Patrol Angis - An AAR and Thoughts on the Game

I have gotten several games of Patrol Angis played through now.  4 solo games and 1 with my buddy Darby using the miniatures from the starter set I bought a while back.  First I'll let you have a look at the game I played this evening.

Scenario:  The Prydian Forces (Red/White) are planning to break through a defensive position setup by the League of Yordan (Green/Yellow).

League of Yordan starting positions...

The Prydian Assault.

For the first turn of the scenario, I gave the Prydian forces the initiative.  They did a normal die roll to determine the number of activation tokens to be issued out to the two sides.  The Prydian forces move up one of their assault rifle teams and hit the enemy team on the hill.  The fire is devastating, killing over half the enemy team.  They fail morale and lost their activation token.  A good start for the Prydians!

The League of Yordan troops send in the Duxis battlesuits and hit the assault rifle team pretty hard.  This takes up their one activation for the turn.  The Prydians had put 2 activations on their support weapon team, so they moved up and on the second activation hit the Duxis battlesuits managing to put down the suit with the howitzer.  Things are looking even better!

During the 2nd turn, using a their jump jets the Prydian close assault team gets in a close as they can to hit the support weapon team on the hill.  Sadly their fire is pretty ineffective (only 1 casualty) due to having to snap-shot on the run.

The 3rd turn is a hard swing in favor of the League.  They have too much fire power.  Especially with the Espaten team on the far hill.  The large mounted lasers rip the assault team to shreds leaving only 1 survivor.

The remaining Duxis have also been doing some cleanup work on their end.  Finishing off the Prydian support weapons team and the assault rifle team.

The Prydian leader calls for the retreat.

Meanwhile, the poor soldier left on the hill offers the enemy a chance of surrender...

Patrol Angis Thoughts...

I have to say I really like this game.  It definitely holds to it's claim of being a One-Hour Wargame.  The action is fast and brutal.  Cover is very important for survival, but it basically comes down to the fact that if you can shoot someone, they can shoot you back.  So if you don't like taking heavy casualties, this game will be tough  for you!

Another thing that's pretty important in this game is winning initiative.  Not only do you get an extra activation.  But you get to pick all the casualties that a both sides take during that turn.  As in the case of the first round when the Prydian support unit managed a total of 5 wounds on the 3 Duxis battlesuits.  Each Duxis has a total of 5 damage points it can take before being destroyed.  If the Yordan player had the initiative, they could have distributed the 5 wounds between the 3 Duxis figures and kept them all in action.  Instead the Prydian player had initiative and was able to put them all on one Duxis, and also picked the one with the indirect fire weapon (that ignores cover bonuses)!

There's quite a bit of flexibility in how you can create your forces.  It certainly lends itself to a space opera feel.  One thing I have noticed with the starter though, is that it's pretty easy for this game to get imbalanced.  5 games so far and the Prydians have lost every game.  I think I can even it up pretty soon with a few tweaks once I get some new troops painted up.  But the warning here is if you don't have friends that like a gentlemanly game, it could be very frustrating.

I'm looking forward to tweaking my armies and getting some more games in.  I also picked up the new vehicle rules so I'm sure there will be some more heavy hitters appearing on the battlefield as well.

Have a good week friends!

Rod

3 Battlesuits and the Ion Age Starter Set is Done!

This week I sat down and assembled the 3 Duxis Battlesuits that were the last pieces of the Starter set I bought for the Ion Age: Patrol Angis game.  Feels good to have it all finished and now I can test out some games.  The Duxis Battlesuits were the last unit for my League of Yorden force.  These were cool mini's and really about the size of 28mm figures, as you'll see in the picture when compared to the 15mm.

With those done, I decided to take the "family" shots of both forces.  So here goes!

Prydian force:

Once again I'm struggling with taking pictures of the 15mm guys.  So there's a bit of blur.  Also, I noticed when I was taking the pictures that I forgot to paint one of the guys armor bits white.  There's a gray guy in the mix.  I'll fix him later.  Funny how you miss that stuff.  I guess I was tired!

And now for the League of Yorden force:

Now to play some games.  After that I'll order some stuff here and there to give options to each force.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great rest of your weekend!

Rod

Retained Knights for the League of Yorden

I'm back to working on my Ion Age starter set (plus extras).  I have 3 more battle suits to complete before I'm finished and ready to actually play a game.  It's about time I wrap this project up so I can have some fun to go along with all the work.

Anyway, here's the last unit of Retained Knight I needed for my League of Yorden.  Four of these figures are being reposted from earlier this year, but I wanted to show the completed unit so they're all together.

In addition, I'm not sure where I got this next figure.  I think it was the freebie that came from buying the starter box.  I'm not 100% positive though, and I couldn't seem to find the figure on the website.  Any-who, I believe this was labeled as a Knight Errant.  I decided to put it in the League of Yorden colors in case I wanted some more options for this army list.

