New Model Armies

At the back of Ian Shaw’s WW2 Army Lists (1986, Tabletop Games) there is a section entitled Beginners’ Choice, comprising four evenly matched battlegroup-sized armies from the late war era:

• British Armoured Recce Regiment – North West Europe 1944
• US Armored Combat Command – North West Europe 1945
• Soviet Army Tank Corps – Poland 1944
• German Armoured Kampfgruppe – All Fronts 1944

As I will be using three rules sets over the next year to compare and contrast, these lists are a wee bit larger than ideal given that all three revolve around te fielding of a reinforced company. But as an old school wargamer, this is immaterial in practise.

All of the lists will need some degree of tweaking to bring them into line with my preferred timeframe of July – September 1944, particularly in the case of the Americans. I intend to use these four armies as my showpieces at the club, nationally and online, therefore they will be the suject of most of my personal painting and modelling time over the next year or so.

I envisage a lot of focus on making all four armies as individually eyecatching as possible, to the point where they become my signature as it were. In addition, they will form the basis for much of my online content; generating reviews, progress reports and gaming examples on a regular schedule, in addition to my business projects and other gaming activities.

There are several areas in the acquisition and construction of these four armies where I will really depart from my erstwhile norm. For one, I will be using extra crew and minis from a variety of manufacturers to give the vehicular components a human aspect. Secondly I intend to incorporate the construction of terrain pieces (particularly buildings and other manmade influences) into the process, along with a degree of customisation and detailing I’ve only previously done for one-off models.

As far as the actual models and figures go, I will be using Battlefront primarily with additional pieces from Peter Pig and others. In effect I’ll be looking for variety in posing meshed with a consistency of finish to produce a homogenous effect for each army en masse.

Insofar as catering for the different rules, I’ll default to Flames of War in terms of core organisations and in particular basing. FoW is my default set of rules and will remain so far some time, given the wider playing base.

With regard to basing, I am probably going to have bases for the self-propelled artillery assets in battery form but not for the general vehicle park. This will allow me to portray and model the camo netting, expended shell cases and general detritus that each battery would accrue in a firing position normally.

Naturally this will involve a fairly significant investment in time and money, but I can realistically expect to have the entire project completed by the end of 2007 at the latest, with all the various developments in my life outside gaming accounted for.

So here’s what I intend to do over the next year or so with this project:

• Complete an army every three to four months.
• Write reviews of the minatures as I complete them.
• Build several terrain piece for each army.
• Write articles on the construction and painting of the various components.
• Devise, research and write up a fully illustrated scenario for the period that will allow me to play and report how the three sets of rules dealt and provided results on the tabletop.
• Summarise and incorporate improvements to the scenario and integrate the successful aspects into my variant house rules for FoW.
• Play a series of battles using the modified scenario and rules and report back the findings.
• Write up everything for inclusion on the main website and include lots of photos.
• Take an inordinate amount of photos.
• Potentially: Submit an edited article to one of the hobby publications, focusing on the playthroughs themselves, in similar vein to an article in The Courier comparing Spearhead, CD and another set using a single scenario as reference point.
• Build proper (as in wooden, felt-lined and brass-hinged) carry cases for each army.

A fair bit of work but very useful in the continual development of my writing, painting and modelling skills. By the end of the project I expect that I will be much improved in the areas of photography, airbrushing and graphics manipulation as well as gaining a better understanding of the various rules and the interation of systems.

I think that by committing myself to a finite personal project and setting a fairly generous timeline for completion, I will be able to maintain focus without burnout entering the equation. The best thing about this entire project is that it will not impinge on either my existing projects of the business became I have already taken these things into account hence the schedule being fairly relaxed.

Financially, I think it could approach NZ$2500 – $3000 at most, and given I have many of the components already, the budget will not be too onerous.

All in all, it’s something I know I can do and gain confidence, skills and some personal sense of achievement.

P-J
(typed up by Kirsty)

Progress Report

This holiday has done me the world of good. I’ve managed a little writing and some reading, but generally taken things easy (35 plus degrees Celsius by 11am is one major adjustment).

I’ve revisited my schedule of painting and it works for me. The Fallschirmjäger are a welcome return to testing out a uniform that is a little more complex than my recent projects. But it’s not all about the armies I’ve listed previously. Years ago, on another blog, I mentioned a project involving collecting, assembling, painting and playing a group of four 1944 era armies: Soviet, German, US and British. This project was inspired by the Beginner’s Choice section at the back of Ian Shaw’s WW2 army lists book published by TTG. I’ve sepnt the last couple of evenings outlining my thoughts and the general plan I want to folllow. These four armies will form the basis of my late war personal collection and will take abiout 2 years conservatively to finish in total. I’ll posty more on the specifics later. There are several branches to this project: terrain, painting, storage, scenarios, miniature reviews etc, so I will not lack for inspiration or subject matter.

I’m not sure whether I’ll have much opportunity or inclination to post over the next week or so, but there’re some fairly significant developments happening. Oh and it looks like Peter Pig will be the recipient of a small order as I look to increase the variation of poses/figures in my existing armies as well as some terrain features.

P-J