I am a success at life

Back on November 7th, I put forth my plan concerning the Crusades "Battle of Dorylaeum" project:


"My plan is to start working up the rules now, while the figures slowly start to trickle in.  And then start painting and basing figures from now through New Years.   Hopefully, I can get the project more or less finished by January sometime.   I'd like to run the battle a few times at home for play test purposes, and then finally haul it into school and run it as an afterschool event after mid-term exams are done.   If it goes well, I might even do it twice."


As of last night, I have accomplished all my goals.   I finished the armies by about New Year's.  I ran a game at home to test the rules.   And last night I played it at school with some school kids.   And I had one more unexpected victory, the whole thing fits into the box I bought for it.   I made up a fast-play version of the rules for school, and it did speed things up a bit, we got 4 whole turns in in 2 hours, instead of 2, and we got a pretty good game out of it.   It did turn out to be a tie, with each team scoring 5 points (2 for each kill, 1 for each stand fleeing off the board).  A good time was had by all.


It's nice to plan something and completely execute it, on time and to a satisfactory conclusion.   I may run the game again at home sometime, and maybe again at school, but that is all just gravy at this point.


Winning.

No Work, XCOM

Since I finished my Crusaders project, I haven't post much on Doctor Skull's Workshop, since I haven't been doing much "work."   I haven't done any painting since then or building.   I do have some things on the horizon.   I still haven't played the Crusades game with the school kids, but I'm thinking of giving it a go next week.  


I have a lot of models to build.   There's a medieval fortress, a frontier church, and a barn all of which might go well with fantasy campaigns or with some sort of modernish game.


I also have an assortment of WW2 light vehicles.   I'm thinking of doing some sort of modern or sci-fi or pulp-type project and have a bunch of modern plastics that would go with those vehicles.


Most of my time lately, however is back to playing XCOM.  Two winters ago I played a lot of XCOM Enemy Unknown.  Last winter it was the expansion XCOM Enemy Within.  But, then my X-box broke.   After failing to fix it, Katie and I went 50/50 on an X-box One, but then found out it doesn't play X-box 360 games, and XCOM isn't available for X-box One (I know too many Xes).


Then I remembered that our family laptop is pretty new and thought it could handle the PC version of XCOM, and sure enough it did.   I played a campaign of Enemy Unknown, and found out that there was a super-awesome Mod for Enemy Within called "Long War."   So I got that all downloaded and fired-up.   I must say that Long War is really fantastic.   It fixes many of the limitations of Enemy Within, more classes, better choices of equipment, more soldiers on the field at a time, more interesting interceptor combat.  It also makes the campaign less predictable and linear, and more sand-boxy, much like the original X-COM UFO Defense from the 90's.   Good stuff.

The Prophet is Outraged (Dorylaum Battle Report)

On Thursday night,  my brother Alan, as the Turks, and Charles "Brother Punchy" Fleurie squared off in my miniatures battle test of the Battle of Dorylaeum (First Crusades 1096 AD).   As my super-awesome cartoon illustrates, the Turks were soundly beaten in the turns we managed to get finished.

Here's a picture of the set-up:

The crusaders are in the center and the Turks to top, and the small group to the lower left.   The retinues of Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders surged forward and wiped out Ghazi ibn Dansihmend's shadowing force on the bottle left.   Tancred's cavalry surged forward and engaged Sultan Arslan's guards on the left-top.   Tancred was almost eliminated but managed to hang on by a thread.   On the top right, an archery duel broke out that saw some of the turks flee, and one unit of Peter the Hermit's pilgrims eliminated.  Duke Godfrey's reinforcements appeared on the right, and the Turkish infantry was sent marching off to meet them.

     The count was 2 Turkish stands fled off the board, and 4 Turkish stands destroyed (10 points), vs. 1 Crusader stand eliminated (2 points).   Things would probably evened up a bit if we had had more time to play.   My camera failed after the above shot, and Chuck didn't send me the pictures he tried to take.




Lessons Learned:  I needed some clearer rules about how much space was required for troop stands to move through, and how to handle an ongoing melee involving a large number of stands from different retinues.   Other than that, I really liked how the combat unfolded.  Alan said that he'd prefer a hex grid to measuring tape, but non disputandum de gustibus.  However, it seems like to do the battle properly, it would require something more like our usual 4-6 hour session rather than the 2 hours we had.   This also leads me to think that I'll probably have to come up with some simplified quick-play rules for when I take it to school.  I think I'll try to have a full version of the battle at home in February sometime too.

Crusades Project Complete

It's all done.   First I painted the tents.

After that I decided to make the canvas battle mat in more of a map-style, rather that a scenery style:

It all fits in the box and everything.