Solo Wargaming - I may have lost something

Nothing serious, but I have been enjoying Ross's posts over on Battle Game of the Month about refining his solo rules, and I realised (with what must have been a pang, I guess) that I haven't been doing much solo wargaming in recent weeks and - since much of my wargaming is of the solo variety - this means I haven't been doing much wargaming. The reason is not hard to identify. My new, and very enthusiastic, commitment to Commands & Colors:Napoleonics as my miniatures rules of choice has left me a bit stranded, since the solo options for that game that I've seen thus far are not brilliant.

My in-house rules, which use a computer for activation, record keeping and calculation, do have the advantage that they support solo play pretty well. However, the simplicity and logical flow of CCN - which make the in-house game look more than a little turgid - have won me over, and recently my own rules have been unused.

I guess this is easily fixed. This morning I spent a little time fishing around on Google and there is a fair amount out there. The problem with playing CCN solo is that the Command (activation) cards do not work well if you can see both hands. A number of the workarounds I've seen use a dice system to replace the cards - I had already started thinking about that approach. Another places the "ghost" opponent's cards in an unseen stack, two cards are turned over, and the one which suits the ghost's position best is chosen, both cards being subsequently discarded and replaced. Or both players can be ghosts, treated in the same way. I have only just started thinking seriously about this, so I am not pessimistic - something will come up, I'm sure. At the moment it's a bit like "how you gonna get them back on the farm, after they've seen Paree?". The CCN game is so much better than my previous rules that I'm reluctant to use anything else, and CCN with an opponent is so much better than my solo attempts with it to date that there is a strong temptation just to find something else to do in the evenings.

I'll have to get moving on this. I've written a post-it to myself, this very morning - that should get something happening. I could try using Ross's rules, I suppose, but that would mean learning something new (ouch). Or I could try to recruit a new opponent locally, but people tend to take to their heels when they just hear about my soldier collection. Or I could try to get my son up to speed on CCN, but he is only 8, and it feels a bit like exploitation. Hmmm.

The Noble Art of Conversion

Some recent acquisitions. Two of the brigade commanders in my Allied army are mounted Rifles officers - a rarity in 20mm. After many years of failing to find suitable figures, and a couple of rather so-so attempts to produce suitable conversions, I have finally commissioned some professional work. I am pleased with them – worthy additions, I think - the donor figures are Hinton Hunt, which will offend some as butchery, though it is an old and distinguished tradition. If Marcus had produced such a figure in the first place, this would not be necessary – and one of the reasons he didn’t is probably because he assumed this sort of DIY effort would fiill the gap!

It is interesting to try to spot the original figures - my initial guess is Stapleton Cotton and (possibly) Junot, with new heads and new horses, but you may have alternative ideas. Anyway, it wasn't me, so I don't know for sure. I also received a nicely finished DN31 (Dutch-Belgian general), who will be surprised to find himself leading a Portuguese cavalry brigade in the near future.

Corpulence in Wargames

A neglected theme, which is maybe a surprise given the average physical condition of the attendees of the last wargames convention I visited. Maybe we need rules to cover the fact that the second battalion are too out of breath to get up that hill in one move, or that the cuirassiers' horses are struggling to cope with the load?

This officer came to me via eBay, in a rather nice battalion of Minifigs S-Range "Valencia Light Infantry", which were in good enough condition to form the Ligero del Reino de Valencia in my volunteer/militia brigade with very little extra work. The officer illustrated is clearly the correct one for the unit, but is from MF's current range. I rejected him - he does not get a gig in my army, sorry. This is not because I am prejudiced against the circumferentially challenged - not in the slightest - but because he simply doesn't look right among my other troops. If you have a wargame army consisting entirely of Minifigs' current products then I'm sure they look splendid, but out of that context this guy is awful. He isn't going to do a lot of brisk skirmishing, or even retreating at the double quick, is he? You can't tell me this chap has been existing on campaign rations.

Hooptedoodle #30 - Broadband & Bloodpressure

Not another rant, surely? You betcha. I live in the country, maybe 7 miles from the telephone exchange, maybe 4 miles from the nearest fibre-optic cable. We get (i.e. pay for) a half-meg broadband service, which on the face of it is not so bad, considering everything, and my little publishing enterprise is based very heavily on email and electronic data transfer. The service used to be fine, but, sadly, in effective terms, our broadband here is getting slower. It is slower than it was 5 years ago - much slower. This is not because the cables are rotting, or the technology degrading in some way - it is because of commercial strategies and some astonishingly dumb assumptions made by the service providers and the life-sucking advertising schmucks who cling to their softer parts.

