More From The Painting Table

I'm not getting any chance to play games at the moment, but I am still slowly working through various random items on or around my painting table. Here's a few more things from the past week.

Firstly I finished up this stronghold for my 15mm Dwarves. It's a 3D-printed fortress, but I added a base and some rocks to give it more height and weight.

Secondly I finally painted these steam-vessels for Galleys & Galleons. They're Dystopian Wars American vessels, cast in a crisp resin that practically paints itself. It still took me a few years to get beyond the undercoat though.

They'll do for generic steam-punk/lace-punk steamships and, obviously, for Dwarves (it's always Dwarves) in a fantasy naval setting.

Here they are in comparison with my conventional sailing vessels.
 

I have more of these in a box somewhere, but at the moment I have to ask myself just how many I need?*

*The answer is 'Enough for two sides so I can do a steam-vessel fight'.

Polyreme

As I said in my last Galleys & Galleons post, I hadn't done a picture simply showing off the new galleys, and maybe I won't at this stage. The battle gave a pretty good idea of what they look like I think.

However when I was working on them I did have a play at making a silly polyreme to use as a flagship; something slightly over-the-top and impractical. This was a basic design I came up with and finished painting today.

It's the same basic size and structure as the quinquereme and hexareme, but with extra superstructure to make it look bigger. In Galleys & Galleons anything larger than a hexareme is considered a powerful but impractical polyreme, so this could be an octareme maybe

I quite like it as a design for a flagship, maybe, but am considering doing some rank and file ones where the hull is simply a little longer and it has three or four towers along the mid-line. But I also fancy making a double-hulled one once I can work out the best way to approach it - that would be another flagship for certain.

The National Gallery Of Victoria

Mrs Kobold and I were away in Melbourne this past weekend, celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary. As is our wont when away on holiday we mostly did museums and galleries, and since we'd never been to Melbourne before we found ourselves with a whole city's worth of places to explore.

Naturally I took some pictures of things I thought might be of interest to readers of this blog. This post will mostly cover the National Gallery of Victoria; I have a second lot of pictures from the Melbourne Museum to sort through as well*

First up are these rather nice pictures of ships by Jyūnisen zu, painted in Japan c1720. They're part of a collection called Twelve Ships, but the museum only displays three of them

Continuing the naval theme, there is this painting in the 19th Century Salon gallery. The Salon is an awesome 'slap all the pictures on all the walls' gallery, with the downside that some of them, like this one, are too high up for you to really see what's going on. Fortunately there's an electronic guide you can use to locate paintings, and see what they're about. The guide told me that this picture is by Norwegian artist Johan Benneter, and was painted in 1876. It shows an action in 1799 off Madagascar where the ship of the line HMS Jupiter fought an inconclusive action with the French frigate Preneuse. Rough seas prevented Jupiter from deploying its lower-deck guns.

Continuing the nautical theme we have this one, showing Ulysses and the Sirens, painted in 1891 by J.W. Waterhouse. I'm a bit of a fan of Pre-Raphaelite art (mostly from an early exposure to the incredible collection in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery when I was growing up), and I'd not seen this one before.

The sirens are beautifully rendered, as is the ship, so it's full of good things. I love the siren bottom left in this picture, harassing the poor crewman.

Every gallery should have a grand battle painting, and the NGV is no exception. I give you 'The 28th Regiment At Quatre Bras', painted by Elizabeth Thompson (later Lady Butler)

Take that, Polish lancer!

And that, French cuirassier!

We found this (unexpectedly) in the State Library - Ned Kelly's armour. 

Bullet holes and everything!

Once I get them sorted I'll post the pictures from Melbourne Museum as well.

*I actually have some pictures from our trip to the Northern Territory in October 2022 to post here too; one day I'll get around to them ...

Lots Of Galleys

I realise that I hadn't done the obligatory 'I finished painting another batch of galleys' post, but before we went away for the weekend that's exactly what I did. Yesterday I had a chance to get a few of them on the table for a game.

Basically I have rounded out my forces with more quadremes and quinqueremes, as well as adding a number of biremes as well. I've also made a couple of hexaremes, which will act as flaghips.

