The recipe is as before, except these fellows are mounted on what in Scotland are traditionally known as "cuddies". The recipe? - something like 80% Jorg Schmaeling, 1% superglue, 19% coffee. If they'd all been destined for the same unit I would have varied the horse colours a bit, but it's not worth the bother at one horse per regiment - no-one will notice. It just means that, in addition to the officers clearly all being brothers, their horses are brothers too.
New Falcatas for June include these
My plans for completing my Spanish army may be about to change again, since Falcata have announced some new General Staff figures for June, plus an assortment of new Peninsular War offerings - including light infantry in bicornes and marching militia in round hats. Oh, well.
To celebrate my release from eBay packing duties, I got the first six of my converted Spanish infantry officers finished while listening to the Champions League Final this evening. There are four mounted colleagues for them which are about half done, but all the rank & file of the six new units are still to come back from the painter, so I have a couple of days to get them done.
The chaps in the picture were originally Art Miniaturen Dutch-Belgians, and they now have various new hats and heads attached. I'm pleased with them - something very satisfying about non-catalogue figures in your army.
Today I was going to do a little post on my new Spanish line officers, but sadly I haven't finished painting them, so that will have to wait a day or so. I was also going to write up the next week of the solo campaign, but I haven't got the housekeeping sorted out yet, so that will have to wait as well.
One of the things which has taken up time in the last couple of weeks is the auction of various Historex items which I volunteered to sell on eBay to raise money for cancer charities. Since I volunteered I can hardly complain about the hassle, but it has reminded me of the amount of labour needed to sell stuff on eBay, especially if you are as verbose as I am when it comes to the listings. Then there's all the questions to answer, and all the peeking to see if anyone else is watching or bidding yet...
Everything is sold now - some 100 unopened kits from the 1970s, plus a collection of 60-odd finished figures. Some things I learned about Historex during the last few weeks:
(1) The interest is very substantially from outside the UK - most of the items have sold to buyers in Italy, Germany, France and the USA. Unfortunately, because of the weight, I could not offer the big collection of complete figures outside the UK, though most of the questions and interest I got came from overseas. In particular, the insured shipping cost of the 2Kg+ parcel to the USA worked out at about £90, which is crazy.
(2) Maybe predictably, the kits generated much more interest than the completed figures - there seems to be more interest in building them than purchasing someone else's efforts, however good. That shouldn't have been a surprise, I think.
(3) The completed figures are horrifyingly fragile - you dare not sneeze near them, and some of them will hardly support their own weight. A challenge - even for a fastidious (fusspot) packer like me. (I love the sound of bubblewrap in the morning.)
Anyway, they are all sold and mailed now - one or two still have to be formally accepted as safely received, but shipping has been remarkably quick. One small packet to Indianapolis arrived in a little over 2 days, which is fantastic. I have to make a detailed breakdown of proceeds-less-expenses, since I have to pay the net amount over to the charity, so I have been more than usually focused on the fees charged by eBay and PayPal. Man, they are not cheap. OK - I'm not really grousing - there is no other easy way to sell stuff like this, but the 10% completion fees on eBay really add up. However, I'm delighted to say that - assuming the last few items have arrived safely and we don't get into any disputes, we should have raised about £730 for the charity, so I'm very pleased with that.
It fairly knocked a hole in the time available for painting and other hobby stuff, though.
Next topic. I wrote a post not long ago about my apparent weakness for big shiny wargame books, and how they are usually not as useful as they might look. Well, I did it again. Having already bought and browsed Wargames Foundry's Napoleon rule book (great title, by the way, guys), I had decided against looking at Warlord Games Black Powder publication, which looked like another of the same sort of figure-promotion-disguised-as-rules jobs.
However, a few people whose judgement I have a lot of respect for have played the game and made positive noises about it. The most guarded comment I have heard was from John C, who said the game he played was "the most excellent fun, but had very little to do with Napoleonic warfare". So, when I got the chance of a good, cheap, second hand copy, I bought it, and it has been my bedtime reading this week - it is a bit large and heavy to be ideal for bedtime reading, and it also tends to hit the floor with an alarming thump when I doze off, but it has been most enjoyable.
