Road to Warfare pt 5

First Platoon Finished!

It's been a while!
Well, that's a milestone - first unit finished! The gliders I'm going to do in a batch of airbrush maddness.

Taking my good friend (and amazing painter) Paul 'Tuffskull' Townsends (www.hobbybrush.com) advice, I covered the whole model and base with flat brown. This gives a great shading layer, especially for the skin.

Although the splinter camo was issued to the Fallschirmjager before the invasion of Crete, I decided to do a mix of grey/green and Splinter issued kit, to cover the mix, so these can be used as either early or mid war lists.

The 'Bridge by Bridge' book has a great FJ painting guide in the book, with three colour (shade, Main and highlight) Vallejo colours. The basing foliage is a mix of Army painter Field grass with mininatur 726-33 S 'Tufts with blossoms early fall'.

Whilst painting these guys, I also managed to get objective 1 painted.

Not long to go now, but I'm working through the next platoon!

Road to War(fare) Pt 4

So, everything is now built.....

The whole shebang!

Yup, that's a lot of toys. Gulp. At least with 6 weeks to go, I've got it all built. That's something, right? The observant of you will spot some shiny new objective markers!

I took a Zvezda bf109 F-2, and built it with the wheels up. Nice little kit really, the horizontal stabiliser (the mini wings on the tail) was a pain, they are individual with the two halves meeting at the join in the tail. As long as you remove any flash, you should be fine. 

As I want each objective marker to tell a mini story, I wanted to have the aircraft having forced landed due to engine damage - so the canopy was carefully cut using the citadel hobby saw to remove the centre section, gluing the front and back to the aircraft, as if the pilot had jettisoned it before landing (which is wise, as a jammed canopy from a twisted frame is the last thing you want if a fire starts!).

The props (propeller blades) were carefully rolled around a needle file, to bend them back. Green stuff helps earth the model to the base. Bullet holes are simply twisting the pointly end of the file in a line - painting oil/fuel spills from them will really make it pop. finally, the downed pilot beckoning for rescue is from the Peter Pig 'downed aircrew' collection:  http://www.peterpig.co.uk/german.htm

The second is a a shot-up kubelwagon, again from peter big. I had to cut it in half, as the model comes with two sculpted onto the same base - it took a lot of greenstuff to help blend it into the base. It's still quite high, but ho-hum, it'll do!

Poor guys. Should be fun to paint though!

Continuing the casualties theme, the last objective uses the peter pig dead fallschirmjager. As the paratroopers used a drop harness that attached under the armpits (more on that on another post) they need to recover their weapons from drop containers - these fallschirmjager were too slow to do so. During the games, I'll have a flat marker under these scenic objectives, taken from the openfire set - that way if the action gets close and units need to move over the objective, I can remove just take the models out of the way.

I'm off gliding tomorrow, and have a major painting session Sunday! More then.

Fez

Tank Aces - starting soon!

We're starting a Tank Aces campaign at the Guildford Games Club!

Wiiiiider than your average table (canned coffee not included)

All the rules are given in the Blood Guts and Glory source book, and we've also gotten the campaign pack, with a lovely map, tokens and victory pins!

The campaign is an escalation one, with three 'campaign rounds'. During the first two rounds, you play the 'scrap yard' mission, where each tank acts as a warrior team, which is useful as the points cap for round one is 500pts, then 700pts for round two. In the third round, its 900pts and back to 'legal' standard armies. This is great for starting players, as tank only battles make for a rules light game to ease yourself into the game system.

Playing on a 4x4 board, the scrapyard missions use the 'tactical edge' objective markers. These are captured as a normal objective, but are then placed into your 'hand', allowing you to re-roll (or force your opponent to re-roll) skill/motivation/armour/firepower/to hit rolls, depending on what is written on the card. You win the missions by earning more XP than your opponent....

XP is what gives your Tank Ace his skills! One of the tanks in your force represents your tank ace, and they can unlock special skills such as moving and firing at full RoF, extra movement, gun range, a whole heap of nice things. 

Its like hide and seek... only with tanks!

I'll be sure to post future battle reports and campaign progress after we start next Monday night!

SPRANG! Yeah, it bounced....

Road to War(fare) Pt 3

Well, its all go this end! Between flying, work, starting a Tank Aces Campaign (see other post), agreeing to co-run a war games/modelling show, taking another painting commission and general life, its been hard to find the time to hobby, let alone post about hobby!

Still, taking my good friend Fred's advice (http://fredswarhammerstuff.blogspot.co.uk/) I'm going to start posting little, and often, rather than wait for a whole massive article to be ready.

So, I've been building like crazy. At the moment, I've built both Luftlandesturm Platoons, the HMG's, both the AT and four of the eight gliders. I already had the Flak guns and the Motorcycle transports built, so that's a positive.

As far as the brown holed bases go - here's a pro tip: Make sure you fill the gaps and spare holes with green stuff! PVA and sand looks good until the PVA dries, where upon it contracts and leaves a nice round divot on the base, needing several more layers of PVA to fill.

The Mighty Force so far

I'll have reviews of the individual platoons in due course.