruins" as "no moving through ruins" and thus they proceeded to manoeuvre down the fire-lanes recently constructed by my assistant in a rookie table dressing error.

Despite this there were some useful takeaways. The Sentry special rule is under-pointed, as is off map mortar support and off map sniper support. In fact, the ability to fire more than once per phase is under-pointed. It's not that primitive firearms may not be able to move and fire that makes them less valuable, its a modern firearms ability to move, fire, and then fire again at full rate of fire in defensive fire that makes it valuable. So point bumps all round. Cavalry charges also probably need a slight nerf, something along the lines of not being able to insta-rout units more than twice their size.

Also, for display games, units should be uniformly armed.

Here are some pics

Manchester Veteran Guard and Cartel troops manoeuvre through the village

A horde cannon advances through a forest after deploying behind it for some reason

Advancing warriors

Yours truly playing the final turn for the embattled coalition

Horde warriors take cover in a tactically important animal pen.

Unable to form an effective firing line the coalition leave themselves open to assault

Overall it was a great experience, but given the cost, the effort that went into getting there, and the stress of effectively going it alone right in the middle of what turned out to be an academically important moment as well as an impending house purchase I cant honestly say it was worth it. I think Salute always inspires me. I look at all the great games and get intoxicated on the atmosphere, and think "I too want to be here" but in all honesty I think I should have reigned in my ambitions and gone to some local shows, at least initially.

Speaking of which, come see and play All That Remains at the Table Top Sale, in Lincombe Barn on the 8th! And possibly Blastastic! in October if I get round to asking the organiser soon.

Update: Salute is on!

The Horde

I've taken delivery of Xanders force for Salute. Gratifyingly both forces fit in a single case, which is a little surprising given the size of this one.

I love this force. At a distance it looks like some sort of  Viking army,

but the closer you get

the

weirder

it

gets...

I love it! combined with Xanders painting, it's a beautiful force.

I've also managed to point it up.

We were slightly worried that the Coalition force would outstrip it in size, but nothing like that has happened. Even stripped down to basically men and equipment, the horde significantly outpoints the coalition. I'm hoping that this will provide an opportunity to fine tune the points values for firearms.

The horde is composed of elite troops. If they don't have the numbers or experience to cross the battlefield without getting cut apart then I know we have a  problem.