It is refreshing to read a wargames book which appears to have been written by adults who have a nice way with humour and who can actually write both entertainingly and grammatically, and without getting unpleasantly nerdy or giving in to the temptation to slag other people's efforts. Anyway, the book is entertaining, the game looks like a lot of fun, and a few bells rang.
For a start, all ranges, moves and everything else are given in multiples of 6 inches - Ding! - hexes, I thought. I'm not sure if I intend to rush to try the rules - I think I'd like to sit in on someone else's game first. Fat chance around here. One slight difficulty I have is that, since the book is written in a nice, conversational style, there isn't a formal statement of scales and so on - or at least I didn't find one. The illustrated scenarios seem to be played with 28mm figures (as you would expect) on a 6-feet-by-12 table (and no-one expected that...), but they do not appear to be very large games, in the sense of numbers of units.
Anybody played Black Powder? Any views on what size of battle it works for? What did you think of it? I realise a lot of people use these rules, but I hadn't really considered them before. They look practical, and I like the simple, commonsense approach - anyone like to offer a brief critique?
If you'd like to invite me to watch a game, I'll be delighted - please just send the return air fare and I'll bring some beer.
This is
intended to be an observation rather than a rant - I state this right at the
start in case you cannot tell the difference.
I think
my theme is basically the counter-productive effect of our modern dedication to Health & Safety. All the warnings printed on everyday items, all the
overcomplicated messages printed on product packaging, all the safety stuff in
user manuals, all those crazy garbled codas on radio adverts for financial
services - all that - be aware that no-one actually cares whether you hurt
yourself, or suffer financial loss, or even die. This is not to say that they
wish you any harm, of course, but their main concern - you could say obsession
- is to ensure you do not blame them or try to get any money out of them if
something goes wrong.
I
recently bought a new flat-screen TV, which came with a very thick owner manual.
Being very careful to keep my back straight when I lifted the manual, I found
that it was printed in 17 languages, including Arabic and Slovene. The
remaining 8 pages in English started off with 5 sides of safety information,
including details of how to dispose safely of the item and its packaging, a surprising
amount of detail about the risks of epileptic seizure if I watched the thing,
and solemn advice about not watching it underwater, or on top of a mountain in
a thunderstorm. Whatever goes wrong, they have told me about it in 17
languages, so what's my problem? Sadly, the manual did not explain how to
edit the tuned channels, or configure the DVD player, and was very sketchy
about quite a few other practical operational matters. This is partly explained
by the fact that the manual is issued with a whole range of very different
models, and so can only refer in general terms to some topics. In truth, the TV
is fine, once you poke around with the menus and stuff, but, basically, the
manual says:
"Congratulations
on buying this TV. We think it's quite a good TV - don't do anything daft with
it, and further instructions on anything that isn't intuitive about the
operation might have been found at the following internet URL if we hadn't
moved it 2 years ago. If anything goes wrong, or you hurt yourself, don't
bother getting in touch - our legal department is bigger than our technical
development section."
And it
says this in 17 languages. One reason why these documents have to be so
multilingual was made clear to me some years ago when the previous Mme Foy
recruited the services of a student to help with the housework. If there is any
implication of a fantasy au pair in a
short overall, forget it - this girl was not of that breed, and her main
qualification for the job was that she was penniless and Mme felt sorry for
her. Maria didn't understand how to use the vacuum cleaner, or how to do much
else, as far as I could see. The arrangement lasted some 5 weeks, until the
Great Bath Disaster. Because she had poor eyesight, and was Spanish, she had
problems with printed English instructions on packages, and one morning she
cleaned the bath with a cleaner which said, in small print on the package,
"Caution: not suitable for enamel baths". Remarkably, she must have
put an unusual amount of energy into cleaning that bath, because she turned it
into a horrible, matt-finished, piebald item which had to be replaced - could
not be rescued. It was about 4 years old, and it cost something like £1500 to
remove it, replace it and restore the bathroom to a proper state. Neither the
cleaner manufacturer nor my insurer were the slightest bit interested in
sharing the financial grief, since the product package said clearly it was
unsuitable for enamel baths - assuming you had very good eyesight and could
read English - and that got everyone off the hook. This was about 20 years ago,
and £1500 bought a lot of food and beer in those days.
I confess
that in some ways I am a slow learner, but I took due note of the incident. The
warnings are not there to help the customer - primarily, they are there to
protect the manufacturer.
