"Commands & Colors: Ancients with Minis and Hexon Scenics. " Topic

Hello all,

Santa very kindly brought me C&C:A this year. I've had great fun using the blocks but I'm itching to get going with minis. I already have 28mm Romans and Celt/Barbarian types and my regular opponent has Greeks and Carthagians. For a while now we've been toying with idea of moving into 10mm for a blast at Warmaster Ancients(WMA)- we have the rulebook and a small amount of excellent pendraken minis but we're no where near playing yet. Having had so much fun with C&C:A (and being an impulsive gamer/mini collector) we're now stuck as to what to do next. Do we continue to use our 28mm with WAB and go all 10mm to hit two birds with one stone by basing our 10mm for WMA but also using them for CCA? Is that do-able? We'll need a new board as well. I've come across the Hexon system (http://www.kallistra.co.uk/) and I like the look of it. With 100mm hexes 28mm minis could be used for CCA in units that would fit into the Hex but I think we'd lose the look of a grand army that 10mm minis would offer. However I accept CCA isn't designed with the 'Grand' look in mind but part of the attraction of using 10mm minis is that it would look better. Also, is the Hexon system any good? I reckon I would need one box of 21 tiles plus 10 singles (terrain tiles would also be required). It would certainly resolve the problem I have of board storage.

I appreciate I'm raising many questions in one post but have any TMPers attempted the same?

Regards,

Rich

I made a hex mat with hexes roughly 120mm wide; this allows me to use my 28mm ancients for C&CA (and also my 20mm stuff for Battlecry and Memoir44).

A production decision. Most of Richard Borg's games use miniatures in some fashion. I have watched and participated in many of Richard's convention playtesting at Hurricon/Recon. I have even sold him some minis for some playtesting. He uses 25mm at the Orlanso shows for the system.

He also did a miniature demo with miniatures for this system at the Austin show that we were at.

Our club uses a mix of 15, 20 and 28mm figures – using DBA basing for the various troop types, but obviously each unit now has 4 elements.

We use a hex mat of the same size as Pyruse – the game looks pretty epic, even in 20mm.

picture

This is a picture of the original Cannae deployment, using 20mm plastics

Well I stand corrected on the 'epic' front with the larger scale minis – that looks great. What size of hex are you using?

I am doing exactly what you propose except with 6mm figures based on Warmaster sized bases. I purchased enough hexon to do an epic board or a couple of standard sized boards. I like Hexon for this since their scenics range is very nice as well. It makes setting up terrain very easy. The only problem is that they do not have single hex hills. I have not tried to modify what they do have though. The hexon also work nicely just with the blocks while you are growing the armies to cover the periods that you want to do.

cheers,

Jeff

SAF! Like the hex sheet in that picture and it might just be the thing to get me going painting the huge 20mm plastic collection I have for the 2nd Punic War.

Graham

I'm in the middle of a 10mm C&C:A project myself. I'd also considered using Warmaster basing to begin with, but the numbers (and by extension the costs) were just too much. I ended up basing infantry units on 20mm x 20mm bases (i.e. half WMA base size), and found I could cram in 24 close-order infantry per unit (or 16 open-order), and still play on the board that came with the game. My cavalry are on 40 x 20mm bases, the same as WMA. With around 15-ish units per side in most battles, we get enough troops on the table to make it look credible.

On the other hand, even with these 'smaller' units, I needed about 1400 figures to fill out the two armies (not including specific Greek figs for the Syracusans, etc). That's a lot of painting! After 3 weeks, I've barely scratched the surface. Even worse, although I bought the cheapest minis money could buy for this project (OG Grand Scale), the sheer volume of them still meant the price came out to several hundred dollars, and I'm still trying to replace a few of the crappier sculpts anyway. I'll probably also have to buy a few more bases before I'm through!

I guess all I'm saying is, beware the time and money involved!

Jeff -

Kallistra now has single hex hills.

Have you found their stuff sturdy; and does the flock stay on well?

Here are some of my 28s on a 125mm Hotz Hexmap (apologies to anyone who has seen them before).

link

28s look great, but you need a lot of them! Especially since I use units of 6 elements of heavy foot, 4 of light foot and 3-4 of mounted as a unit. I like the way that 6-element units hang around a bit longer.

I'm also very impressed by Earthquake's pic!

Simon

Kallistra have just released single hex hills!!!!!

We play C&C with 28mm miniatures on a regular tabletop (ie. no hexes). It works just fine. We translate each reference to "hex" into "6-inch increment", so a movement or range of "2" equals 12", and so on.

Kallistra Hexon II terrain is brilliant. Expensive, but worth it. Hexes are 4ins (100mm) across.

The Kallistra terrain would work brilliantly with minis based on 4cm frontage, such as the DBx 15mm scale, but not with 28s IMHO. However my opponent successfully uses Warhammer-based 28s on the bigger Hotz hexes.

Simon

Dan,

Great news on the hills. I have not visited the site in a while. I have found the terrain to be very sturdy. I have only used it for about a dozen games but no problems with the flocking sticking. I got the multi-toned grass with brown flocking. They look very realistic. Now that they have single hex hills I think there will be no stopping me.

One other thing is that I found they would help out a lot on the shipping cost if you were willing to buy a couple of sets and some scenics. I spent around $600 USD and they split the shipping cost with me. All I did was ask if they could help out on some of the cost.

Jeff

Does anyone have C&C Expansion pack #3 ( Roman civil war) yet?

How do the new rules look like?

Cheers
Mike

I just received my expansions, in the UK. Woo hoo!

Simon

I have both expansion #2 and #3. The big addition with #3 is the new epic rules. You get a 2nd mounted board to match with the board in #2 to give you a large playing field. I played a game of epic at Con-quest last fall with Mr. Borg and it was a nice game. It is much like an overlord scenario but I think there are more choices to make because of the different types of unit interactions.

Jeff

Thanks for the various comments folks.

The long term plan will be to double up on 10mm WHA and CCA but as someone else pointed out thats a lot of painting on a lot of minis.

Good to hear Hexon II gets the thumbs up.

VB

Hi Mates
Til now there has been no Forum for Command and Colors
So an mate of mine and I started one.

It ia a new forum that will give the payers a forum for Questions and answers, a place to show of their house rules , with news , etc

I do hope you'll take a look and if you play C&C I do hope that you will use it and enjoy it.

Here is the Link
candc.yourbb2.com

Cheers
Ps sure it is a free site :)
Mi

A friend took some pics of a 28mm Epic C&C game at the BigRedBatCave recently; they feature 2 Hotz hexmats and a cast of thousands!

link

I really rate the Epic rules.

Simon

Wh have a new C&C Forum
Here is the link
candc.yourbb2.com

I hope to see you there
Cheers
Mike

I am looking for 4 inch or 5 inch hex matts/boards and Hex terrian for them,, can someone help me please

thank you
CHeers
Mike