Free Fire; there's a game in this

Free Fire isn’t fun exactly, though it played out with a continuous laugh track from the people in the row behind me, all of whom should probably be on some kind of watch list. There’s something uncomfortably ridiculous about someone struggling to avoid being run over by a guy he just tried to shoot, but it’s not laugh-out loud funny to watch - and hear - someone’s head being squashed flat under a tire.

Like a lot of weirdly good movies I’ve seen lately, Free Fire is something I could respect without wanting to watch again. It’s completely faithful to its own goofy idea, and even if we don’t really get to know the characters, they’re all recognisably individual people. Well, mostly recognisable. There are moments when the staging, the scenery and the dust get in the way of figuring out just who’s taken another flesh wound.

Flesh wounds are everywhere, mostly for plot reasons. If the cast could run, they’d run out of the warehouse, so it’s important to the plot that everyone get some kind of wallop to slow them down a bit. From about half way in, pretty much everyone still left alive is squirming and crawling through the rubble. But still game, and still magically finding enough bullets to go on potting each other. Hollywood runs on a two-tier model for gunshots usually; mooks fly through the air instantly dead if a gun goes off anywhere near them, and anyone on the poster just shrugs off direct hits from bazookas. Meanwhile, in the real world, the infamous North Hollywood shootout demonstrated that you can get shot again and again and keep getting on with business until you finally bleed out. Free Fire goes that way.

And it gets weirdly samey after a bit. It’s not quite boring, but it’s relentlessly one-note. So, although I’m glad I saw it, it’s not something I need to see again. It’s not quite successful as a movie because it doesn’t quite have a story, just an inciting incident after which two gangs slowly shoot each other to bits til the cops finally show up.

On the other hand, it did feel just like a game. If we had a bag of 1970s looking figures in dodgy beige (and one blue suit!), we could put on a game just like it, since so many of our skirmish games seem to turn into pointless bloodbaths where both sides keep shooting until there’s no-one left standing. Of all the movies I’ve seen lately, Free Fire is the one you could most easily turn into a small war-game.

Other stray thoughts; this is the second thing I’ve seen Brie Larson in within the space of a week, and I don’t know what to make of her career plans. She may be trying to carve out a niche as “smart woman who hangs out with nitwits in gun battles” or she may just be taking every job that comes her way. Armie Hammer has always annoyed me a bit, but it turns out that if you give him a beard and make his character actually annoying, he turns into Canadian Jon Hamm and becomes both fun and charismatic. Sharlto Copley, on the other hand, is beginning to make me think that he’s only acting when he tries to play sane people, which now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do. He’s the target of one of Brie Larson’s best lines, when she introduces him sotto voce to Cillian Farrell “Vernon was mistakenly diagnosed as a child prodigy, and he’s never recovered.” We’ve all known someone like that, though most of them don’t show up in electric blue suits with a truck load of assault rifles to sell to the IRA.

Flexible Roads

Every terrain layout in wargaming has to have roads, and they're always a bit of an annoying compromise. The most annoying bit is that they stand proud of the ground, when they should really be blended into it. Roads are usually a little bit higher than the surrounding ground so that they'll drain properly, but most resin road pieces are much too high. And of course resin is rigid, so the roads always have to lie flat. A few years ago, we started to see latex roads which could be laid over rolling terrain. They're hard to paint; it's all horrible compromises, really. And even though they're usually quite a bit thinner than resin, they still sit on the table rather than blending into it. I got so fed up of looking at the effect that when I bought up all my Hexon, I decided to build the roads directly into the tiles. It's making the tiles more work than I'd hoped, but it is a nicer effect.

