First 3mm Ogre Miniatures Game
Here are some pictures from my first 3mm
Ogre Miniatures game. The conventional armor is all
Oddzial Osmy and the Ogres are
Plasmablast
conversions. The scenario was a heavy Combine armor strike against an
extended Paneuropean front. The Combine's goal was to destroy the city
at mid-table on the Paneuro baseline. They almost made it.
I used my home-brewed
drone and mine rules.
They seemed to work fairly well. The mines in particular slowed the
Combine down a turn and led directly to the Pansie victory.
The table at start, as seen from above.
The Combine forces: Ogres Mama Spank and Nervous George (with a full
compliment of drones) are accompanied by a heavy armor battalion and a
GEV strike company.
The Pansies stand ready with an entire heavy armored battalion with an infantry battalion and a howitzer battery in support.
The Combine hooks right and the Paneuropeans scramble to meet them.
Game over, man. The Ogres eventually grind to a halt in the Paneuropean minefields just in front of the city.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
3mm Ogre Miniatures Project Moves Along
I've mostly been concentrating on 2mm and 3mm Napoleonics this year,
following the release of Blucher. That doesn't mean I haven't had time
to paint up some Ogre Minis, however. Here's an overview of what's been
done with the Paneuropeans so far...
Here's the better part of a Paneuropean armored battalion near a city.
Tanks are all O8 except for a Plasmablast cybertank in the back left.
Here are the Ogre/GEV conventional unit types I have so far:
Going from right to left we have power armor, a light tank (actually a
French AMX-90 with plasticard side skirts added on), a heavy tank, a
GEV, a GEV-PC, a Missile Tank, a Mobile Howitzer and a Howitzer
(kit-bashed from plasticard and the spare cannon barrel that comes with
the mobile howitzer).
I still need L-GEVs and Superheavy Tanks.
A close-up of the light tank and the heavy tank. The heavy used to be my "lights", but I decided to change this after hearing
Mathieu Moyen
was going with British Scorpions as his Lights. The O8 "Aliens
Universe" tank is too much like a Combine Heavy to want to use it for
anything else. And that's when I realized that I have a bunch of AMX-90s
going unused. I cut thin plasticard strips at 2mm x 8mm and glued them
over the treads. Sure enough: they look acceptably sci-fi and their size
is spot on.
Above , we see a howitzer battery and the command troop of the 1st
Polish Lancers. In the back left, you can see a cybertank, made from a
Plasmablast 6mm Marhaf Legion model. This is going to be a cybertank
destroyer in my Ogre-inspired miniatures rules,
Luftpanzer.
A city, made out of Spartan Games discontinued "base" pieces for their
space combat game. Also, some Monopoly City pieces. All gluesd down to a
CD base.
I can't recall if I posted these before. This shows how I converted a Plasmablast tank into an Ogre.
Well, that's it for now! Hopefully this project will be up and running by Christmas!
----------------------------------------
Here are some pictures of how I am using the extra gun barrels from O8´s
M92 SPG to build howitzers for my 3mm Ogre set-up.
Here are the supplies and components:
A bit of pasteboard for the base. A thumbtack (pointy bit cut off and
reused as a bunker antenna), eight slices of a dead credit card, a
couple of plastic bits (which are glued together and filed into the
right shape), some plastic tubing (for the bunker) and, of course, the
extra gun barrel from the M-92.
This shows you the four howitzers in various stages of construction.
Here they are, all built.
Primed....
And painted.
-------------------------------------------------------
Here's the beginning of my "Combine" army for Ogre. Right now they are
wearing Belgian rondels, because it's a good color mix. I will create
some better decals in the future.
The army currently consists of two cybertanks (an Ogre Mk III and a Mk
IIIb) and a company of 14 heavy tanks. Not shown are the twelve squads
of Mobile Infantry that ride the tanks into battle.
The ogres are self-aware and, as such, each controls three attack drones.
I have added the drones because, as
Henry Cobb has made everyone on SJG's "Ogre" board painfully aware, the addition of LGEVS and Light Tanks into
Ogre's
follow-on supplements subtly skewed the game against the attacking
ogres. This is because the conventional armor units can "mix 'n match"
their attack strengths to the Ogre's defense strengths while the ogre
can't really respond in kind.
