Vintage Wings 2012

 Hey guys, while I know this isn't 100% Flames of War related, its is WW2, and therefore awesome.   Phantom Matt, aka Vicious Ego, aka Juno76 and I went to the Vintage Wings airshow, and here is some pics and a vid at the end.   Above is the nose art of the B-25H

Spitfire MKVII and a F4U-D

The very last Hurricane MkIV in flying condition, in North Africa colors.  Pilot kept the flying pretty tame..

..unlike the P-40 Warhawk pilot, who was throwing it around the sky!

LW 6pdr with muzzle brake.

Market Garden style Jeep

German MG-42 HMG

German finely made ammo box.  Now I can color match my ammo crates on my 21 Panzer!

Bofors AA gun on flex trailer.

15cwt truck, note yellow tonnage marker and unit colors, I need to fix my 15cwts now!

Matt/ Juno76 touching the B25.. its his fave in Aces High

In Canada we called this the Canso, better known as the PBY-4 Catalina.  My dad got his start in aviation at the age of 4 riding in his fathers' company Canso, face against that observation blister behind the wing!

Finally a video of the assorted clips from the event.

Hobby Article part 2

Quick post, here is part 2 of the Hobby Series. I should come up with a clever name haha. First picture you see the difference between my old Italy scheme and my new desert-only, Iraqi Sand scheme. By leaving the original darker color between the panels, I almost don't need to go back over with a blacklining pen. Second pic is of Bill Wilcox' Early War A13. This is what I am talking about, the simple addition of guys on the tank goes MILES in terms of adding extra theme and 'oomph' to a model. His whole BAR looks like this, guys on almost every tank.

Bonus Pic: Aces High, a player run mission to flatten an enemy airfield leads to 45 B-17s, trying to stay under radar altitude. We got scouted anyways, but with this many MGs firing, any single planes that came our way (and there were some) got melted. I got 3 kills, 3 assists. However, because we got scouted, when we got close to the target, there was 20+ Bf-110s, P38s, etc waiting for us. Fun times.. note the lone Spitfire giving us escort! "Weather Report: Aluminum Overcast with a high chance of bombs over the Channel"

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Fall Fubar 2012

Dice Devil's are prepping to host the first ever Fall Fubar Mid-War FoW Tournament

Fall Fubar 2012
Saturday, October 27th @ 1:00 PM

Details:
1625pts
Mid-War
3 two hour games
Cost = 20$
First paid first (re)served
Early payment required to reserve spot as well as which faction you will be fighting for (once chosen you cannot change sides)
Payment options: Interac money transfer or cheque or cash in person
Please contact Brett at Pripyat at gmail.com for payment or questions
(previously referred to as Fall Flank 2012)

Format: 
Scenarios to be determined
100% Blue on Red
10 Axis Spots 10 Allied Spots
Standings to be submitted to RankingsHQ

Army Restrictions: 
Please bring 5 copies of your army list and a copy of the FoW rules and army list source
All armies' sources require approval by organizers prior to Oct 20th
All lists must be seen and approved prior to 1:30 PM Oct 27th
 Official Battlefront PDFs are subject to approval
Unofficial Battlefront PDFs are not accepted
Non-Battlefront PDFs are not accepted

Location: 
The Barrhaven Legion @ 3500 Fallowfield Rd., OTTAWA rcl641 dot ca

Schedule: 
Check in at 13:00 (1:00 PM)
First Game at 14:00 (2:00 PM)
Second Game at 16:30 (4:30 PM)
 Dinner at 18:30 (6:30-7:30 PM)
Third Game at 19:30 (7:30 PM)
Awards at 22:00 (10:00 PM)
Bar is open till you stop drinking!

Awards: 
Best Overall
Best Axis General
Best Allied General
Best Army
Best Sport
Darwin's Blade
Murphy's Luck

Miscellaneous: 
On site bar
On site ATM
The Works, Domino's Pizza (in the same mall)
MacDonald's, Quizno's, Tim Horton's (1km or so away)
Loads of parking
Near the Fallowfield Bus and Train Station

Game Summit Skirmish 2012

I started work on my new Tactical Armoured Patrol Vehicles (TAPV) project the day that Canada announced which company would supply the new vehicles. That date was June 8.  Knowing that Gamesummit Skirmish was taking place on September 9^th that gave me three months to have enough TAPVs built to field a new army for the tournament.  I already had a IG army based on the Canadian army in Afghanistan and I wanted to have a new army representing the Canadian army back home. That meant that I had to also assemble and paint troops in green Cadpat (Canadian Pattern digital camouflage) to complement the army in desert Cadpat.  I had this weird notion that I could show up at a tournament with two identical armies.  One painted for the desert and one painted for green or woodland terrain depending on the table I was playing on. When I saw that the tournament had a doubles component, I figured I’d be able to bring both armies to the tournament and play with them on the same table.  All I needed was a partner who didn’t mind not having to paint anything beforehand and just had to bring a measuring tape and dice. Matt Varnish volunteered and Task Force Courage and Honour was formed in honour of a former member of the Gamesummit forum. One half of the force would be Courage and the other Honour. We even had t-shirts made up.  The fact that between us we had only played three games using Version 6 rules didn’t bother us too much.  In fact, between us we only had one rulebook and the first time it was opened was at the start of the first game.

