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Post by rsdean on May 12, 2020 4:38:37 GMT -6
In the Lean Coffee thread, I volunteered to put a Chainmail game on the table. My intention is to assemble some orders of battle out of my collection of miniatures, post them here, and then recruit some players. Based on previous remotely run miniatures games (something I’ve done for almost 10 years, so not new with the plague), it’ll probably be on Google hangouts. However, last weekend got a little busy around the house, so it’s going to be a while yet...probably aiming for the Memorial Day weekend, since I have an extra day to work with.
The sides will most likely be orcs against humans, and we’ll sprinkle some fantasy things throughout to try the Fantasy Combat table.
At home I am limited to a 4x6 table, so it won’t be a huge game.
Volunteers/interest?
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Post by Punkrabbitt on May 12, 2020 15:08:24 GMT -6
I just played a solo game of orcs vs humans a few days ago, the orcs killed more orcs than the humans did!
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Post by rsdean on May 12, 2020 18:41:11 GMT -6
Yeah, that might be a rule we do without...
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Post by retrorob on May 13, 2020 0:36:48 GMT -6
To get some practice, I recommend you to start with humans only recently I got a major battle in my campaign that I had to resolve solo. Forces of Law/Neutral: 240 heavy foot, 80 gnolls, 60 heavy horse, 1 troll, 1 giant, 1 magician (M-U 6), 1 lord Forces of Chaos: 200 heavy foot, 80 gnomes, 70 heavy horse, 1 bishop, 1 ranger (Hero +1), 1 superhero
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Post by clownboss on May 15, 2020 7:47:26 GMT -6
I agree, try to start with humans first. I know history is boring but trust me, you need some room to breathe and train, and you might even get to love it.
Try 100 vs 100 point battles first and slowly build up to 300-350.
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Post by rsdean on May 15, 2020 16:46:55 GMT -6
Shrug...I might note that I started as a historical miniatures wargamer first, in 1971, and I’ve remained active in that in my second engagement with the field since, hmmm, call it 1987. For that matter I’ve *owned* Chainmail since 1975, but seldom played it. The generalities of miniature wargaming shouldn’t be a problem. It’s the specifics of Chainmail that are at issue...
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Post by derv on May 16, 2020 7:42:12 GMT -6
rsdean I hope you put this together, especially with mixing in some fantasy elements. It would be great if you could record it and post it somewhere for posterity. Perhaps with some commentary. I have yet to see a well done demonstration and it's common for people to turn up here looking for advice and direction into how Chainmail is played. I'd willingly point them to a video if I thought it was a good example of play. I'd also vouch that rsdean has plenty of wargaming experience- he's a long time member of the HMGS who has run and helped run numerous club & convention games.
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Post by waysoftheearth on May 17, 2020 4:42:56 GMT -6
Totally agree with derv. So what do we need to kick this off? Are we still chasing a couple of players? If it's all virtual and asynchronous I'm happy to participate. If we need to be online in real time, timezones might not work out.
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Post by rsdean on May 17, 2020 4:52:46 GMT -6
I’m in the US Eastern time zone. My tech prowess is definitely not up to virtual tables...
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Post by derv on May 17, 2020 8:12:17 GMT -6
I think you could run this Tony Bath style with the simultaneous turn sequence. It doesn't need to be virtual. In my mind it would be better if it wasn't.
It could be run as a pbp with you as ref executing the turns according to the written orders. This would involve static pics of the table, terrain, and troop dispositions each turn with written commentary on the process and the outcomes. If you would video tape the whole thing you can pull pics from the video for each post.
Once the game is run to completion, you could edit your video and post these as a whole with your audio commentary included. Video seems to be the medium for the current generation. Maybe it could be put on YouTube or your blog?
I empathize if you are not interested or motivated in putting together a video. A pbp with pics wouldn't be a bad substitute. But, at the end of the day, I think most young people would be more likely to watch a video.
