Army Focus - Star Trek Micro Machines

My recent acquisition of a few of the new Star Wars Micro Machines inspired me to dig out my Star Trek Micro machines for this photo-shoot.  This collection is a mix of some that I had as a kid and some more recent ebay purchases, with the intention of playing some wargames with them.  That hasn't happened yet, but it definitely will do one day!

A couple of issues arise from the nature of the figures, the first is scale.  All the Micro Machines are roughly the same size, which of course means they are way out of scale to one another.  At first this bothered me immensely, but  have decided not to worry about it and treat the ships as markers on a larger scale area of space rather than as realistic dog-fight style game.  The second small issues is that some of the figures are silver special editions, which can look a bit silly next to more 'realistically' coloured ships, again I have decided to try and ignore this and maybe use the silver ones to denote command ships.

The core of the collection is this, my Next Generation era Federation fleet.  It also contains older classes of vessels that still featured in the various battle scenes in the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.  The fleets hitting power is provided by nine Galaxy class, three Ambassador class and one Nebula class ships. This is supported by a Defiant class, two Miranda class, six Excelsior class and three Constellation class ships.  There are also a couple of science vessels, which aren't much use in a fight but could be useful objectives for scenarios,

The Federation of course need someone to fight..... how about seven Borg Cubes!  I think the fleet above might struggle to cope with one or two of these and that it wouldn't be that fun as a game.

More realistic opponents of the Federation is this Klingon fleet.  Whilst not as big as the Federation fleet there is enough here for a good game.  There are three very different ships here, essentially a battleship, a cruiser and a destroyer, but I do wish there was slightly more variety in the classes avaliable.

The Romulans also lack variety having only two ship classes, the mighty Warbird and a scout.  Whilst I only have seven Romulan vessels, Warbirds are very powerful ships and this is definitely enough figures to have a game with against a numerically larger Klingon or Federation fleet.

Both the Ferengi (on the left) and Cardassians only have a single class of ship in my collection, which wouldn't make for a particularly interesting game even if both fleets have just enough ships for a skirmish.  I think the best use of the Cardassians would be to use them in conjunction with the Romulans to represent a fleet at the time of the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order alliance.

These are Romulan Warbirds and Federation Constitution class ships for the original series era, which can't find their way into the Next Gen era of the fleets above, I''m not really planning on doing anything with them at all.

Here we have a bunch of shuttles, runabouts and other assorted ships.  No use for fighting at large scales, but could potentially be used as scenario pieces.

And finally a few space stations, which of course can potentially be used as static weapon platforms.

That's it for now, I'm not actively adding to this collection at the moment, but I'm aware that it's not complete and if some different ship classes happened to cross my eyes I could well end up buying more.

Army Focus - Warhammer Fantasy Dogs of War

 

It's been over a year since I last dug out one of my collections of painted minis for a photo-shoot (although there has been a couple of looks at some prepaints inbetween), this time I've settled on my Dogs Of War army for Warhammer Fantasy.

 

Dwarf Slayer Pirates, my favorite unit in the army

I started this collection back towards the end of 5th edition when the Dogs of War army book was released.  At the time it was a great innovation, a selection of wacky units that could either be fielded as a complete army of mercenaries or added to normal armies to add more variety (although I won't deny it was open to some abuse).  GW also continued to add more of the 'Regiments of Renown' in White Dwarf.  I enjoyed fielding this army at tail end of the 5th edition period, but one thing that always bugged me slightly was the lack of 'generic' mercenaries, everything had to be special unit, almost always led by a hero.

 

Spikey!

Then came along 6th edition, and all the previous army books were thrown out in one go and the game radically reworked.  A couple of PDF's were released with what ere supposed to be 'get you by' lists until the books were done.  Dogs of War never got a new book and I'm stuck using those lists to this day, however, the lists aren't actually that bad.

 

Heroes and Wizards

Inevitably with such an old list Dogs of War sit low on the power curve, but there's a lot you can do with these flexible lists.  They provide the best of both worlds, the 'Dogs of War' list is a generic list featuring normal unnamed regiments, such as heavy cavalry, light cavalry, dwarfs, marauders, pikemen, crossbowmen etc.  Then you have the 'Regiments of Renown' list which features all the special regiments from the previous book and White Dwarf, and you can use these regiments in an army based on Dogs of  War list.  It's good because you can theme a Dogs of War army however you like, but still add the wacky (and sometimes powerful) Regiments of Renown.