What
brings it all to mind this morning is that, once again, I find that the present
Comtesse Foy - bless her - has put interesting bottles of new products in
the shower. Some of them may be familiar items with new packaging - I wouldn't
really know, mostly, but I had better be sure to do a little label-reading to
be on the safe side. It might seem astonishingly remiss - even eccentric - but
I tend not to wear my spectacles in the shower - is that unusual? - I wouldn't
have thought so. Whatever, it is not unknown for me to attempt to wash my hair
with skin cream or bathe with something which turns out to be hair conditioner.
It hasn't got any worse than that, but the scope for disaster is impressive -
chilling, even. If a new green plastic squeezy bottle appears on the shower
shelf, there is no immediate way that I can identify what it is unless they
give me some very large print and maybe some pictures. It could be a new German
shampoo containing caffeine, which is fine - Mme Foy is a tireless researcher -
or it could be Mr Muscle's Extra Strong Barbecue Cleaner. I wouldn't know.
Taking a shower can be a major act of trust.
Of
course, it could be that the legal requirement to print all those disclaimers
and warnings on the label in microscopic fonts leaves no room for pictures.
There is probably even a message that says, "If you can't read this, it
isn't our problem - have a nice day."
I'm currently doing some conversion work and painting to get a supply of command figures for my next lot of Spanish line infantry, and in the breaks - since I have the brushes and the tools out - I am taking the opportunity to do a few other bits and pieces. Tidying up, finishing things off - that sort of stuff.
Here is an example. This, you will see, is a British artillery caisson. I have a few such caissons, and there are still a couple more to be finished. Most of them are models by Lamming - the older the better, to get the scale right. This one is slightly different - the limber and the caisson (actually, I think it is officially an Ammunition Car) are both from the lovely old Hinchliffe 20mm series - long gone; the horses are Hinton Hunt, the driver is a converted Minifigs S-Range RHA gunner. Nothing particularly notable in the mix, I think you will agree - all the castings date from the 1970s. If you were to be a little fussy, you might suggest that the horses are a tad small for the rest of the kit, but that is certainly my fault for removing them from their bases in 1972. Anyway, you wouldn't suggest it out loud.
That is the point - the horses and the limber have been attached to this plywood base since late 1972. When I switched my house standard from 2 gun limbers per battery to just one, I had a few spare limbers like this kicking around the place. Last year I got hold of a matching caisson from the same maker and the same vintage, and added a suitable driver. Some very slight freshening of the paint on the original bits and here you are - a brand new addition to my Allied artillery which has only been 40 years in the completion.
If something is worth doing, my grandmother used to say,
it’s probably worth doing over again. Here I was, quite happy with my new
Hassle-Be-Gone automated siege rules, and then some insightful comments from
Ross on my recent post and an unusually coherent email from De Vries the
Impaler sent me back to the drawing board.
One of the truly great things about blogs is that you can
get other interested parties to shine some light on your own thoughts, and you
can learn a huge amount. [By the way, any fans or students of Water Logic? – I
used to be a firm believer in all that creative evaluation stuff, though I seem
to have forgotten about it since I stopped being paid to think. I might do a
post about it sometime – you have been warned.]
The purpose of my mathematical, off-table siege rules is to
strike a workable balance between convenience and realism such that sieges can
be handled easily in the background while the campaign rolls on. The tricky bit
is finding the correct balance – rephrase that – an acceptable balance.
The part of the siege under particular scrutiny here is the
actual assault or storm. For a start, Ross raised the very good point that not
all sieges are the same. If the defenders are unusually determined, it can
change things. I carefully avoid the use of the word “fanatical” here, since it
has kind of rabid overtones. Let us merely identify that there are certain
situations and certain armies where the defenders would be prepared to fight
for every building, and to sustain unusually high levels of casualties. De
Vries’ original suggestion was that the defenders might be “Spanish or mad”,
but that won’t do at all.