As a buff I let self-aware ogres (i.e. any ogre fighting an opponent
that's allowed to draw from the full range of conventional units) to
command one attack drone for evey "mark" (3 in the case of Mark IIIs and
IIIbs).
Attack drones are essentially light GEVs (you could also experiment with
light tanks). They are not affected by "D" results on the combat table,
but must stay within five hexes of an ogre at the beginning and end of
the movement phase and also at any point that the drones would engage in
overrun combat. Moving your ogre first and then your dones helps you
keep track of them. If a player screws up and "forgets" to keep his
drone within five hexes of his ogre, it immediately goes rogue and is
eliminated.
You can see the drones I have made here to accompany my ogres. They are made out of stick-pins, plastic greeblies and wire.
Here is the Mark IIIb. She is known as "Mama Spank":
Above, you can see Mama together with her Mk III consort, "Nervous George".
The conventional Heavy Tanks are
O8 Caesarions.
The ogres are made from the chassis of 6mm
Plasmablast Games Phestorm misile crawlers,
with added plastic towers and greeblies. The missile launchers
themselves are being repurposed into 3mm planetary defense
installations.
------------------------------------------------------------
Here are two new units for Ogre Miniatures: the Light Missile Tank and Sarissa Battle Armor.
The Light Missile Tank was a stop-gap measure employed by the Paneuropeans during the battle
for Spain. The Pansies discovered that their infantry needed heavy
missile support just when the main factories at Stuttgart had just cycled
away from the elderly Peltast Missile Tank towards the new Ajax design.
The
Psiloi was cobbled together using any chassis available (mostly
obsolete MBTs and APCs) and a "fire and forget" brilliant missile
launcher. BPC applique was bolted on to the vehicle and a rudimentary
close-defence system
gave the LMSL slightly more protection than a cheap pair of jammies.
Equipped with heavy-duty off-the-shelf civilian grade fusion power
packs, the Light Missile Tank also typically sported several charge
ports, used to
support power armor in the field.
The "Pissies" were
extremely cheap to produce, and could be knocked together in a
matter of hours using the most basic machine tools and fabricators. Most
M.I. battalions quickly produced their own variants from whatever
material they had at hand. My particular battalion has a two-vehicle
section attached, but most Paneuropean Mobile Infantry Regiments
attempted to field at least one section per company.
The
Light Missile Tank moves as a light tank, cannot transport any infantry
and has A2, R4, D1 and M2. It's cobbled together nature, however, means
that it is eliminated by both "D" and "X" results, like an archaic
armor unit. It costs half an armor unit or 3 points to field. However,
given the quantity of self-aiming missiles it packs, it can choose to
ripple fire its entire load. This allows it to make three 2/4 attacks in
one turn. If it does this, however, the LMSL is eliminated after combat
is resolved (the chassis simply can't handle the stress).
I
have never been satisfied with the MSL, considering it to be the
weakest of the conventional armor units in terms of its
cost-effectiveness: it comes out to 5.67 points using
Henry Cobb's calculator,
whereas a GEV is 6 and an HVY 6.17. The LMSL is 2.5 points, but it's
one-shot multiple attack ability brings it up to a nice round 3.0
points. This is basically a disposable Heavy Weapons unit. It costs
one-third the price of a regular HVY WPN, but has less firepower,
significantly less mobility, practically no defense capacity (not to
mention no infantry weapons). Use it and lose it. It gives infantry
positions a very nice anti-GEV capability, however.
The second new unit is
O8's Sarissa battle robot. This is quite out-of-canon for the Ogreverse, so I obviously won't be using it in anything like "purist" play.
Heavy battle armor works like regular infantry in terms of combat and defense, but:
1) It can only combine in two point units (not three as normal).
2) It defends at x2 in urban terrain (unlike regular infantry, which get x3).
The
Sarissa was built to give Mobile Infantry some dedicated recon and
sniping capacity. It has A1, R3, D1, M3 per point, with two combining to
give A2, R3, D2, M3. Like all infantry units, it's doubled in overrun
and loses one point to "D" results. It costs 4 points or the equivalent
of two infantry per unit.
