Tales from Terra Nova! Battle Report

I recently ran a demo game for a couple of new players at the FLGS and figured I'd try to document it with a new style of battle report.  Here you have a 600TV roughly game on a 3'x4' urban table using the standard Heavy Gear Blitz rules but my Flash! smaller combat groups.  Hopefully this won't break blogspot!  :)

Edit:  It took a few years but I finally figured out and got around to converting the Tales from Terra Nova Issue #1 Battle Report to a single downloadable pdf.   You can find it here.

Northern Army and Cityscape Terrain Update

Not really a southern update specifically but I did finish my Northern OpFor force that I plan to have face my primary southern army in any demos. The exact make up of the squads as well as the squads themselves is still in flux but pictured here is the initial loadout I worked on. The following are full Blitz sized Veteran GP, Strike, and FS squads with an infantry platoon for variety. I got the army mostly painted except for a few figs that I had to match to the existing scheme (as well as fix dozens of paint chips, breaks, and simply missing parts that the guy didn't include). Thanks to Azure Devil on the dp9 forums for helping me out with some AGMs bits that were missing!  I'll likely never know why the guy removed the MFM bits from all the Grizzlies as he didn't actually model a different variant but they were missing as well and I had to get them from another source among other bits.

Picture below is part of my cityscape cardboard terrain set dressed up with a few extras like trees and roadblocks. I recently commented on HG terrain density so figured I'd post here and see what people thought about this. The set below is a 3'x4' table using 4/5 of the buildings included in one cityscape set (and 1/2 the floor tiles as it comes with 4'x6'). I like the density below except for right in the front of the pic (and it's mirror spot on the other side) but feel it would be a bit too sparse on a full 4x6 table (basically double the space below). I do plan on adding a few n-scale plastic cars as well to liven up the city additionally.  I feel 3x4 should be an adequate play space for up to 1000TV which can go a long way with my fire team smaller squad house rules.

Finished my King Cobras and DZC Cityscape Terrain Review

Finished my triple King Cobras (one regular, two hooded variants) along with the airstrike markers and some additional stragglers (Jaeger Gunner and Chatterbox Iguana). I broke down and finally bought the snakeyes blister I need to make my Black Ops squad legal (which will allow me to use my paratrooper cadre as well) but the ebay seller is taking his/her sweet time shipping them despite marking them shipped with tracking a week ago (with no actual info on the tracking)... grumble... grumble... I've also got some Visigoths that I got a great deal on supposedly on the way as well so hopefully both will arrive next week. As always, the pics below are hosted on dakka so you can click on them to be taken to their gallery page for all your zooming in needs.

I've also been assembling the Dropzone Commander Cityscape set I picked up a few weeks ago and am very happy with my purchase. It's solid cardstock that is preglued and somewhat scored so it's very easy to put together. You just bend into the rectangular shape and then glue down the roof ledges and roof floor into their proper positions. Technically, you don't have to glue either as the tight roof fit is good enough to keep the building in the correct shape via friction and not gluing would allow you to disassemble the building for easy storage/transport as well. The only thing is that I would *NOT* put any models on the rooftop if you don't glue it except maybe 6mm-12mm plastic or light resin infantry as a metal model can cause the roof to fold back down. With superglue, the roof is strong enough to even support a relatively heavy metal model like the King Cobras above (I tried!). A surprising tidbit is that putting the buildings together used up ALOT of superglue; I had 5 of the smaller 0.7oz tubes and still needed to make a run for more to finish the last couple.

The set retails at $45 USD and includes 20 buildings (4 of each of 5 sizes) as well as 24 double sided 1'x1' tiles (enough to make a 4x6' game table). I tend to use 3x4' tables for my Heavy Gear Flash games (see my blog link in my sig) and that is how I built the city above. I took one of each building and made it into two separate "damaged" and rubble states which is why the buildings on the right are so dark compared to the others. As you can see, the 20 buildings populate a 3x4' table quite nicely without any other terrain. If you've got additional terrain, it's probably a good idea to use it on a 4x6' space using all the tiles as the building density you see above would be exactly half. That's not, btw, a complaint as I think the value you get for your $45 purchase is incredible with this set but rather an opinion that a 4x6' table made up to be a true city needs about 1 1/2 sets of buildings and some additional terrain (cars, roadblocks, forests, statues, etc) to feel full.

Here's a close up of the second largest building along with some common and not so common minis for scale. The DZC scale is technically 10mm and I think the building work well for both Heavy Gear (12mm) and Robotech (6mm), the two main games I intend to use this with. The HG King Cobra is obviously the official version (albeit converted a bit in pose) but the Robotech minis are plastic and metal kits from long ago which are a bit bigger than the ones coming out soon (fingers crossed!) from the Palladium Robotech Tactics kickstarter. I've included a tape measure taped to the building as well to give you a measurement of the scale (metric just like the ones shown in the robotech kickstarter pics). Also pictured above are two papercraft buildings created on my upper end of medium grade printer on the best settings using the heaviest cardstock I can with my printer. While I'm admittedly comparing apples to oranges (the DP9 colors are more pastel than the darker DZC pdf files), the quality of what I built doesn't compare to that of the Cityscape buildings.

I definitely recommend the set for anyone looking for a high quality yet cheap and easy to assemble urban terrain set. If the set were a movie, I'd give it 3 1/2 stars out of 4 with points taken off only for a slightly low building density (25 buildings for $50 would have been better IMO) and the strange lack of simple road curves on the tiles (only straight pieces and intersections... no turns). All in all, I'm very happy with my purchase.