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Post by rsdean on May 17, 2020 9:16:36 GMT -6
OK, a test to see if that shows up... Ah, good. It does. I started with step 1 this morning. Out of my troop boxes, I have pulled the nucleus of a force; loosely historical Byzantines, usually styled the Myzantine Empire when in fantasy use. So, one side will be up to 2x9 heavy cavalry, 1x6 heavy cavalry with bows (A Byzantine unit type not usually seen in the west...actually ordinarily back rankers in a cavalry unit with some lancers and some bows), 1x9 medium cavalry, 2x6 light cavalry (one with bows, one without), 1x16 heavy foot spearmen, 1x12 heavy foot axemen, 1x12 heavy foot bowmen, 1x12 light foot spearmen, 1x12 list foot bowmen, 2 mounted heroes, a mounted magic user, and a were-bear. Step 2, point that out to get an approximate idea of how many enemy things we want to throw against them. The basic idea is that I do not want the 4x6 table covered side to side with troops.
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Post by derv on May 17, 2020 14:42:13 GMT -6
I think you could make the image larger. A little larger pic would make things easier to see. I know I have done this in the past, but I don't remember how I did it. Maybe waysoftheearth or one of the other mods could help. Otherwise, looks good.
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Post by rsdean on May 17, 2020 17:19:13 GMT -6
You can tap on the image and double the size; but, yes, it will apparently accept a 1MB attachment, so when I get the bad guys laid out, it will be a bigger picture.
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Post by rsdean on May 17, 2020 17:22:04 GMT -6
Well, there’s a 720Kb picture vice a 100Kb picture...tap that to enlarge.
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Post by waysoftheearth on May 17, 2020 17:26:13 GMT -6
There are essentially two ways to do images on Proboards fora: 1) as an attachment which means you upload the image to Proboards, and it is subsequently stored and accessed from there. 2) as an image which means you upload the image to a 3rd-party host, and it is subsequently stored and accessed from there. Option 1 is probably easier, but odd74 is running low on free storage space, so we either need to minimise additional usage of this, or figure out whether we (as a community) will pay Proboards for additional storage, and how we'd do that. Option 2 is also easy if you have somewhere to host your images. If you don't have access to a host, then there's a "first" step to figure out where to host your images. Be aware that Proboards recently updated its networking policies so that HTTPS is now required for all remote resources (i.e., HTTP URLs no longer work). In terms of the size of the displayed image, there are admin setting, which control the default image size: www.proboards.com/admin-guide/forum-settings/image-sizesAnd users can also fiddle with the width and height of the IMG tag when they post, like this: [img src="https URL to my image" style="height:300px; width:300px;"] You can also specify width as a % of the viewer's screen. I.e., 70%. I'm pretty sure that if you only specify width, the height will automatically figure itself out and maintain the image's native aspect ratio. Hope that helps
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Post by rsdean on May 17, 2020 17:41:55 GMT -6
And some opposition... 1x8 lizard riders (LC) with bows, 1x6 lizard riders (LC) with spears, an orcish seer, 2 giants, 6 ogres, 1x12 goblins with bows, 2x30 goblins, and 1x24 giant (armored foot) Orcs. That’s 534 points of Myzantines vs 524 points of the Green Alliance, so roughly balanced. (If these point values actually work out to balanced, I would be much surprised...there are a lot of reasons why point systems are suspect.). The Green Alliance is not symmetrical with the Myzantines; they have fewer large units, and the giants and the ogres will have to make up for the lack of heavy cavalry. I’ll get all of that typed out into some sort of order of battle reference next. As you can see, compromises must be made; most of my troops are mounted on group movement stands, and Chainmail expects to deal with individual figure removal.
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Post by Piper on May 17, 2020 17:43:50 GMT -6
... figure out whether we (as a community) will pay Proboards for additional storage, and how we'd do that. Just out of curiosity, what do rates run for this? Is it reasonable?