 

Our frst game was against Eric and Mario from Montreal.  They were a good team to play against and good thing that Dennis speaks French as much of the game was played in French. We killed lots of their stuff, but their reserves came in at the last minute and they beat us badly on objectives held.

 



The second game was against an eldar and dark angels team. We dropped way too many killpoints to have a chance. There were some cheesey rules with the distortion cannons and we just couldn’t do anything about them.  It ended up as a minor loss.

Our third game we won against two newcomers to 40K by destroying a good portion of their scoring units and they weren’t able to hold or contest any objectives. I think they both learned a few things and will be much tougher opponents in the future.  Major victory to us.

We won our fourth game against Dark Angels and Guard by a single point in a kill points game.  It ended up 16-15 for us and that was only because the depleted squads holding a couple of objectives made all of their leadership tests to hang on at the end of the game. We were able to knock out their Manticore missile launcher on the first turn and spent the rest of the game trying to knock out a whirlwind with no luck, though we disabled it and got it down to one hull point. Fortunately, when it did fire on the troops holding an objective at the end of the game it didn’t do much damage.  If we had known that we would have directed all of our fire at something else.

For some reason the opponents always seem to go for Matt Varnishes vehicles right away and he took a lot of casualties.  Good thing they left me alone and I was able to save the day most of the time.

Matt V was having some trouble with his dice rolling.  He brought his Flames of War Desert Rats dice and they were letting him down at times. I brought my Flames of War Canadian dice and they seemed to work a bit better.  Any time we needed a big roll, I’d take out the Canadian dice and we would shout “O Canada” as the maple leafs would show up, indicating that we had rolled a six.

Doubles was fun.  We got to meet more guys, play against more types of armies and the games could go relatively quick if guys were not shy about moving and fighting their partners troops when necessary to speed things up.

With two victories we somehow got tied for fourth for best general, won best painted, got second for best sportsmanship and ended up coming in second overall.  Not bad for a couple of guys who don’t play that often and didn’t know 6^th Edition very well at all.

 

COURAGE AND HONOUR

 



Aces High, plus Hobby Series Part 1 Video

Well, as much as I tried to edit Vicious Ego's post and add my Aces High screens, I'll have to put them here. However, The main point of the post is to link step 1 of how plan and build an interesting army for Flames of War (though the concepts work for anything really) Back in the day, I wasn;t a bad painter, but I wasn;t the best either. However for some reason I had this knack for coming up with cool army ideas, and putting it all together into a cool theme or something. Along the way I have won tonnes of "best Army" or "Presentation" awards, and a few folks have asked how I do it. I figure I'll show how, by videoing my revamp of my British army. Step one is below:

The Americans Are Coming

So the Chaffees I need are right around the corner, with a few events coming up in October needing list attention, I find myself running short on time to get my 14th Light Tank Coy assembled and obviously painted. I have my recce assets and TD platoons picked out. Without giving too much away, I should have a lot of tanks to paint.

I have the ambition to get US Rangers ready for one of the tournaments, but without time in September to paint.......there is no way I could pull this off. I'm looking forward to the doubles tournament the weekend before our event. Other than for fun, I have no doubles tournament experience and will stick with making sound decisions while supporting my teamate. I will get some pics of my armies in progress as soon as I get the time to do some hobbying!!

Go High or Go Home

So over the course of the past few weeks, MattVarnish and myself have been taking to the sky in the name of freedom. Aces High is an online only WW1/WW2 combat flight sim with all the bells and whistles of amazing gameplay and pretty good graphic representation of the aircraft you can take control of. It's funny that both Varnish and I have dads who were in the Air Force and we were in Germany near the same time and played a lot of the super old flight sims, games like ACE, Mig Alley, F19 Stealth Fighter and of course Ace of Aces, the WW2 Mosquito combat flight game.

This takes me back.......

F19 night mission! Great game!

Refuelling in ACE was never easy!!

Jumping into a wide array of WW2 aircraft in Aces High is an easy task and this game is not too hard on most computer systems. The fact that it is online and puts you against other people in combat situations is a lot of fun. As our adventures on bombing missions and driving around in a PT Boat continue, so will the updates and exploits of two Dice Devil members taking to the skies.