Which is all by the by, because today I tripped over a way of making nice, thin flexible roads. I'd made the roads on the tiles by painting PVA glue onto the tile and then sprinkling sawdust over the glue. When the glue set, I worked thinned PVA into the sawdust to seal the top. This darkens the sawdust quite noticeably and then a dry brush of light grey gives a passable simulation of a dusty gravel road. I was in such a hurry to get at least some of the tiles looking right that I didn't prime them properly, or even wash them, so when I chipped at one end of the road to get some gunk off the edge of the tile, the whole mess of glue and sawdust lifted off the tile.

And it hit me; you could make a perfectly good flexible road this way. Paint the glue onto smooth plastic, sprinkle on the sawdust (or sand, sand would work well), seal it, dry brush it, seal it again, and then just peel it off. Hey presto, completely flexible low profile road for essentially nothing but your time. Being so thin and light, it would tend to shift on the table, but heavy resin roads tend to shift as well, and you can't store twenty feet of resin road in an envelope.

Tree bases

One of the horrible expenses of wargaming, both in time and money, is decent looking terrain. Today, I'm going to talk about a fix for trees.

Trees are always a pest. Unlike hills and rivers, they don't scale satisfactorily; you have to have groups for all the figure sizes you're likely to use, just as you do with buildings. And unlike buildings, you tend to need a lot of trees. Small numbers of them just look wrong.

You can make trees, but it's a lot of work and you need to be good with your hands. You can buy them, but robust ones tend to be pricey and the strongest ones you can get don't really look very much like trees, being far too round and regular. The other annoying thing about trees is that you need to find a way to get them to stand up. Tree models are top heavy, and they usually just come as little wire stems in the expectation that they're going to be speared into a permanent layout. Wargamers don't do that - they need trees in little clumps which can be dotted round the table or tightly clumped to make forests. I've never been able to come up with a way to spike small scale trees into a base which stood up over time.

Last week, I took delivery of about a hundred nice trees which were made out of wire cable, and had to do something with them. And I think I may have cracked it. The problem is to get a base which is thick and rigid enough to hold the wire stem firmly without being too thick or heavy. And it needs to be something which is soft enough to drill holes in, without being so soft that the tree will wobble out.

The answer - provisionally - is a specialist woodworking component called a biscuit. It's a compressed lozenge of birch fibre 4mm thick and about one inch by two. They're made for a joinery technique called biscuit jointing, and you buy them in bags of a hundred. Chamfer the edges so that they'll blend somewhat smoothly into the table surface, drill holes in them, and then poke the wire stems into the holes with a dab of wood glue. Paint and flock the bases to fit your terrain scheme, and there you go. It seems to work for trees scaled for 10mm and 6mm, where you're going to get about four trees on a biscuit without crowding. Once you go up to 15mm scaled or 25mm scaled trees, you're probably going to be better off buying proper plastic tree bases and gluing them to scrap card bases in the normal way.

I think I did the first batch the wrong way, throwing them together and then painting and flocking the bases; I'm doing a second batch now by painting and flocking the bases before I drill them and glue in the trees. The quickest and safest way to chamfer the bases is with a sanding wheel on a dremel; the texture of the biscuits doesn't lend itself to shaving them with a knife. The other thing to keep in mind is that the biscuits are designed to swell up when they're coated with PVA glue, so it's a good idea to seal them with paint before you do any flocking.

GZG walkers; painted

Two representative samples as completed. I decided that they had to be based on rigid bases because even after the limited handling involved in painting them, I could feel the legs working their way loose.

The camo pattern is loosely based on the 1980s MERDC patterns used by the US and still widely used in countries which were getting US military aid around that time; you can still see it on Korean and Greek and Turkish vehicles among others. The eight MERDC patterns were based on greens and browns. The prettiest of them was the almost never used woodland summer scheme which used dark green, light green and small highlights in black and sand. However, the only one which you ever really saw was the woodland temperate, which was half brown, half dark green with highlights in black and sand. In Greece, the sand was often replaced by light grey. I used the rough template, but replaced green with light grey, highlights being grey green and mid brown.

