Wilco’s Mass Battle Rules mk2 (Spring Clean Challenge 2021)

Bases arrived today. Thanks to Printing in Detail for sending them out so quickly.

Ordered 200, 20mm x 40mm Plastic Bases

did have the options to get HDF Laser cut ones cheeper but for one the plastic ones are half the thickness of the HDF ones but keeping the sturdiness of the base and second I like the feel of the plastic bases as they remind me off the Battle of the Five Armies game bases that I love so much.

After many hours of clipping and cleaning up 200 bases, finally done.

Next step is painting the minis before sticking them on the bases.

The boost that has made me look at this project again was seeing the great 3D files being made by Forest Dragon.

https://www.patreon.com/forestdragon/posts

There miniatures are a heroic looking 10mm, dude ranked STL Files designed to fit on 20mm x 40mm Baces. This is what I have been wanting for one time, the ability to obtain a large ranked force at low cost and in amazing detail. So I joined the Patreon. 

For Printing I’m using a Anycubic Photon Mono and a Anycubic Wash and Cure Machine. I can very much recommend the Printer and once I was printing of lots of prints I recommend if you can to pic up the Wash and Cure 2.0 as well as it will keep the cleaning of your 3D files contained and reduces the mess that can result from Resin Bath 3D Printing in general.

To be honest I don’t know how many minis have been printed over the last month but I will be ordering 200 baces and I am not even shore if that is going to be enough.

Messy Day 1 of Printing but Day 2 I tidied them up and printed the same about again.

I have been printing as my two game play test armies are Forest Dragons, Chivalric Knights and Vampires.   

So time to talk about my mk 1 rules. Well to give you the simplest explanation, each bace of troops has a attack and defence stat. At the moment each bace has a bace stat of 1 attach and 1 defence (this could change in mk 2 rules but this is designed to keep units from just having no chance of inflicting no damage or defending agents any unit)

I wanted to be able to look across the table at another army and just know from looking at them what the result of combat could be like without figuring it out in advance but you could if you wanted to. So the idea is that you have the bace stat but very simple modifiers like a child is a +1 Defence to the bace, Heavy Armer is +1 Defence to the bace, Double Hand Weapons is +1 Attack….

Here are some quick images showing a 3 bace, single rank of elves with spear and shield agents a 3 bace, 2 rank(6 bace in total) of goblins with spear and shield.

Other Examples that I feel needs to be included is a second rank that has Spears will also be included to an Attack in combat.

“Will Note Combat is fought by the front rank of a formation.”

Additional modifiers i am looking at include ,command units in formations can round up attacks by 1 if it results in a killed bace.

About 10 years ago I started imagining up a game bringing together two of my favourite games,  “The Battle of the Five Armies Miniature Game” and “Sid Meier’s Civilisation PC Game”. I’ve always wanted to after playing and seeing on the table top BotFA my own mass battle ranked game and have always wanted to build a table top version of Sid Meier’s Civilisation so I started to create one. Sadly after creating the first prototype I moved house and didn’t go back to it.

I am still interested in creating a Civilisation creating game and have ideas I hope to post in the future but for now I will let you know what I had done for the mass battle 10mm side of the game.

As part off the game each side used different kinds of resources to recruit different units and advance them across the table to defeat the enemy keep. I wanted to develop a rule set that would make when different units engaged there was a early desirable winner and no need to roll dice. This developed in to my core mechanics that I will talk about in another post (watch this space)

I also split my BotFA core set in half, not worrying about races but to give more unit types and to keep each army balanced. I will add images of the armies I made in there Red and Blue colours that were my game play prototype. I did also add a couple of other minis such as dragons and young fire drakes to give more unit types (i believe they are from the original Mighty Empires set from GW). 

Hope you like the images of these painted armies, personally I think seeing large blocks of tight ranked troops look so epic and the idea of a force that stance a large table will look amazing.

Let me know what you think of the GW Minis that came in the “The Battle of the Five Armies Miniature Game”. Will be talking more about game play ideas I had in my MK1 rules and how im developing them in the next posts swell as how im upgrading the miniature forces using Forist Dragon STL File miniatures. 

Small Look at Forest Dragon’s Prints agents the old GW BotFA Minis.

I’m not shore when GW released “The Battle of the Five Armies Miniature Game” but as soon as it was out I got myself a copy of the main core game. The main reason I love this product so much is that I believe it is the only mass rank, PLASTIC spuded, 10mm game they have ever done. Shore GW has made 40k Epic and Warmaster but epic was not so much of a mass ranked troop game and Warmister was restricted in scale due to rules and also cost as they were metal. 

Before this game came out Warmaster was catching my eye. The thing I like most about the Warmaster and The Battle of the Five Armies Miniature Game was that the 10mm miniatures are very tight ranked unlike some other 10mm miniature ranges where the minis are individual and is hard and expensive to take the minis and tight rank them that they look good.

Another aspect I like about Warmaster and The Battle of the Five Armies Miniature Game is the 40mm x 20mm bace system. This size has such a wide range of positioning with one another that in game stratagem can be easily developed with the bace composition alone.

One thing I regret now is that I didn’t buy multiple boxes of this game just due to the amount you got in the box for a good price and my over all love for the minis. It is nor realistic now to get them second hand now due to the price but now that I’m hoping to get my own games rules down on paper (digital paper) finally I am looking to up great the minis I’m going to use but will never forget the inspiration this game and minis gave me.