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Post by rsdean on May 17, 2020 17:47:03 GMT -6
There are essentially two ways to do images on Proboards fora: 1) as an attachment which means you upload the image to Proboards, and it is subsequently stored and accessed from there. 2) as an image which means you upload the image to a 3rd-party host, and it is subsequently stored and accessed from there. Option 1 is probably easier, but odd74 is running low on free storage space, so we either need to minimise additional usage of this, or figure out whether we (as a community) will pay Proboards for additional storage, and how we'd do that. Option 2 is also easy if you have somewhere to host your images. If you don't have access to a host, then there's a "first" step to figure out where to host your images. Be aware that Proboards recently updated its networking policies so that HTTPS is now required for all remote resources (i.e., HTTP URLs no longer work). Thanks. I’ve gone ahead and uploaded the picture here, but if we are starting to bump up against the storage limits, I will not make a habit of it. I’ve been through two rounds of losing access to my on-line hosted pictures (so there are swaths of my blog with no pictures remaining) so that’s not going to be a near term solution. Pass the hat, or Patreon ...
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Post by waysoftheearth on May 17, 2020 18:42:44 GMT -6
... figure out whether we (as a community) will pay Proboards for additional storage, and how we'd do that. Just out of curiosity, what do rates run for this? Is it reasonable? Current pricing seems to be quite well hidden, but I came across this one from 2014: support.proboards.com/thread/520888/forum-storage-limit-increase-costsSo it's a monthly subscription cost that scales with how much storage we need. Bear in mind that rates may have increased since 2014.
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Post by Piper on May 17, 2020 19:13:48 GMT -6
Well, then? It seems the easiest solution all the way around is for folks to link their own online photos. For all the drawbacks of those services, they're still free. IMGUR is a link-friendly, https friends, and free site: imgur.com/
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Post by Zenopus on May 17, 2020 21:20:17 GMT -6
If you have a blogspot blog, which I believe rsdean does, you can host images there and link to them here. Even if you don't post them on the blog, you can still upload them to a draft post, get the link for the hosted image, and then post it here while deleting the draft post, and the hosted image will remain among your blog images. I'm not a fan of third party sites like imgur, because of what happened with Photobucket in 2017 when they dropped their free service. As a result, there are tons of old broken image links on forums like ours, including ones I posted. Though I guess the same thing could happen with blog hosted images if Google ever decides to nuke Blogspot.
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Post by rsdean on May 18, 2020 6:43:59 GMT -6
So I too was caught up in the Photobucket debacle; my other bout of issues had to do with a blog management app I used for a while, which apparently stowed your pictures in some off-site storage. When it ceased being supported, all those blog posts pictures went away as well.
I recently had an issue where a friend linked to pictures on my blog for an “other side” battle report on his, and all my pictures so linked went into an error mode. When he unlinked, they eventually came back, so I conclude that using Blogger as an image host may violate Google’s terms of service.
Follow up pictures for this project will probably be blog posts with a general link to the post here.
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Post by rsdean on May 23, 2020 4:31:46 GMT -6
It has been a busy week here, and I haven't gotten order of battle sheets typed up for this. I have also decided that it would be prudent to try this once before opening it up at large, so I hope to get a first play done with my brother this weekend. Assuming that happens as anticipated, I'll link in a battle report from my blog, and then we can schedule one for this group...
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Post by rsdean on Jun 8, 2020 4:07:35 GMT -6
Well, life overwhelmed...back to this soon.
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Post by derv on Jun 20, 2020 13:29:35 GMT -6
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Post by rsdean on Jul 12, 2020 4:29:54 GMT -6
I’ve seen that! The Scrum Club isn’t too far from here; I went to their Scrum Con in February, in the before times... I’m busy with preparations for getting married in two weeks, so it’s going to be August before I circle back to this project, unfortunately. But, the designated armies are still mustered together in storage boxes.
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Post by derv on Jul 12, 2020 20:10:07 GMT -6
Congratulations!
Certainly no hurry on this. I'll keep my eye out for when you return.
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