With kids, now I fit my painting to the time I have spare. So with an hour or two before a family visit, I decided to dig out all my unpainted 15mm, 6mm or clix mechs and see what I could get ready for the tabletop.
My son wanted to help but I easily decoyed him with some OOP DUST/AT43 mechs (which are skyscraper size compared to our ~15mm tall mechs we painted last week; so he was super impressed). Leaving him happily pew-pewing on "his" man-cave table (he uses it for LEGO plus any minis he politely borrows off my table) I was free to dig through my mini boxes in search of all things mech-y.
I'm going to paint a series of mech "units" in generic military colours (grey, olive, khaki, silver) to allow them to be swapped back and forth between random armies - no "Space Marine" all-red, all-blue, all-yellow paint schemes. I'll use easily-overpainted shoulder tags to delineate forces - which means if I change my mind I can easily swap mechs between armies, changing their allegiance with a dab of paint.
The copper GZG not-VOTOM my daughter painted is a "battlesuit" in our game; so it gives you a sense of scale. An AT-43 28mm is more of a regular mech, and the Battletech clix with claws is a heavy unit.
The strider is from a small 15m manufacturer which I cannot recall (I think it was one of those "guy-selling-from-his-blog" stores limited range of minis - from 10 years ago.)
The Battletech mini is a rebased clix. I have quite a few unique random clix, who are going to serve as the "centrepiece" model of a range of small mech forces.
My aim is to make a similar size unit of 5-10 mechs next weekend. I'm using clix, 6mm, 10mm, and 15mm mechs - as well as some 28mm mechs to be "titan class." Inspired by Gamma Wolves, I've decided to get as many of my random mechs table ready as I can.
These are excellent. Look forward to seeing Gamma Wolves in action. Very much enjoying your recent reviews.
ReplyDeleteI'm also of a mind to try FFT3 - and your review (ages ago) has tipped the balance for me - and made me want to get it.
I feel it's worth the price. I've used FFT3 as a "base" for many mech and tank houserules of my own. I'd put it in the "improved 40K" category - it uses familiar d6 mechanisms.
DeleteIts one of my most used/read "reference" rulebooks, and useful stats and army lists from WW1-modern make it useful even if you don't play it much.
That would be Fist Full of Tows 3 for anyone else reading. I had to look it up. :-) It was going to be an impulse buy based on these comments but the price (even for the pdf) stopped me. So it goes at the top of the "research further" list.
DeleteFFTW3 is a distant, more elegant cousin of Flames of War; it has many recognisable 40kisms; but it has a clear design goal (fast play, realistic WW2-modern on battalion scale+), build-your-own-units rules and is a hefty reference tome (vehicle stats and ToEs for pretty much every nation from preWW2-present day)
DeleteI suspect I've reviewed it previously from the comments above...
It's interesting to see what you're doing with mechs, which are one of my obsessions. I've also been going back through all your articles of rules and game mechanics, which are a great resource.
ReplyDeleteYou could probably compile them all into a book and put it up on Amazon, just saying.
Anyway, great work. Stay safe and keep well.
Well, I have a LOT of mechs, due to overenthusiastic purchasing in 15mm just before the birth of my child, then kinda getting sick of the samey Vietnam-in-Space rules a la Tomorrow's War etc.
DeleteI'd actually like to see a more hacking/e-war (i.e. tech as magic) a la Infinity, set of rules in a platoon scale.
The strider is from Micropanzer. Great job on all of them!
ReplyDelete