I am only a fringe technician, but I've worked with computers, the internet and general communication issues for enough years to have a good grasp of what goes on. The recent (and continuing) problems with Blogger have been a reminder of the situation - I have no wish to pick on Google as a prime baddie here, they are only one among many, but anyone who has a high profile is sort of inviting a whack on the head, so let's pick on Google for a start.

Some of our local difficulties seem to come from the fact that ISPs and website designers assume everyone has fast broadband, and so jam up the bandwidth with adverts and unnecessary ornamentation - cute videos and suchlike - but also we appear to have problems caused by what seems to me like unnecessary interactivity. Example - when using Google search, I start entering a search string, and by the time I've typed in 4 characters it has already started listing search results on what I've typed so far. The bad thing about this is that it has missed 2 of the characters I typed because the computer's attention was distracted, waiting for buffered responses from elsewhere. I don't need the stupid thing to predict what I'm going to ask for, it isn't clever or helpful - well, it's probably clever, but mostly it's just an irritant.

Similar thing using Google's email service (which I do all the time for my publishing stuff) - I keep having to retype missed characters and the typing falls behind with buffering, because the idiot program is checking what I've typed to see if it can identify, and supply, an unsolicited ad for "sunshine holidays in Prestonpans" or similar based on the words it finds there - this seems to be a continuous monitoring, requiring a hefty dialogue with the ISP's server which causes delay and screws everything up. Google again: Blogger seems to provide continuous update of pages, which is not necessary at all, and just causes problems and delay (and my CPU fan to come on!) if the traffic rates are too slow to cope with this. If a blog page is open as a background tab on the browser, it appears to hold things up in the foreground while Blogger searches for updates. Not necessary. Dumb.

It's not just Google, of course, the same symptoms are found elsewhere - I have to check all typed input when the Internet is running slow, since stuff goes missing. I was quite happy in the days when you had to hit F5 to get a page refresh - basically, if I want an advert for perfume to be updated continuously I'll ask for it - most things in life, apart from the occasional sports commentary or streaming material, don't need to be in real time (or failed real time, which is what we get). I'm currently in discussion with my friendly techie internet expert to see if there is some option setting on the browser which amounts to "only update the bloody page when I ask for it", and some setting for Google Search which means "don't interrupt me with stupid guesses, it's rude - I'll hit Enter when I'm finished".

It's a joke, at best. YouTube, and news video clips, have become unuseable here because the overhead generated by the advertising material that comes with them is getting in the way. At times such as my main monthly publishing week, the response speed causes real stress. My ISP's email browser does not help. If I decide that I don't want some particular new window that the browser has just opened for me, and I try to get rid of it, I have to wait until it has finished downloading all 17 graphic ads (many of them movies) which it has been showing me all week, before it will pay attention to my request to close the window.

I guess that, in general, broadband is getting faster and better and is a real boon to us all, but - inevitably - greed is jamming things up. The service providers and the marketing weasels are filling the available bandwidth with crud which makes the received service slower and slower. Some days it's easier and quicker to phone somebody than to try and send an email, and that cannot be right. I've tried switching off the ads through my ISP's provided filter settings (Customer Preferences - hah!), but that is a scam - you have to identify each actual ad you want to suppress, and there are myriads of them.

If you email someone today, mention the word "Mississippi" at some point. If the recipient gets a little ad on his/her mail browser advertising holidays in New Orleans, then you have just measured the level of stupidity the world has reached - and people are making money out of this inconvenience.

Here's an open message to ISPs, politicians, providers of phone lines, cable companies, Google and anyone else involved. Some of us do not have the infrastructure to support fast broadband - it isn't there (I'm not going too quickly here, am I?). Ironically, people in remote locations are among those who rely most on communication technology, but I realise this is a matter of money, so fair enough. As the available bandwidth gets clogged with more and more penny-generating irrelevances, the Internet is grinding to a halt for those whose broadband connection only has the capacity to cope with what they actually want. THE SERVICE IS GETTING WORSE - WAKE UP.

Foy's Tenth Law: The Principle of Enforced Expertise

Foy's Tenth Law is also known as "The Principle of Enforced Expertise", and it states:

However obscure and personal may be your interests or beliefs, someone will eventually appear and tell you that you are doing it wrong. You may hide, or lock the door, or move to a secret address, but you cannot prevent this happening.

I was thinking about this, and it reminded me of a short story which I once read and which, infuriatingly, I cannot identify. I thought it might be Stephen Leacock, but I can't find it. The story is about a man and his friend who regularly get involved in social card games, but always do badly. Whatever game they play, there is always someone who knows it better, and plays it better. Eventually, in desperation, they invent their own game, with a crazy name, and very strange rules, which vary by the day of the week and so forth.