I did not repeat the mistake of blackwashing the entire vehicle, instead opting for the fiddly, annoying and never particularly satisfactory technique of blacklining the panels. This looks quite garish in the photos above, but at arms length on a table it will be fine, particularly in the rather feeble lighting conditions prevailing on wargames tables. All successful figure painters wind up going one of two ways. Either their technique improves to the point where their figures look wonderfully lifelike and win prizes, or they realise that the figure only has to look convincing at three feet under a sixty watt bulb and their technique becomes all about getting roughly useful effects in the shortest possible time. I went down the second path years ago, and with every year that passes, I find new ways to avoid putting any more work into painting than is absolutely necessary for the objective in hand - which is generally to put a lot of figures on a table to a deadline.

Photos were taken in natural light around the middle of a very rainy day. On a bright day they could probably have been done hand held, but with the overcast conditions the meter was showing 1/15 of a second at f2.2, and it seemed safest to use the tripod and the remote release. Interestingly, the White Balance setting on the Sony for cloud gave the wrong colour balance; I got the most faithful results with the sunlight setting.

GZG walkers; preparation

The plan here is to paint a four colour arid landscape camouflage in light grey, light brown and small hints of mid brown and mid green. It remains to be seen whether I will be any more successful with that than with the gravs.

GZG make two different lines of walkers, eight legged and four legged. The four legged exists at the moment only as an armed scout type vehicle



This is the gun armed variant. There are two gun turrets available, one of which has a light cannon, and the other of which allows you to plug slightly bigger gun barrels into a roughly similar sized turret with a socket for rather science fictiony looking guns.



This is a missile armed variant, actually assembled from some of the spares provided when you order a platoon pack of anything.

Eight legged walkers can now be had either as tanks or APCs, though the APC seems strangely unconvincing to me - hard to get into, hard to get out of, not really high enough for troops to sit inside. I bought the tanks, which can have any of three guns plugged into the turret mantlet and a sensor mast stuck in a socket in the roof. As with the grav vehicles, I made up four, with three main gun turrets and one support turret which has a short gun and a missile pack. The main gun in the picture below doesn't show well; it actually consists of three parallel barrels held together at the muzzle end with a big clamp. I have no idea how I'm going to make that look reasonable. The sensor masts in these cases are the alternative spherical ones provided. One thing I'm really conscious of as the vehicles go together is that GZG have provided a lot of sockets in the turret roofs of their vehicles, and that there aren't really enough things to fill them plausibly. I may have to copy what they do with their own samples on their site and stick antennae into the remaining open holes, because they show up even after you've finished painting.

GZG grav armour; painted

These did not come out as I had hoped. The basic idea was to paint them in the current Swedish armour scheme, which is a splinter pattern in two shades of green and black. The first hiccup was when my preferred lighter green didn't have what it took to cover my mid green. So I wound up using a greyish green which gave the right amount of contrast but not quite the look I'd wanted. Then it turned out that it's actually quite hard to lay down a splinter pattern on such a busy and cluttered hull, so the patterns weren't quite as neat as I had hoped. However, the thing which just ruined it was the decision that I needed to emphasise the hull detailing by giving the vehicles an ink wash. This went on far too black and blotted out all the colours without really emphasising the detailing at all. And it couldn't readily be undone without starting the painting from scratch, which I wasn't in the mood for. So I retouched the lighter green and then dry brushed the vehicles heavily to reduce the excessive darkening caused by the ink wash.

That just left me wondering about the grav plates; after a lot of dithering I abandoned my initial idea of painting them blue with metallic blue highlights and settled for painting them silver with a green ink wash and dark bronze edging. The ink wash here worked out fine, settling well into the grooves and providing a useful streakiness on the raised areas.

Basing was done very simply; PVA glue brushed onto the base, then shake the base in beach sand. Let the glue dry and then recoat it with more glue to bind the sand and stop it shedding. A useful side effect of the second coat is that it darkens the sand and punches up the contrast between different grains. Dry brush with buff paint. Dab on yet more glue and then shake the base in micro foam flock.

