Topics

1

Space Naval Games / Shattered Void

« on: March 17, 2020, 09:01:06 am »

Seeing as the Kickstarter is delivered and folks are receiving their ships it seems time to make a clean thread for Shattered Void content.
I’ll start us off with an inventory and general thoughts.
I backed the Kickstarter at the Lieutenant Level and went full in for most of the Astivar Collective faction. I ended up with twelve ships:
3 fighters, 2 heavy fighters, 1 armored fighter, 1 interceptor, 2 gunships, 1 repair drone, 1 devastator, and 1 corvette.
All the cards, dice, tokens, templates, and bases are accounted for except on further inspection I’m missing two plastic stat trackers.
The resin is top notch! Really high quality details, very little cleaning necessary, and construction was fairly straight forward. The quality of the cards and plastic components is average at best, the movement template is good quality but massive (which may effect gameplay), the cards are pretty basic boardgame quality, but the design and “finish” when slotted into the stat trackers is pretty poor.
I’ll post some close photos of the assembled ships in the near future.

2

FACO / Looking to play some Firestorm at the Haven

« on: July 08, 2018, 12:36:22 pm »

Hey eveybody
We recently had a guest staying at our house and I had to clean up my hobby room to make some space for her. In that process I pulled out all of my Terrans and gave them a good dusting and found a place in my display case for them.
Looking them over has got me interested in playing some Firestorm. Is anybody interested in having some games at the Haven, maybe on Monday nights? Not sure if they still have “Spartan” night on Monday but that seems to be a less busy night generally.
Let me know!

3

The Swap Shop / Spartan Games Model Search

« on: September 02, 2017, 01:10:19 am »

I've been away from the forum for awhile, I figure with all of the crazy stuff happening with Spartan it's time to throw up a post for interested parties to sling some models back and forth. I'm looking to complete some factions/squadrons and I'm sure some others are looking to do the same.

I'm looking for...
French St. Malo Battleship with fast attack subs
1 French Furoix scout flyer
3 French Frelon small flyers
1 Brittanian Hawk scout rotor
Ottoman Hisar mobile airfield
Almost anything RSN or Veydreth for Firestorm Armada

I have French, Australian, FSA, Ottomans, Terquai, Oroshon

Looking for trades or money

Cheers

4

Find a Game! / 2017 Firestorm Armada

« on: February 27, 2017, 09:00:03 am »

Hey everybody. I'm curious if any of the Colorado crowd is interested in playing some Firestorm in the next few months. I only played a couple games of it last year as opposed to dozens of games of Dystopian Wars and would like to play more this year.
I'm free most days including Monday Spartan Games night at the Haven. I can also come up to Denver/Parker pretty easily.

5

The Showcase / Quickdraw's French

« on: January 05, 2017, 03:24:07 pm »

Hi everybody. Over the past week I have been working on some French land units. I haven't ever played on land and I think it will be a fun way to keep Dystopian Wars fresh.

Here are the land units


And some air support

6

General Discussion / Group Spartan Order

« on: September 28, 2016, 06:07:58 pm »

Is anybody interested in doing a pre-holidays Spartan direct order with me? I have a few singles that I'm looking to add and a couple direct order exclusives. Just seeing if we can collaborate to get to that elusive 100 GBP mark.

7

News and Rumors / New Halo and Firestorm Commanders

« on: August 15, 2016, 04:57:50 pm »

Someone posted this on the Spartan forum.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/K2lZx
Looks like Spartan has commissioned an artist to make new commanders for Halo and Firestorm. I love the look of those Dindrenzi characters. They look tough as nails and you can just feel the hatred! The Terran commanders look appropriately incompetent also.
I haven't used the commander in the System Wars book, but I really like the commander mechanic in Halo. Maybe if they expand this idea the Firestorm commanders will see some use in my games.

8

The Showcase / Quickdraw's Royal Australian's

« on: August 10, 2016, 10:35:57 am »

Keeping with all the painting I did over the past couple days are these Australian battleships for Dystopian Wars. These were both in various states of completeness so I really only needed to finish them up. The rest of my Australian fleet is also in various stages of completeness but I have had a hard time finishing this paint scheme. So dont expect any updates soon, but maybe by the time the new year comes around.
I was going for a look of heavy use. I imagine that the Australian's just don't have the resources to build new ships so they probably keep ships active well after their actual lifespan. This results in ships that are well cared for, but rusted and grimy.

9

Space Naval Games / X-Wing free for all (a battle report)

« on: July 25, 2016, 05:10:41 pm »

While I'm socked away on this remote mine site working, my ability to have a game of anything has seriously suffered. Luckily for me I found a way to play some games. I've grown close with some of the engineers (or engi-nerds as they are fondly referred to), and they have been pretty interested in what it is that I do for a hobby. Most of them come from nerdy backgrounds like comics, video games, or RPGs. However, none of them have ever played a miniatures game.

Enter X-Wing!!! It's easy to travel with, it's easy to teach, it's quick, and it's Star Wars.

Three of them wanted to have a game, and since I wasn't going to be able to focus on my game while teaching both I figured we would just all put ships down and play. We each picked our favorite ships within a 25 point ceiling and no named pilots. Then if someone had left over points I selected a few appropriate upgrade cards for them to choose from.
The ships were as follows:
1 Red Squadron X-Wing - R2 astromech
2 Academy Pilot Tie Fighters
1 Syndicate Thug Y-Wing - Blaster turret and R4 agromech
1 Tempest Squadron Tie Advanced (this was mine)

We each deployed in a corner by placing the range ruler parallel to the corner and setting up somewhere behind that. I dropped 1 big asteroid in the exact middle and put one asteroid just outside range 2 along the center of each board edge. Each turn we determined initiative by a simple D6 roll off. Points would determine the victor: 1 point per damage and 1 point per kill.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures to show, and couldn't post them even if I wanted to with our poor internet.
The game was furious. The engineers got the hang of it really quickly and had a blast. The X-Wing and the Tie Fighters went after each other for the majority of the game and there was much bumping of ships. The Y-Wing took to the outskirts, rather cunningly, but he had trouble keeping his turret in range. The Y-Wing was left standing at the end, but due to our points allocation the X-Wing was the winner. She actually ended up damaging and then splashing both Tie Fighters and doing 3 damage to my Advanced. I thought the Tie Fighters would take it being able to get double the shots each turn, but they ended up just providing extra points for everyone else to score.

