As stated earlier, one of my wargaming goals in 2017 is to "make my games look better". Not only does this entail painting more of my models, but it also means collecting and painting more terrain.
To that end, I recently acquired the Harbor Set, four of the merchant ships, and three of the oil rigs from Spartan Games. I also picked up the Airfix 1:76 scale pontoon bridge set, because the pontoons are the right shape for large ship hulls (very large--like, dreadnought-sized). I've seen people on the Spartan forums do some amazing work with that model set, so I figured I'd give it a try.
Combining the Harbor Set with the ships and a few models from the Industrial and Military sets, plus an island I picked up at Adepticon last year, I came up with this:
Captain Rockman and I played a 1600-point game this evening with his Chinese Federation against my Federated States of America. We put the island in the center as a "commercial way station"--basically an interesting-looking line-of-sight blocker. We also added the four merchant ships on one side, one of the pontoon ships (we'll just call them supertankers for now) on the other side, and two supertankers riding at anchor off the coast of the island. Combined with some of the smaller DW island terrain and one of the oil rigs, the table looked like this:
The idea for this set up was that the civilian ships would scramble as soon as the shooting started. The smaller merchant ships we designated as mediums, and the supertankers were massives. They basically became moving line-of-sight blockers; the smaller merchant ships and one of the tankers were trying to exit the board on one short side, while the other two supertankers (one at the dock and one off the coast) were trying to exit on the other short side. We assumed that the captains would do whatever they could to stay out of harm's way, so we had them do some maneuvering to stay away from the belligerents, but in some cases they sailed right through the engagement zones. We couldn't shoot at them; we just had to deal with them being in the way.
Since they were all starting at a dead stop, we figured they would move only half their allocated movement in the first turn, then full movement afterwards (8" for the mediums and 6" for the massives). We moved them at the end of each turn.
This turned out to be a pretty fun set up! We were both able to take advantage of hiding behind the civilian ships to protect our own ships; we only played three turns (it was a pretty big game, after all), so the ships didn't move too far, but it was still easy to see how they were affecting the game. Plus, they were interesting to look at--not just rocks or small islands.
We did some brainstorming about how to use them in the future--possible targets of boarding actions, etc. Got some ideas brewing.
Once Captain Rockman's reserve forces showed up, I really started to take a beating:
Here's how the board looked near the end of the game. I had lost most of my medium-class ships by this point (that was Captain Rockman's field order--and mine as well, although he got much closer than I did), but as you can see it was a fairly busy board with the island, the civilian ships, the small island groups, and all of the remaining combat ships:
The Chinese carried the day by a few hundred points. There were all the requisite fires and corrosive markers--it was not pretty. Rockman *almost* achieved his field orders, but actually part of what helped me was that my last remaining cruiser was partially blocked from his battleship by one of the supertankers during the last turn, so he couldn't get a full attack dice roll for his shots.
Got some ideas on how to paint these ships and harbor facilities; toying with some ideas on how to build out the supertankers (not all of them will be supertankers--I have ideas for other ship types as well).
Thanks for looking!
