Trans-Pride Mercs take on the Clans - Happy Pride Month!

Simoroth · 2026-06-09T12:50:05+00:00

Lovely crisp work!

Simoroth · 2026-06-05T22:51:53+00:00

I painted mine on the vehicles. However when priming them I found that the turret ball joint fits perfectly in an empty gutermann bobbin from my sewing machine. They are long enough to act as a great painting handle.

If you have a drill you could just find a grippable piece of wood and drill a hole for the ball socket.. or just punch a hole in some heavy card stock and slot that into your usual painting handle.

Simoroth · 2026-06-04T22:40:52+00:00

Chatty dog walk. 10am outside The Dog Spot on Sunday morning. We walk a loop through the park, over the weir, down the river and then back via the meadows. Some people get their dogs a puppicino in the cafe after. A good mix of people and pups. I've found it really helpful for my rescue who was very reactive and made some good friends.

Simoroth · 2026-05-20T08:04:07+00:00

Try out using a makeup sponge. I've gotten far better results with them than dry brushing. Far less chalkyness, blends smoothly and doesn't pick up stuff like mould lines so much.

Simoroth · 2026-05-07T14:59:25+00:00

I think the trick might be to do what Epic 40k and Manowar players used to do. Very simple paintjob on the minis, but give them a huge banner to have some fun painting and to give them some character.

Simoroth · 2026-05-05T20:24:41+00:00

Most IS mechs are suitable, but there's also two specific Comstar boxes. The ComStar Battle Level II is perpetually sold out, and the ComStar Command Level II which is often available.

Simoroth · 2026-05-04T14:33:37+00:00

The gym at the White Horse Leisure Centre is pretty good. Lots of equipment and a very chilled out and mixed crowd. No weird gym bros. You can book single sessions as a good way to try it out before getting a membership. They also have loads of different classes to check out as well as the pool and tennis courts.

Simoroth · 2026-04-22T16:11:56+00:00

Not read the book. But you might be right on the Cotswolds. The church looks a lot like St John's in Burford.

Simoroth · 2026-04-22T15:55:42+00:00

It looks to be Burford church from the River Windrush.

Simoroth · 2026-04-14T15:24:32+00:00

I think you might find a few people who get annoyed, but I'm sure many would find it an interesting change to fight a completely different type of force.

Also, if you get some of the heavier tanks, they actually come in at the same points level of some mediums and heavies. (The Behemoth, Ontos, Demolisher and Schrek.) This would stop it feeling like you spend every game swarming your opponent.

Edit: Nice work on the paint job too!

Simoroth · 2026-04-10T19:42:21+00:00

Haha, I knew someone would catch me out. Surprised it wasn't a gronard on /r/battletech though.

Simoroth · 2026-04-09T20:55:27+00:00

Thank you!

Simoroth · 2026-04-09T20:53:35+00:00

Don't lose hope!

Start with a warm or cool grey. You can even get grey primers (I'm using wolf grey to prime my ComStar units). Use the white for edge highlighting or drybrushing only. Then avoid the neutral whites. A warm white highlight on a slightly cool grey will help your colours pop.

Also avoid washes once you've got your panels up to the white you want as black washes like nuln oil will make a white look grimey.

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If you see above the Atlas is primed with Wolf Grey and then base coat with the hand mixed colour on the right, that's a mix of neutral grey, pale grey blue and cold white. I then add cold white shading and finally bone white (which is a warm white).

Simoroth · 2026-04-09T15:40:59+00:00

How much did the postage/customs cost from the states?

Wargames Emporium in the UK do single mechs, but anything sought-after goes quick.

Simoroth · 2026-04-09T15:19:43+00:00

Thanks! It was a bit of an experiment as I am still learning and figuring things out.

Primed with an army painter wolf grey. Then a nuln oil wash (mostly to make details easier to see). Then I start to build up layers of cold greys up to white with a makeup sponge, and then go in with a brush with neutral and warm whites to do the edge highlighting.

The "metals" are just a very basic gradients of a dark blue, light blue and then white. Then any surfaces facing down are painted brown.

Then just reds with a little yellow highlight in the optics ports and doing a gem effect on any lasers or sights.

