Sweeeeet

Well played, Knight Models. This is a much higher quality product than I was expecting!

New from The Troll Trader

So after a brief hiatus while my attention was focused on Warzone, the TTCombat stuff has been piling up in my office and the most recent arrivals represent a real step up in terms of presentation.

So here we have the Apartment Building A, an extra floor for said building, a sheet of sidewalk pieces (genius!), some roof top accessories and finally a newly rescaled truck since the previous iteration was a little on the big side. Oh, and they all have instructions!

Pictures of the sheets to follow shortly.

The Bank and Garbage Truck are now available

Clearly you must buy both for your Zombie or Superhero game and drive one through the front of the other!

Garbage Truck!

Bank!

Batman never had this much trouble..

No Mordheim last night since I have played everyone in the campaign now, but I did play a demo of the Batman miniatures game instead. League of Shadows vs Joker's crew and boy, do guns hurt! Keeping up my losing streak from Mordheim, I lost the Batman game too although I think I'm going to have to read up on the rules before I decide whether or not I like the game. Thus far, I enjoyed playing the game, but don't like the mechanics of it. Requiring line of sight at the start of activation in order to get into close combat is a bit harsh when a model with a ranged weapon can move to get line of shoot, shoot, and then move back out of LOS.

I also received my TTCombat vehicles and got them assembled in time to take them to the Batman demo game (although they weren't needed). Really nice kits and a bargain for the price! Two MDF frames (one half size) and two small bits of acylic if you buy the Police variant:

I totally forgot to take pictures of the Police van on the frame but the layout it exactly the same, albeit with four small pieces that you put on the roof of the cab to accommodate the acrylic lights. As usual, very easy to build but I do have a few tips:

The pieces on the frame marked R and F are the axles for the rear and front of the vehicle respectively. When assembling the wheels, note that there are 8 segments with holes in the middle (to attach to the axle) but they are in two different sizes. Make sure you separate the smaller ones from the larger ones before you start gluing, as a wheel is comprised of a smaller segment with hole in it, larger segment with hole in it, segment with hub cap, and smaller segment with the rim of the tyre on it.

I also suggest gluing the wheel segments onto the axle one piece at a time, instead of assembling the whole wheel and trying to slide it on, otherwise it might get stuck half way and if you are using superglue you are going to have to take corrective action with a knife to fix the problem.

MDF: Good! Ronin: Awesome! Painting Progress: Some!

So I managed to make it to PAW on the weekend where I played a game of Wild West Exodus (neat system and minis but luckily for my wallet, there isn't a faction I am really drawn to) and Ronin (2 x 2 board? Handful of miniatures? Simple d6 system? Sold!). I picked up a new Bauhaus starter to supplement - or replace - the Bauhaus minis I got from the Warzone Kickstarter plus a few bits and pieces from Ainsty. Riding a brief wave of motivation, I spent a few hours on Sunday and Tuesday night working on the Undead Legionnaires from Project 2 and most of the base colours are down but I'm still finding it hard going and things are looking too messy to really bother with pictures.. hopefully I will be able to work on them tonight and tidy them up a bit.

Finally the Troll Trader peeps took my suggestion on board about the Warehouse extension kit and it is already selling on their eBay store. Despite the fact that I've just about run out of room, I'll pick up the warehouse + extension, plus another extension, in anticipation of receiving my Batman rulebook in a few weeks time.

Old Town Scenics - Warehouse

When I first saw this building on eBay, I had my doubts about how big it could really be because clearly the Troll Trader have an A4-sized cutter (although if they want to sell theirs and upgrade to an A3 one.. I am so sold on mdf terrain that I am totally in the market for a machine now!). Fortunately, this building really does feel like a (small) warehouse once complete and although it comes on 7 sheets, that is simply a reflection of the size of each component rather than the complexity so you are only looking at 35 minutes or so to cut out, sand and glue everything together. Price wise, it comes in at around £16 and when you compare it with their awesome looking Pub Bar Hotel in the Old Town Scenics range, it becomes clear that the pricing is simply an indication of the number of the number of sheets in the set rather than the complexity or usefulness of the build.. which is a pretty fair way of doing things.

As suggested above, this is a nice simple build and it's only the weird crates with the two bands around them that are at all fiddly to build. There is one 'ooops' moment when attaching the side walls to the floor piece, however.. the cuts for the holes are not flipped (because the wall is facing the other way) so the tabs don't line up. It's an easy fix though, you just need to snip off the tab.

This one issue aside, it's really hard not to see the potential of this warehouse. Sure, it isn't quite tall enough to warrant walkways and support beams up in the roof but it would be right at home on a table used for the Batman miniatures game, I reckon. I just hope the Troll Trader release an expansion kit for this set. 1 x floor panel, 1 x front and back wall and 2 (slightly shorter) roof sections and you could make this thing two, three or four buildings wide. It would look ace! One tip though - sand down the backs of the doors where they slot into the floor piece and upper rail - it's a bit of a tight fit othewise and it won't be easy to slide the doors open and closed once they are painted. In fact, I would probably leave the doors and upper rail off until after painting it complete.

The miniature used for scale is the Rail Golem from Malifaux on a 50mm base (I believe). So although the building itself is not very fancy (compared to the Townhouse A or the as-yet unbuilt Tower), the footprint is great and the potential is excellent. I certainly wouldn't hesitate to use this in a modern day game, either, and I think it will probably be the first of the TTCombat buildings I will actually paint. It may not be as swish as the two warehouse offerings from Sarissa Precision (which I have seen but sadly, don't own) but for this price it's pretty damned hard to beat.