Eridani Light Horse and Lazy Eights

So I've made a bit of progress on clearing out the Battletech backlog. First of all the progress on the Eridani Light Horse. The Light and Medium mechs from the last post have all recieved their secondary colors. Still to go is some cleaning up, adding the wash layers, and then basing. Once this batch is done, I'll be moving on to another 5 Medium mechs and 19 Heavy and Assault Mechs. I'll probably put off the basing until all of them are painted to simply my assembly line method of doing things.

Then we have my new small unit that I'm making use of to clear out the last of my Inner Sphere metal and printed mechs. This is a unit that was serving the FedCom in the First Succession War and disappeared between then and the Second Succession War. In my Taurian Alternative Fiction story, I had this unit survive and to be honest if the unit fled into the Periphery it could survive for a long time while flying under the radar of the major realms and powers. This unit's paint is starting to come together but I seem to be stuck on what to use as a wash. Input and thoughts on it would be appreciated.

So that's where we stand for now and I'll be aiming for another update next week. Still not a fan of the painting but trying to keep myself on task to get all of this cleared out so I'm ready when the Kickstarter mechs and vehicles arrive. Thank's for stopping by and I'll see you all next time!

Eridani Light Horse Update

So I finally got back to putting some paint to miniatures this past week. I went with an assembly line sort of idea when breaking out the Tamiya Field Grey (which oddly enough is a really nice shade of green). I got a total of 18 light mechs and 7 medium mechs basecoated over the black primer to get them ready for the next steps.

This coming week I'm going to see about getting the bronze and red added to them and, if I make good progress, wash layer as well. I also have a dozen heavy and assault mechs, that aren't going to be in the ELH due to being old metal models or resin prints that scale just slightly different than the new Catalyst plastics that this regiment will be made of, which need a color scheme of some sort decided upon. I've gone through a lot of web pages considering different units and am starting to lean into just slapping together a small merc unit a la TBAG'ers. That's all for now and hopefully a new post next week.

Donegal Guard vs Ace Darwin's Whipits

So this past Saturday evening I made it back up to Johnson City for a game with Cheef again. This time around I was fielding a slightly reinforced lance of my 8th Donegal Guard versus his Ace Darwin's Whipits. He had me slightly outnumbered at the beginning with 7 mechs again my own 5.

We both split our forces with two of my jump capable mechs (Wolverine and Hatchman) on the tighter confined urban terrain while my Ostol, Awesome, and Hunchback took to the rolling hills on the other flank. He put his Stinger, Grasshopper, and Urbanmech on the urban side while his two Shadowhawks, Panther, and Enforcer took the other. Rob made a brief appearance and was nice enough (to me anyway) to seemingly put a light curse on Cheef's dice. Early turns of ranging shots didn't see anything happen but the first blood was in the urban era. Before the Urbie was close enough to get involved, my Hatchetman and Wolverine ignored the Grasshopper to double up on the Stinger. It was quickly rendered bereft of weaponry and proceeded to book it off the table. His Grasshopper and one other mech were the other two failed pilot checks.

My Ostol was faster than the Awesome and Hunchback and as it got out in front it quickly drew a heavy amount of fire that it weathered fairly well. As the ranges dropped more damage began mounting on both sides. Cheef became more disillusioned with his Shadowhawks as the game went on, as why they look like nice mechs, having the lightest versions basically of all weapons with an AC/5, SRM/2, and LRM/5 and a single medium laser. They consistently just couldn't put up a decent amount of damage reliably. Around this point too, Cheef learned of Murl's seeming curse when it came to piloting checks. Out of three checks over several turns and three different mechs, he rolled a combined 3 each time. One of them was on his Urbie which managed to crit itself on it's fall and took out it's own AC/10.

I ended up taking a leg off of Ace's Pink Panther and rendered him mission inoperable. A few turns later saw the Urbie destroyed, though it did score a small laser hit to the head of my Hatchetman in the scrum, and one of his Shadowhawks downed from a destroyed leg as well. It was nice to have a proper urban combat scene with a Wolverine and Hatchetman squaring off against an Urbie, Grasshopper, and a Stinger. Definitely a proper fight with the proper types of mech for it.

At this point he was trying to regroup his scattered mechs to support each other as the remaining Shadowhawk was missing some weapons and the Enforcer was starting to show some damage. It was at this point that when my Hatchetman and Wolverine shot at the Grasshopper that my dice after failing to confirm a possible critical hit on at least a dozen previous rolls suddenly got three of them on the Grasshopper for a pair of engine hits and a gyro hit. Combined with it losing most of its weapons as well, Cheef threw in the towel at this point. I somehow had all my mechs still standing though three of them were a couple good hits from going down. All in all it was a fun evening with lots of chatting and relaxing. Looking forward to the next time though it seems that once a month to get up there is going to be as good as it gets for the foreseeable future.