I'm abashed about the ink wash outcome. I'd never had much luck with ink washes in the past, but then tried diluting the ink with Johnson's Kleer floor polish, which breaks up the surface tension and stops it from beading on the flat areas. It worked like a dream with 15mm infantry figures - the scale reference figures in the earlier shots were painted simply by washing them in one solid colour, inkwashing them heavily and then dry brushing them with the base colour again, giving an effecitve enough shaded effect for very little effort. The results are less inspiring when applied to big areas.

Photographing miniatures

Putting pictures on Blogger is annoyingly counter intuitive. Hats off to Google for coming up with something which is actually more frustrating to use than the picture layout tool in Word. So apologies for the messy layout in the last post, but it's not my fault. I need to think more about this. The next picture post will probably have less pictures.

There are whole web sites devoted to taking pictures of miniatures and I've got no intention of reinventing the wheel. I'm just going to note for the record how those shots were taken.

Sony DSC F828 on a tripod shooting into a cheap light box I bought on impulse a while ago. The box was lit from outside with two anglepoise lamps fitted with 75 W daylight bulbs; these are also the lights I use to paint under - in fact the set up was done on my painting table. The painting lights were Robert's idea, and a huge improvement on my efforts to get the light right using a single flash either on or off the camera. With the lights, I used manual exposure with the aperture set at 4.5 and a shutter speed of about three seconds; the times varied slightly depending on the shot, with most of the shots underexposed by about .7 of a stop to allow for the fact that I was shooting a fairly dark green and I didn't it to wash out.

I have complained in an earlier post about the limitations of the 828's viewfinder - it turns out that if you set the camera to manual and then work towards the correct exposure, the viewfinder will give a reasonably faithful approximation of the final shot based on the values that you dial in. Very useful because I was shooting a dark object against a light background and even with spot metering the camera's "correct" exposure was bringing the shot in too bright. I only wish it would do this when you're working on programme with a flash, but it's impressive to see, and it's a trick which SLRs can't do. The LCD preview has the other advantage that when you're working with this kind of job off a tripod, you can set up the shot without stooping awkwardly to see through the viewfinder. Overall, I may keep on using the Sony for this work even if I do buy a better camera.

Post processing was very limited; load the pictures into iPhoto, discard the useless shots (three-fifths of the shots on the card were useless shots from the early efforts to get the flash to do the work) and then crop the shots down. Once I had the crops done, I needed to correct a slight pink cast which I've noticed in most of my shots of figures. I can't decide whether it was because I got the white balance setting wrong or whether there's some quirk in the camera - I'm undecided because I've seen the pink cast in earlier shots which were done with dedicated flash where the white balance should have been perfect out of the box.

GZG SF armour; the grav vehicles

This is the GZG approach to a grav tank, at the early stage of painting. I've undercoated it black and primed it mid green - really cheap mid green, but the shade was the one that I wanted. I'm putting it up partly to show what the vehicle looks like and partly because I'm planning to show the process of painting the vehicle up.

The gun is one of three choices. The saucer shaped thing to the left of the vehicle commander is one of two choices for a sensor housing - the other one is a globe, which i used on the walker tanks.






This shows one of the alternative gun choices. In this case I also stuck a missile box on the mount for the sensor arm in the first example. I made one up in this mode and three with the big gun and the sensor disc. Stargrunt envisages no more than a pltoon of tanks a side so I was thinking in terms of a platoon of two to three gun tanks and one support tank with a short range heavy weapon and missiles for longer range interdiction. Or, being completely truthful, I was just making the most of the variations provided







This is the lighter grav vehicle with a turret mounted long gun. GGZ also make this with an unmanned turret which doesn't look as good. I wound up discarding a number of those turrets to the spares box.