 

One of the 6th ed changes was to take the Halfling Hotpot out of the Empire army and put it into the Dogs of War army

There are two painting eras shown in this army, as easily seen by the two basing styles, the older style ones were painted when I was about 16, and the flocked ones after I returned from university.  I'd like to find the time to repaint the older part of the army, but it's not on the current priority list.  I'm not really planning on adding anything else to this army either, but it's still a collection that I enjoy and wouldn't want to part with.

 

5th edition; when two giants and a wizard was a suitable regiment

When being used this army is often joined by Dwarfs from my Dwarf army, Marauders from my Chaos army and any cavalry I can lay my hands on to represent light cavalry in particular, but occasionally some heavy cavalry can add a little punch.

 

Flying crossbowmen

Army Focus - Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures

OK firstly be warned this is a big post, with more pictures than I've ever put in a post before.  This is a return to my surprisingly popular series of posts where I put up a bunch of pics of one of my armies or collections of toys for everyone to have a look at, today featuring my collection of Dungeon and Dragons Miniatures from Wizards of the Coast.

This was a game very similar to the Star Wars miniatures game that dominated my gaming for a couple of years, and like SWM these come prepainted in randomised boxes, with vastly varying quality.  In a lot of ways this was the more serious and tactical game out of the two, but I never developed the same love of it as I did for the Star Wars variant, mostly due to my lack of knowledge of the background.  D&D minis contains figures from various different realms supported by the main D&D game split into factions based on temperment, which lead to most reasonable powered warbands looking very bitty, and almost all theme squads being very unviable.  Unlike SWM which I still come back to from time to time, this collection hasn't been used in six years and it's essentially dead.

Lawful Good

Lawful good contains amongst other things, dwarves, angels, human guards, celetstials and warrior monks.  Generally slow and well armoured, and for me a bit boring.

Chaotic Good

The home of the elves, forest spirits, halflings and air elementals.  Generally fast and hard hitting, but fragile.

Chaotic Evil

The most fun faction for me and the largest in my collection, includes orcs, drow, bugbears, gnolls, fire elementals and all sorts of crazy monsters.

 Balrog Balor, my favourite D&D mini

Lawful Evil

Home of goblins, hobgoblins, duergar, undead, beholders, devils, kobolds and water elementals.

Others

Some stuff can be used by multiple factions, which made a mess of both my miniatures and card filling systems I can tell you!

And finally a group shot of Drizzit and some of his allies and enemies, these are the few characters I have any knowledge of from the D&D background and that comes from a couple of average novels I read quite some time ago.

Army Focus - Star Wars Miniatures Starship Battles

This is absolutely my last post on my Star Wars miniatures collection (I promise), whilst I have already posted about all the figs used in the main game Wizards of the Coast also released a one off set of starship minis, which although part of their star wars minis line were clearly not compatible with the main range and in fact formed their own game; Starship Battles.

Of the 60 ships available in the range I actually have at least one of 59 of them (I'm only missing the droid control ship) SWM was my entire gaming life at this point and I was just buying stuff to try and complete collections, which has lead me to getting more than I could possibly need.  The game its self wasn't great and we only played it for a couple of months before mainly forgetting about it.  it wasn't a compete loss though, I do have a large collection of very cool star wars ships, and whilst X-wing is a great game for small scale dog-fighting, I always like battleship clashes, hopefully at some point I will get around to making a victory at sea mod which I can use these ships in.

The game only has two factions light side and dark side, which I've always found very odd.  The light side contains republic forces from the prequel trilogy and rebel/new republic forces from the original trilogy and just after.  The dark side forces feature the seperatists and the galactic empire.  We soon gave up this system and played either rebels/new republic vs empire or republic vs seperatists.

The ships are split into four classes, fighters, frigates/crusiers/transports etc, battleships and huges.  None of the ships are too scale and are essentially representations of a ship, or flight of ships (in the case of fighters).  Whilst it can be annoying it does allow you to field both X-wings and star destroyers on the same table.

The rebellion and a huge Mon Calamari ship that was built in the early years of the new republic.  I actually have a bunch of A-wings as well, but they seemed to have missed their photo-op!  The rebels were very much king of the middle ships with the Millennium Falcon, Tantive IV and the Nebulon-B frigates.

 

 The Imperial fleet has a lot less variety, but star destroyers are very good!

 

 

These few ships didn't quite fit into any of the categories 100%, but wild card and the two versions of slave 1 were useful ships nonetheless.

The republic fleet has quite a bit of variety and is a bit of a miss-mash of styles and abilities.  The Arc-fighter above highlights one problem with this range, occasionally the soft nature of the plastic produced figs  resulted in really bad warping and ruined minis.

 

And finally we have the mostly droid fleets of the seperatists.  the droid fighters were poor, but the big capital ships packed a real punch and were tough.