I set up the traditional Syracuse vs Carthage game, with equal forces. Each force consisted of twelve ships - a hexareme flagship, three quiniqueremes, three quadremes, three triremes and two biremes. I randomised the terrain and semi-randomised the deployments.

Here's the setup-up, with Carthage (red) in the foreground and Syracuse (white/yellow) on the other side of the table.

The action developed slowly with both sides sending biremes and triremes to the eastern side of one of the islands in order to outflank the opposition.

Syracuse took the first casualty with one of their triremes being rammed and boarded by the Carthaginians.

Eventually the two sides got into action in the centre. Syracuse led with its quinqueremes, looking to move their quadremes round to support the flanks. Carthage pushed forward with their quadremes, whilst their quinqueremes lagged behind. Both of these classes of ships have artillery, so ramming would be preceded by some shooting.

Carthage took their first casualty as one of their quadremes was rammed amidships and sunk.

More action in the centre.

To be honest I got so wrapped up in the game that I didn't really keep notes on what was happening. Beyond the island the triremes and biremes had inflicted casualties on each other, but Carthage had managed to work a couple of ships onto the Syracusan left flank. In the centre both sides exchanged artillery fire, but as you can see here a couple of Carthaginian biremes were on the attack.

The end of a bad turn for Carthage, with three of their ships sunk. As I normally do I set 50% casualties as the breakpoint, and was surprised to find that both sides were one ship away from it; it was proving to be a close action.

But it was Carthage that inflicted the winning blow, with one of their quinqueremes rowing through some wreckage to ram a Syracusan quinquereme and sink it.

The losses. Syracuse had lost one quinqueremes sunk and two others struck, as well as a quadreme, triremes and biremes struck. Carthage lost a trireme and quinquereme struck, and had two quadremes and a bireme sunk. So in a way by being in control of the field they made a net gain in ships.

The new models looked great and it was interesting to see the different capabilities in action.

Ship Tactics Of The Early 17th Century

The Battle of Gibraltar (1607) by Adam Willaerts

A recent discussion on ship types for the 30 Years War on the Naval Wargaming Facebook group prompted a lively discussion, including this one from Ix Nichols that is such a great description of how a Galleys & Galleons game pans out that I thought it was worth sharing here:

I've been researching the 1600-1650 period for 3 decades, and there just isn't much written about it in English.

There simply wasn't any such thing as formal fleet tactics until the line of battle became formalized in the 2nd Anglo-Dutch War. In the first half of the 17th C. sailing ship commanders modeled their tactics on cavalry, charging in a mob lead by an flagship, and either settling into a boarding melee or withdrawing to reload and charge again (and again, and again, etc.)

It took a lot longer to reload a broadside (few gunners, primitive gun tackle), so Napoleonic exchanges of fire were nearly impossible. An individual ship bent on a gun duel might attempt to bear down, fire a broadside, come about, fire the other broadside, then break off to reload. Ships in a running fight would just fire individual guns as able.

The only fleet formations of the pre-Anglo-Dutch War period I'm aware of come from five days before the Battle of the Downs 1639: Oquendo put his ships in a crescent, and Tromp put his in a spread-out line ahead on the leeward gauge. Medina-Sidonia had used a crescent in 1588 and a Portuguese admiral used the retiring leeward line in the early 1500s, so both of these tactics may have had some known precedent to the belligerents, but most fleet battles with sailing ships seemed to involve pell-mell mob tactics (including the Downs).

Personally, I think this makes the period *excellent* for wargaming, because this is *exactly* how wargamers behave. Wargamers think (incorrectly) that Nelson's genius was initiating a melee, so the only way to keep ships in line is to handcuff them out of reach of the table and move their ships for them. In fact, the melee seems to have been the standard tactic until the 1670s, and it was always bloody and usually gave victory to the side with some kind of force advantage. That was bad in real-life wars, but great for wargaming.

So have at it wargamers - hurl your ships at each other with reckless abandon, and forget those neat and tidy lines!

Galley Fight

I'm still painting the latest batch of galleys (and it will probably be a week or so at least before they see any action, but I did have a play with my existing ones yesterday. I wanted to try out some alternative stats for ancient galleys I'd been thinking about whilst we were away over the weekend. 