The same light grav vehicle, this time with a support turret. The missile box in this case is cast into the turret. You get to decide which of two different gun barrel types to use; this picture shows the shorter one, and the one above shows the longer.













This shows the heavy with a couple of figures for scale purposes. The figures are old Traveller figures made in the 1980s which I only got round to undercoating and painting once I started buying these vehicles. Below, again for scale, is one of the light tanks with the same figures

GZG SF tanks

Assembling and painting GZG stuff has eaten an unholy amount of my time this last year. John and I messed about with Wessex Games' Aeronef rules and didn't think there was quite enough in them to give a satisfying game, but it got me to thinking and in one of my forays around the web looking for rules, I found that GZG had put Full Thrust up on the web for download. And it DID look interesting.

So a lot of starships got bought. Good simple rules and a reasonably fun game.

However I DID have some issues with the ships I bought from GZG. Easy to paint, not so easy to stick together. Generally, the newer the design the easier it was - I think the designs got more user friendly and of course the moulds were still crisp and new, so sockets and plugs were still the right sizes and hadn't got clogged and filled with flash. With the older ones - well, sticking together the Kra'vak ships tested my patience to the breaking point. And the UN ships, which were among the newest moulds - well, the designs looked great and the modular system should have worked, but the bigger the ship, the harder it was to get the modules lined up straight and true.

GZG's 15mm tanks don't have those issues. They're neat, simple, and well thought out. I bought 16 altogether; four each of the light and heavy grav tanks and four each of the light and heavy walkers. I wasn't really interested in anything with tracks - partly I don't really like the look they've gone for, but mostly I already have plenty of tracked stuff which could be pressed into service for a game.

You wind up with lots of leftovers. Everything comes with a choice of gun barrel, and if you buy platoon packs as I did, you also get other random bits and pieces of extra kit. So I have six spare light turrets which I don't know what to do with, and all kinds of sensor modules and left over gunbarrels. I'm figuring either to build them into the APCs which I know I'll be buying in the new year, or glueing all the leftovers together into spaceships. I already have more spaceships than I really have storage space for, but something tells me that the new year APC buy will see me with even more spare parts than I already have, not less.

The choice of gun barrel thing is a good idea. Kind of. I think it might make more sense to let the customers pick a gun type than to put a sprue of three in with every vehicle. These are not small castings - there's more lead in any of the barrels than in a 15mm cavalry figure. So GZG is using up a lot of lead and casting time - and postage costs - that they could be making savings on. But having a choice of barrels is useful for a gamer - I was able to set my platoons up as three gun tanks and one support tank with a much shorter gun and a box of missiles. It's very beginning of WWII and I wouldn't dream of a mixed platoon organisation in another context. But Stargrunt, which is what I will use at first for these figures, is mostly an infantry game and doesn't envisage more than a couple of platoons of tanks on the table at any one time, with each of the constituent tanks fighting essentially independently. So it makes some sense to use a mixture of types.

The models go together pretty well. The heavy walkers have eight legs and it's easiest to accept that all eight of them will not sit flat. The alternative is to make an already fiddly job even more fiddly by sticking them on one at a time and striving to make sure each one sits dead level. Wargamer's instinct tells that it will be best to put them on bases anyway - in the normal run of things legs will get knocked off in handling unless they're anchored at both ends. And once they're down on a textured base, the natural unevenness of the base will cover up any slight differences in where the feet rest. The same kind of arguments apply to the light walkers, which only have four legs. The grav tanks are easier - mine came with stands, which might have been a freebie of the platoon pack. They're good stands made of solid metal - big enough and heavy enough that the tanks aren't easily knocked over. (In contrast, the standard GZD stand for spaceships is made of plastic and is just too light to hold steady anything bigger than the smallest ships in their range. Weirdly, for their medium ships they seem to think that the plastic post of the stand isn't quite strong enough and they supply a lead post, but it still goes into the same lightweight hollow plastic base. I filled all of my plastic bases with plaster this summer which has helped a little, but I'd still be happier if that bases were cast in lead.)