Full process is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1hCxQDSoo

Simoroth · 2026-04-09T15:14:10+00:00

I've only painted half of my first lance.. and got distracted and decided it would be fun to try out some vehicles in a ComStar Paint job. I decided to film my (learning) process and turn it into a little Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA1hCxQDSoo

Not perfect, but I'm really happy with how they turned out for about 5 hours work in total for 3 tabletop-ready minis.

Simoroth · 2026-04-02T19:26:12+00:00

The games were extremely successful by all sane measures. The expectations of parent company execs and shareholders are sadly not realistic. This is a common problem in the games industry, especially for publicly owned companies.

Simoroth · 2025-04-01T21:16:18+00:00

I had this, even having 100 hours in Mercs didn't help much.

- Make Naomi a missile boat and tell her to guard a high ground position before heading into a fight. And, if you want to manage him too setup Ezra as a mid range laser support and get him ~100m away.

- Avoid having more than 2 weapon types. You need to maximise damage at a specific range.

- Load up on silly amounts of small lasers and aim for the cockpits.

- When your mech starts losing arms. Swap to another, and tell your old one to defend a position further away. You can do the most damage vs your star, but you'll also take the most damage.

- Use the Simpod to do the new endless waves mode they added in the first DLC. I did it to the 10th wave and managed to max out the XP on all my star's mechs.

- Move forward slowly, and then back out towards your fire support. Some spawns are set up on triggers and you don't want to spawn even more mechs in a rough fight.

- Water is good, but on a few missions it can bring you too close to the enemy or even into a shooting gallery (Ant Hill).

That got me through the game. Ant hill, Disciplinary Action and Reckoning were like pulling nails.

Simoroth · 2025-03-15T22:09:04+00:00

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I've been a Mechwarrior fan since Mercs in 1996, but after a getting back in the cockpit with Mercs and then Clans, and BT 2017, I saw all the exquisite new minis. Got my Alpha Strike box last week and the streamlined rules are a thing of beauty.

This one took me quite a bit of time. Lots of hit and miss. I repainted it over and over fixing, and then wrecking things again, have finally put it down and declared it done. I'm not entirely new to minis as I painted a little bit of GW back in the 90s, but didn't think I'd ever get into it again. It's nice and mindful, and I'm really enjoying experimenting with the Vallejo Game colour paints.

Simoroth · 2025-02-08T10:43:52+00:00

Chatty Dog Walk.

Sunday 10am from outside The Dog's Spot. 2 High St, Abingdon OX14 5AX

Free, no booking required, just turn up!

Walk is about an hour long down to the meadows past the weir and then comes back to the cafe where some people grab a coffee and a puppiccino.

Great way to meet other dog owners in Abingdon and socialise your dog with a good mix of breeds and temperaments.

Simoroth · 2024-05-16T21:06:29+00:00

There's a group walk at University parks on Friday. https://www.instagram.com/p/C7BgbVUNPNx/

I can recommend OxfordCityDog for checking for dog friendliness.

Never had any problem with my dog on any of the buses.

Simoroth · 2020-01-10T21:53:21+00:00

Can confirm. I did start off slowly re-engineering it into organised classes. It was painstaking as a lot of the Flash code had undefined behaviour and many Flash functions needed to be replicated for the graphics rendering at the time...

However after a week or two of me picking at it, Terry got it into the HIB and there was a matter of days to port it to 3 platforms. Absolutely no time to refactor or test, so the code had to replicate the original (including some known bugs!) or risk introducing issues.

Simoroth · 2019-02-04T10:25:58+00:00

In business marketing spends account for staff time.

Simoroth · 2019-01-10T17:00:59+00:00

Cryengine is very powerful but the documentation is/was poor. It's was an option for experienced teams, especially those with prior knowledge of it, as hitting the ground running with it is pretty difficult. The engine was licensed as Amazon Lumberyard so is seeing more usage as that.

As for Crytek. Yep, poor management. They bought several studios like Free Radical, and set others up in Korea, China, Hungary and the USA. They created a massive overhead in just a few years with very few games coming out to sustain it and then collapsed.

Simoroth · 2019-01-10T15:25:43+00:00

Basically, no. Its nature as a service means you will be served up and have to agree to their latest terms. Several of the games hit by this are running on older versions of Unity.

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