The aim was to simplify the stats given in the rules and tweak the quality of the galleys so that some of the larger ones would be more useful. At present the quinquereme, which seems to have been a mainstay of some fleets, seems somewhat underwhelming compared to the trireme, because it has a Quality of 4, making a group of them quite hard to activate without a flagship to boost them. There's also a strange quirk of the quadreme where it seems to have been given the reinforced hull trait in order to have it sit uneasily between the trireme and the quinquereme in terms of ability to give and receive attacks.

What I decided to do was drop the C values on some types, leave others as they were and try to improve quality on some larger ships.

My proposed stats (including ships I'm not ready to field yet) are:

Bireme - Q2 C1 - Ramming, Unarmed, Yare, Shallow Draft

Trireme - Q3 C2 - Ramming, Unarmed, Yare, Shallow Draft

Quadreme - Q3 C3 - Ramming

Quinquereme - Q3 C4 - Ramming

Hexareme - Q4 C5 - Ramming, High Towers

I set up two sides, nominally Carthage (Red) and Syracuse (Blue), and gave each three quinqueremes and four triremes. There were no flagships, but with everything operating with a Q3 that shouldn't be an issue.

Here's the action after a few moves, with the quinqueremes of both sides in the centre, and triremes operating on the flanks.

The first attack saw a Carthaginian trireme get ahead of  its main force and get rammed by a Syracusan trireme.

A bad roll on the All At Sea table saw the Carthaginian vessel ground itself on the island, and sink. The Syracusan triremes then fell back to cover the flanks of their larger ships.

North of the island two Carthaginian ships closed in on a lone Syracusan trireme.

The quinqueremes were closing up now as well. Unlike the triremes they have deck artillery, and the Carthaginians soon started taking hits.

Indeed one was sunk rather quickly, and the Syracusans closed up to bring their newly gained fire superiority to bear at closer range.

Meanwhile near the island a Carthaginian trireme had been sunk, and another was forced to strike as a second Syracusan trireme joined the action.

A Carthaginian quinquereme caught fire. With galley actions I remove the possibility of explosions, however; any explosion result is simply treated as an additional fire (which pretty much dooms the vessel anyway, but not so immediately).

The end of the action - the Carthaginians had lost a couple of ships sunk, one surrendered and one burned beyond salvage. Syracuse had a trireme surrender, but had otherwise just taken damage.

The new stats seemed OK, but there is the danger that they make the artillery maybe too good, so I'd have to try them out some more.

To be fair I ran a second game using the stats in the rules. Whilst the quinqueremes had their moments failing to activate they still proved useful and weren't too outclassed by the triremes. I need to play more games.

New Gladiators

I completed another batch of gladiators yesterday evening. They've actually been finished since the middle of last week; I just had the bases to do.

They are all from Crusader. Crusader make gorgeous gladiator figures.

Here's an armoured scissor (left) and a secutor (right). The observant amongst you will see that the secutor got missed out of the group-shot above,

A thraex, and another secutor. The secutor figure is my favourite of this batch.

A veles and a barbarian.

I still have a few more gladiators left to paint, but then my supply will have dried up. I want to get some more, both from Brigade Games and from West Wind (via Old Glory), but postage rates from the US to Australia make that far too expensive a proposition at present.

Anyway, this batch of six brings my gladiator stable to over 90 figures.

Biremes Assembled

We had a family weekend away in Katoomba this weekend. There was enough downtime for me to put together some biremes I'd been working on for Galleys & Galleons.

Here I am, hard at work in the kitchen on the house we rented.

(It was a big house - there were seven adults and one small child)

I mostly cut out all of the components for fourteen vessels before we went, so that all I had to do was glue them together. First I stuck the hulls, prows and oar-sections together, leaving them to dry for the afternoon.

And then it was just a matter of rounding off the sterns, adding the bow and stern-posts and finally a little strip of deck trim

In addition you can see a ship with lots of towers - I was having a play with a design for an over-the-top polyreme flagship.

I'm back home now, with a pile of new ancient galleys to paint, although I'm away on an extra-long weekend next weekend, since Mrs Kobold and I are celebrating our wedding anniversary.