Snap Out of It

Time to set some goals here, people.

Time to put a stop to the drift.

Goals, then. Right.

By the end of 2012, I want to have done the following:

*Made real progress in the "1565" project.
*Re-started the "Old School ACW" project.
*Finished all of my outstanding French Cavalry regiments
*Built at least three British, Prussian or Bavarian Infantry regiments and a pair of Cavalry regiments to go with them.

Rough outline of the above as follows:

"1565" - to start with a skirmish-sized force to see how I go painting my assorted Knights of St John/Spanish and some Turks. Working out some appropriate army structures for them. Pausing and seeing if I am really interested in starting to build them. Building some anciliary bits to go with them. I would like to build some Renaissance artillery fortifications just for the fun of it. I am looking for an excuse to construct an earthern "star fort" from polystyrene. I am also itching to build some of the Langdon 1:1200 Renaissance warships. They look terrific. I have some experience building his Napoleonic ships, so I know what I'm in for. Where might this take me? I am pondering a loosely-based-on-reality solo campaign set in the eastern Med in that era. Might it culminate with a "Great Siege"? Who can tell. Certainly not me, but I have greatly enjoyed reading about it. I've also been daydreaming about Landsknechts, perhaps just as a painting/collecting thing, but again, who knows where the renaissance may take me. Maybe I also want some of the old Hinchcliffe Winged Lancers, too.

"Old School ACW" - I feel like a bad parent. So much effort went into the project, and I felt so bad when I ran out of time with only one undocumented game played. At the very least, I need to get a few games in, and at best, I need to follow the project plan I laid out in the blog to it's conclusion. I have at least enough miniatures in stock here to build the project up to it's divisional-sized milestone. Let's do it, eh?

"The Eighteenth Century" - This has been on a care and maintenence basis for longer than I care to think. Not good. I have one complete and six part-completed French Cavalry regiments. Surely I can finish off another three from my existing lead pile alone? Likewise a recent audit has revealed many many infantry who could fight my French Infantry - if only they were painted... My ambition is to get playable forces together to play some of the smaller scenarios from "The Annexation of Chiraz" and "The Raid on St Michiel".

At a rough guess, that's about 340-400 Olley-points over about 20 months. That's less than one toy soldier or horse a day; at my painting speed (900-milliolleys to one Olley per day), that's a pretty acheivable amount.

Part two of this post is titled "The Lonely War Gamer". I'll keep it brief as it is largely born out of a fairly large disappontment.

In recent months I had decided it was all very well to build these damn' huge armies but really, what was the point of it all if they just sat around in their plastic boxes in the car-port. So, I decided to get out there and join a war gaming club. Your actual, honest to god wargaming club. None of my friends here in Melbourne are war gamers, indeed, my nearest and dearest friend I am sure regards it as only a step above dressing up as a lady, although what's wrong with that I'll never know.

My nearest club dabbles in almost anything other than straight historical games, so I thought, OK, go with it and finally got around to painting/touching up the Riders of Rohan army I'd been slowly putting together after reading Mike Siggins review of GW's "War of the Ring". I read the rules, tried to become familiar with them and finally went along.

Well imagine that of all the people there playing the various flavours of Warhammer, only two were doing the Ring thing and they were about 14 or so. Nice kids, but, really, do I really want to be spending my precious spare time doing this? One of the other guys there told me that this was a dead gaming genre pretty much and that GW was only promoting it as much as it was to recoup the massive license fee they'd paid.

I was generally ignored as I wandered about the room, hopefully trying to insert myself into a conversation here and there... Fair enough, they all knew each other and were mates and I was just some guy, but I'm not sure it's how I'd have treated a noob.

So I'm thinking fuck it, I'll be a soloist from now on.

Might be selling some Riders of Rohan before long. Painted to a basic wargames standard. 48 infantry and 34 cavalry. Another 20 infantry and 30 or so cavalry unpainted.