Into 2024

Well, we're into a new year and hopefully it's better than the last few have been. I'm going to be making a concentrated effort to start cleaning up my backlog of Battletech as I really do want to have everything caught up when the Mercs Kickstarter arrives. The first step towards that I got my desk fully cleaned off today. To assist me with keeping it that way, I took some key choices from my various collections and staged them on the desk. Hopefully this will keep me on track by not trashing the desk or letting junk pile up so at least I'll have room to work on stuff. Anyway, that's how the year is starting and we'll see how long I last on this attempted part of my journey.

I've selected a few of my favorite diecast cars, my only graded and slabbed comic book, a couple smaller Marvel figures, a few hero characters from my Lions of Harlech, some Eaglemoss Marvel characters, my Camo Specs Battletech book as I like to always have it handy, a couple mechs (the Atlas from Cheef), a few Star Wars bits, and for my GI Joe representation, this really cool Larry Hama figure that I picked up a couple years ago. As to the PC screen, retro Flash Gordon artwork for the background screen. See you all next time and enjoy your new year!

Finally A Post Up

Well, back at the beginning of the month, for my birthday I got up Johnson City way and after hitting up a few stores for lunch and some Project BBQ for lunch, I met up with Cheef for a couple games of Battletech. Due to some forgotten info, our first place to play was out and we ended up playing at his house instead. Both games were slugfests with lots of damage to go around on both sides and were a lot of fun as well. However no pics were taken in the fun.

As a birthday treat to myself I did pick up a few Battletech items. I got the "No Greater Honor" Eridani Light Horse anthology, "The Mercenary Life" anthology, and the Battlecorps Anthology "Gray Markets". I have greatly enjoyed the Eridani Light Horse one and it has a series of stories starting in 2772 capturing a Rim World's Republic world and highlights of the campaign to retake Terra and then skips forward through the years through the various stories before finally ending with a tale in 3151 with a reformed Eridani Light Horse getting ready to campaign under the Davion flag once more. The Mercenary Life has been interesting as it's a series of short stories from the point of view of different characters as they cross paths between 2991 and 3014. It's right in the timeframe I enjoy and it's been fun as a different way of weaving an overall tale with a series of different short stories.

The last item I picked up for myself was an old Ral Partha Battletech Medium Lance with complete mechs and the box if fairly good shape. The mechs have all been partially painted and I'll need to decide what I am going to do with them before they get paint. With the new plastics from Catalyst they most likely will be painted as a lance together and go on the shelves as display pieces. With that in mind I am not sure what to paint them as. I am currently deciding between Lyran Guard (because I hate myself white), Arkab Legion, or Hanseatic League Defense Force. Anyway, that's all for now and hopefully I'll be able to get some progress on mechs again once I'm past this holiday stretch. Retail Management is always fun this time of year. See you all next time!

Quite A Bit Overdue

So back on October 21st, Cheef and I got a game of Battletech in, but I've been a bit busy and have not got around to posting about it yet. As is quite common, close to the halfway point I forgot to keep taking pictures.

I took a Clan Ghost Bear force of a Solitaire, a Nova Cat A, a Hellbringer (Loki), and a Mad Dog (Vulture). He brought a wolfhound, a commando, a hatchetman, a Hunchback variant, and then too much armor. 4 Heavy tanks total ended up being too much armor for me to chew through fast enough. Towards the end I tossed in the towel with three beat up mechs remaining facing two damaged mechs and too much remaining tanks to deal with. Two tanks were fairly hurt but the other two were basically untouched. The next day I even considered a force of a dozen LBX armed Urbanmechs to deal with the tanks by criting them to death next time.

So that's how it went, I feel like I did fairly well early on to keep my force fighting just part of his but I couldn't roll well enough to drop his mechs fast enough before the rest of his force came to bear. (Though 4 ER Large Laser hits from the Mova Cat cored the Commando quite nicely) So that's it for now and I'll see about posting again soon. I have Monday off work and nothing I to deal with that day so I'll be looking to spend at least some time getting some Battletech dealt with. See you all next time and thanks for stopping by!

Building An Eridani Light Horse Regiment Pt. 4

So work this past month has been quite time consuming though there seems to be a return to norming in the near future. I haven't managed much during this time but there has been a little progress. Mainling in the way of acquisitions.

So first of all, I've got green layers of two lances of mechs. The first lance is Phoenix Hawks for the 6th Recon Battalion which is going to be all jump capable. The second lance os the regimental command company command lance of a Cyclops, Awesome, and two Annihilators.

Then we've got an Etsy purchase of 8 APCs and 4 tanker trucks that I will be using as coolant vehicles.

And then last of all we have some infantry. I had three packs of these and for some reason starting basing them. After I finished the first pack I asked myself why wouldn't I paint them on the sprue first and THEN base them and stopped from doing any more. So this is what I've added for now and hopefully I'll start getting more painted soon.