They are delighted with their game, and thrilled, at last, to be the world's leading experts in something, until the friend reports that he has found a book in the public library on how to develop an unbeatable strategy for their new game.

If you can think of anything more pointless than a quotation without a known source, please do let me know. You get the idea, anyway.

Minor Jostling in the Painting Queue - More Foot Dragoons

The replacement drummer

An everyday yarn of the life of the retired wargamer. The minutiae of army organisation. I published a post recently explaining that I was pleasantly surprised to have obtained and painted a battalion of Les Higgins Napoleonic French Foot Dragoons, since I had never thought I wanted one, but was more than happy to have them.

At that time, I did some minor huffing about my disappointment with the drummer. Because no-one ever produced a suitably scaled drummer of foot dragoons in metal, I had recruited a plastic chap (no prejudice here), from Strelets set 0009 (I think). As far as I know, this is the only foot dragoon drummer in 1/72 scale in the entire galaxy. Though the Strelets set is a nice one, and contains some interesting and potentially useful figures, I regret to say that the dragoon drummer is, with all possible respect to our Russian friends, a gnome. Grotesque in face and physique, equipped with a helmet which has been sat upon and a drum which clearly is deflating; and why - why? - do Strelets arrange to have the sprue joint in the middle of the front of the helmet? Even David the Painter was not able to produce a thing of true beauty from such unpromising raw material.

Anyway, I have lived with my plastic drummer for a while, but the intention has been to replace him if I could come up with a suitable conversion. In fact the conversion was easy - a Kennington Old Guard drummer (Kennington Old Guard are particularly good, by the way) with a replacement head donated by a Garrison officer of foot dragoons. The really handy thing about the Garrison figure is that the horsehair mane is blowing interestingly in the wind, which means that it is not hanging down the back in the manner which makes other dragoon figures unsuitable for conversion. The converted figure has been half painted for a month or so, but this is a bit of a luxury project - replacing an otherwise serviceable figure for aesthetic reasons is never a high priority, and progress has been stalled for some weeks.

New development. Someone was selling a group of LH foot dragoons on eBay, and they looked quite nice, so - though of course I don't need them, and though I don't officially deal on eBay any more - I put in a half-hearted bid and was surprised to win them. When they arrived, I was even more surprised to see how well they are painted. With perfect grenades on the turnbacks and all that, they looked to me like the work of Clive Richards, one of my favourite traditional-style figure painters, but the seller confirmed that he had painted them himself, years ago when his eyesight was better (and I know what he means). So, with minimal retouching, I suddenly find that I have a second battaion for my Dragons Provisoirs (uniformed as the 19th and 23rd regiments), though of course I now had to get my replacement drummer finished in a hurry to complete the new battalion. The picture at the top of the post is a bit foreshortened by the close-up angle - I like to think that the new guy is - well, less gnome-like than he may look here.

So I now have both drummers in service. I had another look at the Strelets chap, and I still don't like him very much, so I've make a note to replace him sometime - and I know how to do it now. Life being what it is, I would bet that the Strelets drummer will be around for quite a while. Any takers?

Hooptedoodle #29 - Small Ads in Comics

This is all triggered by the fact that I came across this picture - I don't know whose picture it is, so if it is yours then thank you, it is a great picture. I have never seen one of these things, and haven't thought about them for well over 50 years, but this was one of a small number of weird toys I always fancied from the small ads on the back of my mate Brian's comics when I was a kid. I wasn't allowed comics like that - I just got the Eagle, and later I got the Rover and Adventure. Brian's comics were much darker, with heavy, violent stories about US Marines fighting in the Pacific and suchlike. But the Seebackroscope was definitely on a secret wanted list, as was a device which, apparently, enabled you to throw your voice and mystify all your friends. I would have loved to mystify my friends.

The only thing Brian and I ever bought through these ads was a small box of ex-US Army ration packs. Don't ask me why. Brian arranged for them to be delivered to his grannie's house, and we opened the box like thieves. I am delighted to recall that the packs contained no morphine capsules - nothing dangerous in that sense - but they did contain foil-wrapped chocolate and fudge bars. Brian liked the chocolate, which was too strong and bitter for me, and which also had an odd grey appearance which might have served as a warning if we had been receptive to such a thing. Brian, sadly, consumed a great deal of the grey chocolate, and was unable to venture further than a few feet from the toilet for the next day or two. For some reason, his mother blamed me for the whole escapade. Most unfair.

So, as you will see, this is nothing more than me idly dreaming about things from long ago which I didn't really understand at the time anyway. I am confident that there will be a whole specialist hobby built around the toys you could buy from these old comics, and there will be experts. You may actually have a degree in this very subject.

Did anyone ever have a Seebackroscope? Was it any good?