Further, De Vries cited the Agustina Effect (after the
heroic lady celeb from the Siege of Zaragoza), where the civilian populace are
prepared to help with manning the guns and the barricades – i.e. commit to a
level of active combat over and beyond merely trying to defend their own
property. We also agreed that there might be situations (though I’m struggling
to think of an example) where the citizens are on the side of the besiegers,
and take a part in the attack on the garrison. To put all this into effect, I
have changed the calculations of ASS and DSS (as defined in the rules below) in
the storm – the defenders can get an extra dice if they are ready to fight for
every building (the Suicide Dice - suggestions for a better name will be most welcome), and either the defenders or the attackers might possibly get
yet another bonus dice (the Agustina Dice) if the civilians are prepared to
fight on their side, during the actual storm. All storms take a week, however
they go.
Agustina de Aragon - "No - it's OK. If she really wants to stand there when we fire, just let her get on with it..."
Ross raised the matter of levels of loss – applying an
overall factor to the complete besieging army’s strength to get the casualty
figures is over-simplifying things, and may give inconsistent or illogical
results. Prof De Vries also pointed out that calculating the besiegers’ losses
retrospectively for the whole siege, based on the “total force employed” is, to
use his terminology, dumb, for a number of reasons:
(1) Though the total
force, represented by the variable Assault Value (AV) may justifiably be
regarded as all at risk during the weekly routine Bombardment Phase (which
includes all kinds of missile fire, mining, sorties, hunger, disease, bad
breaks and random demoralisation), this number AV will vary from week to week,
apart from losses, as a result of troops being detached from the siege, or new
troops joining it.
(2) During the actual storm (as Ross also mentioned), only a
portion of the total available AV may be called upon to actually assault the
place – losses for that week should be restricted to this subset.
(3) In a campaign where weekly returns are made for all
units, it makes no sense at all to do the casualty calcs for a siege only when
it has ended. It is much better to perform the calcs week by week, as AV varies
up and down (or is subdivided), and carry forward the actual totals.
Though still determined to keep this manageably simple, I
accept all of this, and the re-tweaked section of the Siege Rules now reads
thus:
11.3.3 Storming:
Defenders’
Storm Strength, DSS = FV + GV + 1D6 + the Suicide Dice + the Agustina Dice
Attackers’
Storm Strength , ASS = AV(st) + 1D6 +
the Agustina Dice [BV, the Battering
Value, does not count in a storm]
Where:
* The
Suicide Dice is a bonus 1D6 available to the defenders if they are prepared to
fight for every building.
* The
Agustina Dice is an extra bonus 1D6 available to either side if the civilian
population of the town will fight for them.
* AV(st)
is whatever subset of the full current AV the attackers commit to an assault.
Results:
* If
ASS > DSS then the fortress falls and the garrison surrenders. Attackers
lose 0.25 x DSS (rounded to nearer whole number) from AV(st). Defenders lose
0.5 x ASS from GV.
*
Otherwise, if ASS <= DSS, storm is repulsed; attackers lose 0.5 x DSS from
AV(st); defenders lose 0.125 x ASS from GV
[Losses
in GV and AV are not simply casualties – they represent all manner of loss of
ability to continue – and note that GV and AV can become negative].
Each
week during a siege, losses for each side are calculated as one tenth of the
percentage loss in AV or GV for the week. During a storm, AV(st) replaces AV if
it is different. Thus, for example, if AV is reduced from 7 to 6 during a
particular week, the actual loss to the besieging army in killed and wounded is
1/10 x 1/7 = 1.4% of the troops present/engaged.
Nothing gets Breakfast
TV switched off quicker in our house than the scheduled few minutes with the
Show-Biz Correspondent, possibly live from Hollywood,
with tales of who has been seen with whom. Glossing over the fact that I have
not heard of most of the people mentioned, I really cannot believe that anyone
gives a rat’s about this stuff. Does someone out there actually care?
Not being
interestingly rich or famous myself, I have never paid much attention to the
private lives of those who are. I accept that I appear to be in a minority
here, so let’s be a bit more specific – I don’t care much about the private
lives of people who are still alive, anyway. Once, long ago, astounded to learn
on the BBC’s lunch-time national news that a Palace Spokesman had told the
world’s press that Princess Diana was suffering from a slight cold (she was
still alive at the time, I hasten to add), I complained to my wife-of-the-day
that I was once again thinking of resigning from the human race, or any other
species which spent its time waiting for daily news of this calibre. Bad move –
I was immediately skewered with a familiar laser-beam stare.
“You,” she said,
“should be trying to get in the queue to JOIN the bloody human race”.
