"Age of Steam plus Great Evzone Experiment " Topic

Tackling two ongoing issues in my hobby activity.

link

Some questions

1) In FAI gunery ranges are in 1000s of yards. Is it still 100 yards=1 cm?

2) What do you think of the Evzonas idea?

Konstantinos Travlos

Not a naval gamer so can't help you there but I did like the look of the Evzone.

I compared your figure to the pictures of evzones I have. None of the evzones in my pictures have a pack--they all carry things in a blanket roll, just like your figure. I think I'd try extending the tunic with green stuff or the blue tack you are using, at least as an experiment on the one figure. Do post photos when you get the first couple finished!
For what it's worth, Greek officers at least in the earlier part of your period were transferred around enough that they wore standard officers' uniforms, rather than buy a special evzone officers' uniform, which they would have to pay for out of their clothing allowance, and would barely get to use before being transferred back to a line regiment. So, you can use French officers without the tunic buttons (Greek officers' tunics had hidden buttons).

Finally, I was told by a Greek shoemaker while in Athens that the evzones' shoes were designed so they could be used as a weapon. No idea if this is true, but it would be amusing to model this in your rules!

Grelber

Grelber. Extending the tunic is going to be tough as these are 10mm figures. On the blanket roll, the figure does have a pack, parly covered with the blanket. Not sure if I want to snip it off and re-sculpt the part of the blanket roll on the back.

I was aware of the officers thing, but I thought it was that only the privates and NCOs where in the evzone uniform. I did not know that the reason was the private provision of the uniform. Thanks. At 10mm I think my ACW Union proxies should be fine ;)

I have heard that story a lot of times. Now in my service in the Presidential Guard I had the chance to hold tsarouxia (I was alas in the Command Company not the Evzone company. Got a severe cold during training and had to be sent to the hospital for three weeks, so my Evzone experience ended before it started. Only parts I got was the standing unmoving training, the basic candence of ritual steps, and the do not talk or look at other people thing :p).

Anyway to get back on tack. The Tsarouxia are indeed heavy things, nail studded. I do not think they were built as weapons, but their heavy build plus the fact that they are iron shod with nails made them useful as weapons. I am sure someone at some battle threw them at the enemy (soldiers in battle lust do a lot of weird things I have been told/read). But they are not per se made as weapons.

One nasty after-effect of the iron shod is that when it rains in Athens, the marble sidewalks of Parliament become extremely slippery for the Evzones and are dangerous, because the iron nails do not have traction on wet marble.

Another less dangerous after-effect is that you can make the shoes produce fire sparks by dragging them on marble. If caught you would be punished by 5-10 days administrative imprisonment. When I was doing my service, the cohort that was about to be discharged went crazy at the 2:00 in the night watch. Booze, Evzones puncturing the sun-shield with the bayonets,and tsarouhia drag racing. They got caught by the Colonel, who was making one of his rare night rounds. I think 4-6 people got between 20 and 30 days of administrative imprisonment each. Consider they were going to be discharged in a week, and now would have to serve until the end of their administrative imprisonment. Ouch. Still it was glorious (they had it recorded and the video was shared among the soldiers).

In FAI gunery ranges are in 1000s of yards. Is it still 100 yards=1 cm?

Yes. The same as in GQ3.3.

In FAI gunery ranges are in 1000s of yards. Is it still 100 yards=1 cm?

Charlie 12 already answered the question, but in case you were looking for the definition in the rules, it's on page iv, top left:

Knot: 100 yards per Game Turn. Varies with the scale of the miniatures employed: 1:6000, 1:4800, 1:2400 and 1:3000 = 1 cm per knot (10 cms per 1,000yds). 1:1200 = 1 inch per knot.

If you look around the ODGW downloads and various forums, you'll find there are a lot of people who use a ground scale of 200yd/cm. I do that myself, partly to fit battles on real life table tops, partly so I can use my nice rangefinder measuring sticks (dowels graduated in 2" bands of alternating wood stain colors), and partly to fix the ratio of ground-scale-to-time-scale that the author deliberately broke:

Game Turn: Simulates six minutes of tactical action. There are 10 Game Turns to an hour. Movement rates are actually based on three minutes; the time simulated has been doubled to maintain player interest and simulate the effect of "dead time" inherit in any military operation.

However, since you're basically playing with pre-dreadnought-era ships, you're probably better off at 100yd/cm – the shooting ranges are shorter without DCT, the ships will tend to be slower than the modern fleet units of the era I've been playing with, and there's less scale distortion when using 1/2400 models.

- Ix

In your blog post, you mentioned speed of play, and I agree that the GQ3/FAI system is a bit clunky and slow as written. I've found a few ways to speed it up:

• Don't measure or pre-calcuate any gunnery shots. Just roll the d12s, pick up all the dice that show 4-9; if there are any left, then measure the range and step through the charts. Instead of rolling 1/2 the number of d12s for 1/2 hits, just keep half the 1s you rolled, and if there's only one, re-roll the die: even you keep it, odd you lose it.
  
• Make range-finding sticks marked in range bands (e.g. 12000yd "short" sticks in 2000yd increments, 24000yd "long" sticks in 3000yd increments). Measuring ranges becomes a simple in/out test without any conversions from cm to scale yards. I made mine from thin wooden dowels (about 2mm dia), marking each increment with a marker then filling in each band with alternating colors of wood stain.
  
• Have each player calculate and roll his shots independently, then leave markers around each target showing the number of hits achieved. The player running the ship rolls for hit results/locations after all shooting is over. I use Litko markers (orange for "penetrating" and yellow for "non penetrating") but you could also use dice.
  
• I created a custom QRS that converts the play sequence to igo/ugo. I hate pre-plotting – it takes too long and causes unrealistic numbers of collisions.
  
• Use the "fleet action" torpedo rules. I also created new plotting templates with wider angles (see my web page for PDFs) because I found that the short ranges, high speeds, and narrow angles combined to make torpedoes useless.
  
• Ignore the coal smoke rule, and count any shot across any part of a ship model as "obscured by coal smoke". Given the scale distortion, that seems accurate enough to me.
  

- Ix

Thanks IX good suggestions