"Taiping figures painted and rules available for download" Topic

Well, the title says it all, really.

I've done my first unit of Irregular's Taiping infantry. Pictures and a link to download my "Taiping Era" rules over on my blog:

link

Downloaded.

Cyrus:the Great: Hopefully you will enjoy them. They went down well at CoW (although with a dispute about the mathematical model enshrined in them later ensued), but it'd be good to have feedback from a completely blind play test of them.

Thanks, Trebian. I logged into Google, but can only find an "open with" button that references third-party apps, one of which seems to want yet more of my personal information – how might I simply download it?

Good to see and interesting rules.

Skeptic: You've got me there. You should just click on the link and have pdf displayed. With the cursor at the top of the screen there should be a download icon (an arrow pointing down to a line). Click on that.

Of course it's a bit hard for me to test as I log on as me and have full powers over my drives!!! The others of you who have succeeded in this might be able to correct anything I've got wrong.

OB – Glad to see you find them interesting. I was going for that rather than good. There's so much generic stuff out there that's tweaked with a bit of chrome I wanted to embed the period flavour in the system. You could probably game the period with Black Powder, but that just felt wrong.

Should have some cavalry pictures up tomorrow.

Looking forward to seeing your cavalry I only have two figures painted so far.

Osprey have a reconstruction of the 'victory helmet' on page 25 of their title. The background colour is black or perhaps dark blue, there are white ovals lined in red containing ideograms in red circling the helmet, the the tip of the helmet is red lined with yellow horizontal bands and scalloped in the same. Additional lozenges and diamonds in light blue decorate between the rest. Almost impossible to paint in 15mm.

"almost impossible" but you had a go, right?

In Ian Heath's Big Green Book of Asian Armies, it describes it as: "Embroidered with coloured flowers and cloud patterns, and had four white panels round the front edge inscribed with characters". The drawing in B&W on p158 shows lots of lines and fiddly detail.

Based on that I had a light blue background ('cos of the clouds), some white blobs, – clouds, – some red splashes with yellow centres – flowers – and four white dots with smaller black dots in the middle.

I might do some of the remainder in the style you describe.

Cavalry are currently waiting for the PVA to dry on the bases before polyfilla/sand them paint.

Thanks for making this available!

Thanks, Trebian. Even though the "download" button was not displayed, I found it by its "mouseover" text. Still, the download was aborted by an error of some kind – I may clear all cookies and try again some other time.

I did but it was impressionistic at best.

Sorry to bother you about this, Trebian, but would it be too much trouble for me to request a copy by e-mail? Thanks!

Skeptic, – you shouldn't have any problems that need cookies clearing or whatever. It may just be google's weekend blues.

Kind of late coming to the party on this one but first I saw of it….

Anyhow I own a large collection of Taipings and Imperials plus an EVA force too so I downloaded your rules and will soon give these a try. I'm always looking for anything which might give me a good Taiping game, it is such an interesting period.

Thanks!

mghFomd: Look forward to your feedback on the rules. Check out the blog for game descriptions and the handy use of Mah Jong tiles as markers.

Some more figures finished:

link

@Trebian: They look good! I was pondering the same question – would the members of the same tribe or clan have worn different hats?

By the way, I was able to download your rules, but had to login and accept some sharing of information with "Lumin PDF".

Skeptic: I don't know what "Lumin PDF" is. If I have destroyed your PC please accept my apologies. It's not something anyone else has mentioned.

As for the hats/tribes…I couldn't sort the figures I had to make the units all one head piece or another, so in the end I just went with it, arguing to myself that in the heat of a campaign anything could happen.

Trebian,

This Saturday I am going to be trying out your rules. I've got a big collection so there is going to be a load of troops on the table, we'll see how rapidly the rules play.
I'm excited to try it.

I already changed one thing, I don't think rockets should be any better one square away than say for example 3 squares away as they just fired them at an angle up into the sky and hoped they dropped close enough to hurt anyone, they usually did not. In fact, like some games with mortars, one could argue there should be a minimum range.

Anyhow will let you know how it all goes!

mghFond: Look forward to your AAR. The rules are out there to be used, so go ahead and change them!

I think that at a closer range you could fire the rockets more accurately by lowering the trajectory. To be honest I've never used the rocket rules in anger, – they're there for completeness sake more than anything else

Yeah, they shouldn't be important anyhow given all the eye witness accounts of them pretty much go like this:

______ sees hundreds of them fired off, lots of noise, etc but never sees anyone actually killed by them.

But a friend of mine made four rocket stands for my collection – two each for the Imps and the Taipings so I feel I need to use them whenever I play a rebellion game.

We played the game last night. Imperial army attacking some fortifications held by the Taipings, both sides got reinforcements on Turn 5. For the Imps that meant the EVA with their superior firepower.

The attackers had a total of 25 units and the defenders 21 units. One thing I did do differently to show their lack of coordination was to draw playing cards – red a Taiping unit could move, black an Imperialist.

Well, it certainly was bloody enough. When we called it after a little over 3 hours the Imps had lost 11 units and the Taipings 7. Sadly the EVA infantry never got close enough to fire a shot but their artillery had started in on pounding the enemy.

Overall the group found the artillery a bit too good. Almost all the destroyed units were by cannonfire. The attackers felt they couldn't storm the fortified lines because the artillery fire just melted their units. Granted they did have a lot of mediocre to crappy troops.

We all loved the use of the square grid for movement, much easier really!

Not convinced of the EDNA mathematical model though. It seems like in some ways being a 12 or a 10 quality unit doesn't help as much as one would think. A few examples in order here:

A D4 unit can get a -2 modifier for rallying with a leader in same square, so can a D10 unit but it pretty much guarantees the D4 unit will rally unlike the D10 one. Unless we did something wrong.

Also in a few melees we felt the high quality troops were no different than the bad ones. I had a fierce bodyguard ying of Taipings slam into a Green Flag unit ( in MV we are talking D10 v.s. D4) yet for the melee the quality troops got no real bonuses fighting crappy troops other than front rank doubled for attacking. The Green Flags won the melee.
Granted the dice rolling favored them.

We had fun with it and we discussed the game as guys were leaving. We may well try it again with some more modifications. Hey, I do that all the time with my own madeup rules too, I'm always tinkering.

Thanks for putting it on your blog so we could give it a shot.
Oh and sorry but no pics, my digital cam batteries were dead.

Thanks for giving the rules a try. That's a big game you're playing there!

A unit rolling a d10 should be using the European trained modifiers, so in a d10 v d4 unit they're deducting 4 not 2. In games of Imps v Taipings I'd expect most units to be 6-8.

Massed artillery is devastating, so don't charge it frontally (!). It's best not to have more than 2 guns in a square, and I tend to spread them out a bit. Wait 'til you fight the Brits with Armstrongs.

The EDNA model has garnered some criticism. It's the only die rolling model that mirrors a catastrophe curve so I've stuck with it despite the limitations.