Here's a reinforced Paneuropean Mobile Infantry Battalion. It has three
power armor companies and a support company made up of a Light Missile
Tank battery and two Light Tank troops.
Here's the same battalion, but with a Light Tank company attached in reserve as support:
You might notice two new units in the battalion. One is what I call the
Light Missile Tank. The other is a Sarissa heavy recon battlesuit. These
units will be detailed in an up-coming post!
Here's a GEV troop from the famous First Polish Lancers next to a U.S. quarter and a British pound. These are modified
O8 Centaurus GEVs.
I added a paperclip nub as a forward gun, the back jets (chunks of
plastic tubing) and a cabin extension (a piece of plastic beam):
While up in Puerto Rico for the 2014 National Women's Studies
Conference, I picked up some of O8's new sci-fi figs (tip o' the hat to
Gregory Mitchell for bringing them down to the conference!).
My goal here is to paint "black" and "white" armies for
Ogre Miniatures
- as close to the old classic game and paint schemes as I can come -
yet still be able to use these figs, at a pinch, in other sci-fi
settings (most particularly my on-going Smade's World campaign). The
"Combine" figures are thus white with red trimmings while the
"Paneuropeans" are my standard blue-grey. I gave the Combine Polish
Roundels and the Paneuros Belgian roundels. Hopefully, I will be able to
switch these out with home-made decals at some point in the future.
O8 now has some smashing stuff that can
easily stand in for Ogre figures. Having bought a bunch of it, I've now set about kit-bashing to make everything as close to Ogre as possible.
So here's the new O8 Centaurus hovercraft, kit-bashed to look like a GEV...
The casting is a little too long and lightly-armed to be a straight-up
Ogre
GEV (although it's damned near perfect for the GEV-PC). I bulked it up a
bit by adding a cabin extension made out of a chunk of plastic beam. I
also gave it a nubbin of paperclip as a bow gun and two snips of plastic
dowel for its jet engines. It now looks pretty spot-on, IMHO.
The GEV-PC version has no gun or cabin extension, but a boar-brustle
hold bar was mounted running from the cockpit to the back fan and the
back fan was raised a bit via a square of plasticard.
The two are now easily identifiable at arm's length.
This is a tank and it's a bit of a heartbreaker for me. As is, it looks
just like a Combine Heavy Tank. Almost perfect in that respect
except that it's one of the smaller tanks made by O8. The GEV and MSL dwarf it! This is a pity, because I think it's lovely as a Heavy.
Maybe someday O8 will do the other
Aliens tank from
The Colonial Marine Technical Manual.
It has the same general design, but is much more high-tech and,
presumably, larger. If they do that, then said vehicle will become my
Heavy. Until then, the Caesarion will have to do, as it's about half
again the size of this baby. This vehicle will be relegated to being a
Light Tank (I don't like the original
Ogre designs for these, anyhow). It's still very nice looking!
Here're the Mobile Howitzer and the Howitzer. The MHWZR is a straigh-up
O8 casting. It comes with an alternative barrel, however. I used those
and a bit of plasticard, a thumbtack and a bead to scratch-build the
HWZR, which I think looks quite nice.
Here is my newest Mark III Ogre build. Its chassis is a
Marhaf Legion Phrestorm support tanke from Plasmablast Games. Its superstructure is built from pins and plasticard:
Last but not least, the infantry. I am basing these as four castings on a
12mm x 12mm stand and two castings on a 6x12mm stand. This makes for a
"platoon" of six castings on a 20 x 12mm base, with "change" being able
to be easily made. I will also base some 10 platoons, per army, on full
bases, just to make life easier in smaller scenarios.
And finally, here are some group and comparison shots. You can see the Missile Tank and GEV-PC in these
. The
Ogre is a tad small, but not too bad: canon Mark IIIs are 58 feet long
and mine is slightly over 50. People are accustomed to thinking of Ogres
as amazingly huge, but the Mark III is only really about twice as long
as an Abrams M1. "Only"...
That last shot shows a company of Light Tanks being chased by the Mk
III. This is the only unit I've got painted up for now.More pics next
week, though, God willin' an'the creek don' rise!
