The World Cup has started. My lad, despite being rugby mad and not really liking football, seems to have been caught up in the excitement, so watched the first game. My daughter too. I retired to the kitchen to cook the dinner. Football leaves me cold. So, rest assured, if you want to get away from the footy, I shan't be mentioning it again. This blog will, I hope, be a haven of wargaming sanity during this period of lunacy. I suspect that my productivity will go up, as I try to block it out of my consciousness.
Today I finished off half a dozen more movement trays. I don't like making movement trays much - but I remind myself that making movement trays is better than sticking rusty needles in my eyes, which is, in turn, preferable to rebasing figures. Making them in decent-sized batches seems more efficient, and gets the tedium out of the way quicker.
I need more trays because I'm going to paint another unit of Sassanid spearmen - mostly from Miniature Design Studio, with about a quarter of the figures from A&A Miniatures mixed in for variety. Also a 12 strong unit of archers to form a combined unit with the spearmen, and another of 16 archers. The unit of MDS archers I did looks a bit big at 32 figures, so am combining them with this other 16 and so will end up with two units of 24 - again, with a few A&A models mixed in for variety. Lastly, I'm going to do another dozen 'nomad' cavalry. I always think that a Sassanid army should have at least as many light cavalry as Clibanarii, and since painting a third unit of Clibanarii (mostly from spare models), the light cavalry have been outnumbered. Of course, this probably means that the Romans will get hammered, so then I'll need to paint more Romans...
Mad? Who - me? ;-)
The rule-writing is proceeding pretty well. I've got all the basic stuff down, and seemingly working fairly satisfactorily. Some of the numbers need 'tweaking' to get the results right, but the mechanisms seem to work fairly well, though there are still a number of issues to deal with before I'd consider letting anyone else fiddle with them. For one thing, I haven't played any games big enough to test the card-driven turn sequence properly, but that'll have to wait until I'm sure the unit versus unit stuff is really working properly. I need to devise suitable stats for all the troop-types in my armies too, and test them to make sure they 'behave' as expected. I'm also slowly drafting a few 'special rules' - for things like testudines, pila, etc - which will, I hope, help to give these rules the flavour of the period.