There are open command hatches in most of the turrets, so you can have a figure in it or just glue the hatch shut. What I thought at first was a moulding flaw in the hatch coaming is actually a notch to take the hinge part of the hatch. On the heavies, the turret rooves have three holes cast in for adding bits of clutter, one big which will take a sensor dome or ball (supplied with every heavy tank) and two small which would take an MG or something similar. The bigger hole will also take another weapon mounting and I got small external mounts which would hold missile boxes or heavy MGs. I used them to add missile boxes to the support tanks. You also get a lot of sprues of ammo boxes and jerricans and mysterious boxes which could be stuck to the tank to make them more individual and lived in looking, but there's no obvious place on the tank turret or bodywork to which they could plausibly adhere. In real life, that kind of thing is either stowed in baskets or lashed down with rope or custom metal brackets. The boxes are not cast with tie downs on them and I'm not a good enough modeller to fake them into life. Anyway, the bodywork is plenty busy enough as it is - lots of raised panel detail on all the vehicles. I don't think I'm losing out much by not using the spare clutter. It's sorted into bags along with the other spare parts and will presumably come in handy in the same way as all the other things I've saved up in the last twenty years, which is to say, never.

Remains to be seen what the tanks will look like painted; the Mongols still need to be finished before I even get into that.

The threatened other things lurch into view

One thing is the awful persistence of the smell of superglue. It's really not a good idea to spend too long inhaling the stuff. I finished up my gluing about two hours ago and it's still all I can smell. And since I have a cold in my head which is preventing me from smelling anything very much.... Yes, I'm sure I had far more of the fumes than is healthy.

Well, maybe there wasn't an option. I was sticking together various science fiction tanks and there's no useful alternative to superglue. Epoxy smells worse and takes longer to set, so that you're breathing in the fumes for hours as you mix little mini batches for each successive sticking task. Soldering is what the big boys recommend, but I hate to think of how much I could hurt myself doing that. So it's out with the gap filling superglue and the zapagap, which smells worse than the superglue, and try to get the whole job done in one go so that at least it isn't hanging over me for weeks.

All the way through the job, I was thinkng that I shouldn't be doing it. There are still 23 Mongol horsemen sitting on my painting table looking reproachful. Until I paint them, I don't have clear space to start into anything else, so why was I gluing together the new stuff?

Because it was new stuff. It had just arrived in the post and it needed to be stuck together before I could even figure out what it would look like. And this is how it comes to pass that every wargamer has a backlog of unpainted figures; there's always something you think you'd like to try, and picking out figures and buying them is much quicker and easier than cleaning them up, priming them, painting them and basing them.

I've had the Mongols for four years without painting them. They were bought when I was doing a lot of Ancients in Israel and it seemed to me that you could never have too many nomadic light horse. Then I came back to Dublin, the group here weren't into Ancients at the time and the Mongols got long fingered. No immediate pay off in painting them. They only came out of the shipping box late last year, and then they sat disconsolately on top of my painting shelf for a year, stuck to their lollipop sticks and undercoated, but otherwise neglected. I was doing other stuff - scanning in ten years worth of negatives, rebasing three thousand 6mm tanks, housekeeping of one kind and another.

But the housekeeping finally came to an end this autumn and I started half heartedly back into the Mongols - still a pointless group of figures which would gather just as much dust painted as they already had unpainted, but equally, still a reproach sitting there reminding me that I had spent money on them and I ought to do something with it. And I got 90 or so done, but temptation is always beckoning. A month or so ago GZG had a sale, and I was briefly tempted by some of their new SF tanks - they were just so weird and interesting looking that I wanted some even without having any particular idea of what they'd be any good for. Then I looked at the Mongols and reviewed what had to be done after them and forgot about the idea. Then I looked again at GZG, and they had a Christmas offer. And this time I bit.