To this day, I am sure
she was right, so since then I have tried to keep track of areas where I don’t quite
line up with the mainstream – not because I necessarily wish to change, you see,
but because a little understanding never did any harm, and forewarned is
fore-something-or-othered. Armed – yes, that was it.
All those magazines
that stare at me next to the checkout in the supermarket – the ones with an
exclamation mark at the end of the title – all plugged into some national
obsession. “Katy Price tells all – exclusive”, and there is Katy on the cover,
looking right at me – sharing her secret just with me. Good on you, girl. You
tell em. Don’t tell me, though, for goodness sake.
That’s what nearly all
kids want to be now – rich and famous. Rich = famous. I’m not so sure about
that, but there is a general assumption that fame brings riches, and you have
to be rich to be interesting. Just as well that Jesus or Gandhi aren’t around
now, then – they would get no coverage at all.
I see special
celebrity editions of shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, and many of
the supposed celebs are unknown to me. There are more and more famous people,
it seems, and I’m still not one of them. I’m probably jealous – that must be it.
I knew we were in
trouble a few years ago when I saw a bit of a TV show which featured people who
earned money from being professional look-alikes – being booked to turn up at
hen-parties and suchlike. I found that an interesting idea, and I thought the
Bruce Springsteen clone was really good, but there was one character I had not
come across before, and it turned out that this particular guy earned his living
from impersonating one of the then-current stooges on the Big Brother reality TV
show. Just a minute – but isn’t that a reality show, featuring real people
(i.e. non-celebrities)? Does that mean that exposure on reality TV converts
people into celebrities important enough to justify the existence of a paid look-alike?
This is scary –
especially since anyone who thinks he sings quite well in the bath can now get
publicly humiliated on Britain’s
Got Talent – are they all famous too? At this rate, everyone is going to be a
celebrity eventually. I hadn’t thought of this – if I become the last man on
earth that no-one has heard of, surely in its way that would be, like, really
exclusive? I mean, you know, such a person would be interesting enough to
warrant some media exposure. Someone should interview him on TV to see what’s
wrong with him. Ghost-write his autobiog. Hmmm.
On the radio recently
there was a pointless phone-in about something or other, and someone was
sounding off at length about the obscene amount of money Wayne Rooney gets paid
a week, and what a disgrace this is. [For non-UK readers, or UK readers who could
not care less, Rooney is a prominent football (soccer) player with Manchester
United – arguably the most gifted English player at the moment, and his private
life keeps the media and the public in a state of great excitement]. For once,
the pundit in the studio seemed to me to have something sensible to say:
(1)If Rooney
is offered a certain, very high, wage, is he expected to say (as we all would,
of course), “Oh no, that’s far too high – I’m not worth it”? Bear in mind that
a single bad injury could end his playing career tomorrow, so this whole issue
is very high-geared. The man is not a filing clerk.
(2)This is a
free market – if the complainer begrudges him the money (or envies it?), all
they have to do is apply for Rooney’s job. I’m sure that Man Utd would be
delighted to talk to them.
Is all this,
ultimately, just about envy?
I fear that, once
again, I have not progressed my ideas very far – I’ve just sort of wheeled them
out of the shed. No matter, I can wheel them back again for another day. On the
general topic of not fitting in with the times, here’s a good song from Loudon
Wainwright – this is the best clip I could find. I’m sorry that the last 4
minutes or so appear to be silent – you can stop it when the music ends or, if
you prefer, you could use the silence to meditate on a topic of your choice. I
guess LW is not rich or interesting enough to justify a better clip.
Once, back in the days
when I wore a suit every day, I was mistaken for someone famous. I was hurrying
up Charlotte Street,
in the centre of Edinburgh,
late for a meeting with a lawyer, as I recall, when I was stopped by two
middle-aged ladies with beaming smiles.
“You’re him, aren’t
you?” said one, “him on the telly.”
I was a bit taken
aback, and explained that I was sorry, but I was not him.
“Oh, come on!” said
the second lady, “we know who you are!”
I muttered something appropriately
pathetic, and continued to my meeting.
Later the same day I
was telling some colleagues about this. One of them couldn’t believe that I
hadn’t asked who they thought I was. I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t asked,
too, but deep down I’ve always known that I would probably have been upset if I
had found out, so I’m glad I never knew. Sometimes I do wonder, though.