Sadly, that was all I got to accomplish this weekend since I had to deal with a sinus infection.  If you ever get the opportunity to visit Texas I'll just go ahead and warn you that January through November is pretty much allergy season here (although December might get ya too...)  Good times.  Yeehaw!

Have a good week friends!

Rod

Knights with Boobs and a French Lancer

Right now I'm still working my way through a unit of French Lancers,  but I took one night to knock out a few more figures for my Ion Age gaming.  These are some more retained Knights for the League of Yordan.  This whole unit is female, so to prove it beyond just having expanded chest armor, they decided to take off their helmets to show off their lovely hair styles.  Not sure how practical that is in combat, but I'm sure it helps with miniatures sales!

Also, I've finished my first lancer.  Took a bit as I worked on finding the right colors.  It will be hard to tell anything from this picture as I ended up washing out all the highlights with the lighting... oh well.  Miniature photography is harder than you'd think, no matter how many tutorials I read!

Ion Age - Precinct Adventurers

The nice thing about 15mm figures is you can sit down and paint one pretty fast.  So while I'm working my way through a batch of French Lancers I try to take a break from time to time and paint some of the 15mm Sci-Fi figures.  Hopefully this will allow me to make frequent updates to my blog while I work on the larger stuff.

This batch is a five figure set from The Ion Age Universe.  They're labeled as Precinct Adventurers.  For me, they'll probably end up being spaceship crew members or inhabitants of my sci-fi town.  Here's the group shot...

One of these figures you saw in a previous post, but the rest are all newly painted.  Here's the one I painted previously.

And the new stuff.

Hope you all had a great weekend.  Cheers!

Rod

League of Yordan - Espaten Team

Moving forward with my Ion Age starter box, I've now started painting my League of Yordan figures.  The League of Yordan is one of the rebellious groups of Barons who chose to separate from the Empire and try to run theirs planets the way they wanted.  In the rulebook fluff, their colors were green and gold so I decided to stay with that color scheme.  First unit to get the brush was a weapon team.  This is the Espaten Gun and it's crew.

One of the things I enjoy about this setting compared to other sci-fi settings is you can make it colorful.  Since these are knights in the future, I like the idea of having bright flashy colors.  It's a nice break from all the futuristic camouflage patterns and subdued colors I've been doing for my regular sci-fi gaming.

10 more figures and 3 power armor suits and I'll be ready to play some Patrol Angis.

Hope your week starts off right!

Rod

Wrapping up the Prydian Force

I have finished up my Prydian force and moved on to my League of Yordan force for the Ion Age. The last two figures for my Prydian force were some "hero" characters.  They are mentioned prominently in the Patrol Angis rulebook fluff regarding the battle on Dando II.  And here they are...

First up is Baron Bathazar Fulcrum, commander of the 43rd Knightly Regiment of Prydia.

His aide and trust companion Knight David Jerome.

And for fun... one of my Christmas gifts was a pack of adventurers also from the Ion Age collection.  I painted this guy up and decided to name him Zirk.

Thanks for stopping by!
Rod

Can't Quite Put a Finger On It...

Painted two new figures I got from the Ion Age collection.  Just for fun I made a little story...

The vending machine robot is one of those miniatures I just knew I had to paint the minute I saw it.  I think I ordered it within uh... 5 minutes of seeing it? It's a fun one.

Thanks for stopping by!

Rod

More Prydian Retained Knights

Here's the second Post (aka squad of 10 troops) of Prydian Knights I got in my Ion Age starter.  This leaves me with 2 more figures to finish my Prydian starter force.  The two remaining figures are hero characters so I hope that will go pretty quickly.  Even though there's only two left I needed a change of pace from the same color scheme so I started a couple of random figures just for fun.  Then it's on to the next batch!

Here's a look at the finished unit.

Thank you for stopping by!

Rod

Entering the Ion Age

I've been following the development of this line of miniatures called the The Ion Age for a while now.  It reminds me of some of those great space operas I read in my youth.  When you look at the miniatures you'll see they have their own distinct style.  Knights in space!  So when I finally felt I had time to commit to a new miniature endeavor I ordered the starter box that comes with miniatures and the game rules, Patrol Angis.

The first army I'm painting is the Prydian Army.  Following along with the descriptions in the rule book (which has lots of fluff I might add), the Prydian Army's colors are white and red.  I went with a slightly different scheme than was in the pictures, focusing more on red than white.  Maybe seeing so much of Santa these past few weeks was an influence???  I'm also leaving the bases intentionally "generic" because I want to try and play around with different alien terrain, and didn't want to set the figures to a certain theme.

Post of Retained Knights

Patrol Angis is a platoon level game, so I will be painting a platoon for each side (usually 20-22 figures).  The sub-elements you choose to make up your platoon is where you have the flexibility to match the force to your play style.  Right now I have what came in the starter, so for the Prydians I get two posts (10 men unit) of Retained Knights and two hero characters.  So I'm close to halfway done with the Prydians!

Thanks for visiting!

Rod