Newbie recieves starter set - first impressions
Completely new to the game and models.
Starter set arrived from ebay, well wrapped and complete. He'd washed the models black for the RN and brown for the dreadful French to easily differentiate between the models but otherwise stock pristine models.
Really like the clever game mechanics that reproduce sailing complexity without shackling you to charts and cardboard pinwheel computers.
When you choose to play a game with such beautiful objects the aesthetics have to play a part.
Realise it or not everyone has a point of diminishing returns, especially when there's likely to be dozens of models that all need to look good alongside each other. Another factor is likely to be several completely scratchbuilt efforts, there are well documented beauties pictured on the forums here so it has to be tried.
So what do the stock ships need, what else might bring them up a level and then what is going too far in terms of work or actually makes them look less appealing.
An ink wash would have been a no brainer anyway to enhance the hull detail and add some texture to the sails. I don't need help telling a french slacker from smartly crewed credit to the service and the brown seems to work best on the masts and sails. I'll likely go 2 parts yellow to 1 part brown, the old magimix for wood leather and anything else that gets in the way. The black has a tendency to appear more smeary when just daubed but it does work better on the hulls I think so all ships are likely to get pretty much the same treatment.
Now I'm looking at the sails and I hit my first big problem, huge problem, hateful problem.
Dear god there's a dreadfully ugly slug of plastic between each and every sail belly and it's mast, with textured stripes no less.
It's easily concealed by angling the ships for photographs but now I've laid eyes on it, it has to go. They have to go on every single ship, eight sails apiece.
So as a veteran of a thousand or more plastic figure conversions, and before I set to with a dremel with a carving burr and my trusty scalpel can I ask you guys how soft the plastic is?
The burr will quickly remove most of the material but the mast and sail belly will need to be finished with a scalpel.
I don't have any scrap sprue to practice on so can this plastic be scraped down with a scalpel or does it need to only be sliced away?
The more I have to slice the more chance of losing a sail or masthead, especially given I'm taking a good deal of stiffness out of the structure.
I'm pretty good at this sort of work but I'm wondering if rerigging with Langdon sets (from larger classes of vessel to get over the scale difference) would end up easier and prettier?
Rigging will likely just be ratlines, they definitely add to the prettiness, long ago I fully rigged my old (1980s) white metal ships with girlfriend hair in a similar method to the paintbrush based approach discussed here, but it collected dust and cunningly made them undustable at the same time. Thank goodness these days the airbrush compressor does such a good job of handsfree dusting.
No disrespect to the first rate (no pun) rigging ideas here but to my eye the cordage always wind up way thicker looking than instinctively seems right.
The french will fly pretty pale blue pennants to show that they stress laundry skills over seamanship, The odd brit will fly a single pristine white pennant to show we have superior laundry skills even when we're not even trying.
Love the game mechanics but am already struggling with the stock models, I'm wondering about keeping the bases and just replacing with Langdon 1/1200 ships?
I've got more chance of getting struck by lightning than finding an opponent with his own fleet around here so ship scale just needs to be internally consistent.
Lastly the terrain rules and shore battery involvement really lends itself to scenario play, endless point balanced encounter battles with a neutral wind direction and out of sight of land make Jack a dull gamer.
Making tiny forts and harbours, hours of endless glee.
Will make anything interesting lift out of the landscape with tiny cheap rare earth magnets, then either have a flat diagram of the firing arcs revealed underneath or else plain vinyl and draw them in as needed with dry wipe pens.
If I make the liftouts a regular shape (50mm hexagon? more likely a standard round base size from something easily available) the coastline becomes modular. Swap a hillock for a small fort, swap a lighthouse for a coastal semaphore station with those wacky mechanical flags...
The coastline will be carved/sanded from dense foam with a paint and flocking treatment and bark for the cliffs. Buildings blocked from hardwood offcuts, detail added with putties and stick on bits. At this scale you just need suggestions of detail, the paintbrush alone will add more than half of it. Sheep on the hillside are easy, but cows never look right at this sort of scale.
It's like my passion for 6mm ancients all over again, paint the army, make the terrain, build three farms a village and a roman marching fort. Still noone else has painted their army yet...
Drou