This was a fun way to play the game with a group as the winner clearly was not the last man standing.

The game was a hit and I'm sure we'll be playing this more often up here. They've already decided that we'll be taking our dinner down to our makeshift game room tonight and pairing off so that we can get a few games in each.

10

General Discussion / Dystopian Wars Terrain

« on: July 22, 2016, 05:28:13 pm »

Last time I was home I walked by a neighborhood garage sale and noticed in a box of old toys a handful of these colored plastic pieces made out of different numbers of hexagons. The ones I saw were green, brown, or blue. They came in varying sizes: 1 hexagon, 2 hexagons, 3 hexagons, and 7 hexagons. I didn't think anything of it at the time but was recently thinking back to that and thought they would have been interesting for gaming. I did some research and found that they are terrain tiles from a game called Heroscape, which I actually vaguely remember TV commercials for awhile back.

As it turns out, using these tiles is fairly common for miniature gaming. They are stack-able and come in a variety of sizes so that you can create sort of tiered, hexagonal hills. I'm thinking these might be an easy way to quickly build variable land shapes for Dystopian Wars or any other wet naval game. Packs of the tiles sell like hotcakes on ebay. It looks like they generally sell for around $50 for a lot of ~300 individual tiles, which is actually a smattering of different pre-made shapes. Most of them seem to include a few 24 hexagon plates, some 7, a bunch of 3, and a bunch of 2 or 1. Generally they also contain a couple colors of tiles. However I've even seen lots of the same numbers of tiles but only in a single size for around $30.

It looks like $50 will cover a Dystopian Wars table pretty effectively.

Has anybody else seen Heroscape tiles used in miniature gaming?
What's the consensus on hexagonal, slightly of cartoonish (for lack of a better word) looking terrain for Dystopian Wars? Would it detract from the game?

11

The Swap Shop / Time to trim some fat

« on: June 08, 2016, 08:29:17 pm »

Hello MBS friends
I've decided to clear out some of my unused and unwanted naval goodness to make room for some more stuff. Listed below are the items I can see myself getting rid of. A lot of these items are just things I don't use and likely won't ever get painted. I'll be happy with paypal, cash, and Gamer's Haven credit. I can ship anything (with additional postage charges) or we can arrange a hand off if your local. I'm not really looking to trade for anything, a lot of what is on my "to buy" list is non-naval in nature. Just post here if your interested and we can work on a price through PM.

Have at it. I wanted to give everyone in my group a chance before they go to ebay. I'll probably keep them here a couple of weeks before I list them online.

Dystopian Wars

Russian Coalition

• Moskva Dreadnaught
• Kostroma Carrier
• Pesets Submarines x2
• Myshkin Bombers x4

Republic of France

• Ecuyer Cruiser (partially painted)
• Marseille Cruisers x3
• Lyon Frigates x6 (sort of partially painted...)
• Tourbillon Skyship

Firestorm Armada

Ryushi --- Yes Greg, I've decided to quit my goats and focus solely on Terrans. I just like humanity too much.

• Carrier box (primed and sort of stripped)
• Patrol Fleet (Primed and partially painted)

• Ba'Kash Cruisers x3 (never assembled)

12

General Discussion / Admiral on Netflix

« on: May 31, 2016, 12:22:38 pm »

I found a movie titled Admiral on Netflix the other day. It was listed from 2015.
From what I read it was originally titled Michiel de Ruyter (the main character) but was changed for the American audience. It doesn't have great reviews but that hasn't stopped me watching things in the past.
It recounts the history of the Netherlands and English trade wars during the 17th century.
Here is a link to the trailer:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bQMhB_BBttM
From what I've read of the history of the time it seems to take a broad brush to the political history but portrays naval combat fairly well.
It's exciting, violent, and there are plenty of ships blasting each other with broadsides.
Definitely worth a watch if you have Netflix.

13

Find a Game! / Gaming this summer around Colorado

« on: April 10, 2016, 09:30:41 am »

Well everybody, I'm starting a new job this week and I will be traveling 2 weeks at a time. And then I'll be home for a week.
What this means is that my gaming is seriously going to suffer.
So I will be posting periodically here to let everyone know when my rotations put me back in Colorado so we can cram as much naval gaming as possible in a week.
Here's the really important part --- Obviously I have to give priority to my wife when I'm back and I'll want to spend my evenings at home. So if people are available during the day to play games this summer SPEAK UP!
Happy hunting and see you guys in a couple weeks.

14

Modeling Q&A / Traveling with paint

« on: March 10, 2016, 11:40:20 pm »

I'm wondering if anyone has first hand experience flying with paints and hobby supplies.

A search online found a handful of people saying "yeah I do it all the time." And another handful of people saying "I wouldn't even try."

15

The Showcase / The Covenant CAS

« on: March 04, 2016, 10:20:27 pm »

In some Sangheili folklore there is a story of the "great white ghost". A mythical spirit guardian that protects from other evil spirits and acts as a guide for the deceased to make it to the spirit world.
I give you the Covenant CAS Carrier Great White Ghost.



And one for scale. This bad boy comes in just over 10 inches long and 4 inches at its widest point.