British 5.5″ BL Battery

I realized this afternoon that this battery had never got posted up on my blog. I finished it awhile ago and the basing was done with what colors I had on hand. Maybe I should have waited for greener static grass and flock, but its an interesting look.

The gun performance in game is great . It is nice to have something that really give the heavy tanks something to worry about. Pair it up with an AOP and its a very potent force. More pics after the break. Read more…

Tags: 5.5" BL, Artillery, British, Flames of War, FOW, Late War, Mid War, WWII

GenCon History and Force

I can’t believe that I forgot to post this for so long. It wasn’t an award winning history, but I’m pretty proud of it anyways. The general area of the history is researched. Right Guards unit in the right area at the right time. Specifics… well its a Soviet force. Not alot of detailed info out there so I had to make a few details up. It hit every bullet point the TO’s had outlined for history scoring and should have received max points. I couldn’t get Photoshop to spit out the files into a 2 page PDF so unfortunately there are two files to this.

Brian Wright Gvardeyskiy-Tyazhelyy-Tankovy-Polk-1

Brian Wright Gvardeyskiy-Tyazhelyy-Tankovy-Polk-2

Tags: Flames of War, FOW, GenCon, History, Late War, Soviet

Ironman After Action Report @ GenCon

So Ironman was an interesting format. I didn’t do so well, but that was largely virtue of the first game. It was a bit of a snowball effect as I expected. Click on the images for full size animated GIF’s of the action.

Game one I faced German pioneers in hold the line. This really should have been a reasonably easy fight for me. 9 KV-85 vs 2 Tiger I should have been a short battle. The Pioneers I could have cleaned up at my leisure then. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t make a fire power roll to save my life early on and it took entirely too long to neutralize the Tigers. I was then ambushed by the Pioneers who flamed me and then thankfully failed tank terror even with the CiC’s help. I then proceeded to lose most of the rest of that platoon while bogged in the woods when they assaulted again.  My second group of KV’s came in for the front objective then promptly lost their commander and so couldn’t withdraw to stay at distance from the infantry who had yet more flamers. At least they took the rest of the Tigers with them. Last two KV-85′s decide to stick around and pick at the infantry from range and hopefully break another platoon before time. Unfortunately for them I bogged both in the woods and get assaulted instead. Obviously I need to work out how to run armor effectively. At least I neutralized the Tigers, and those can’t come back as they are divisional support. Read more…

Tags: Flames of War, FOW, GenCon, Late War, Tournament

Ironman @ GenCon Thoughts

Just general impressions here, detailed after action report later with animated Gifs of my battles. Ironman was an interesting format that I enjoyed, but I think needs a few tweaks to work well. The general idea is that you need to win with economy of force. That winning a Pyrrhic victory isn’t a victory in the long run.

In order to be fair, non-killable assets need to degrade, or at least have a chance to go away. Planes were taken care of this time with plane dice not coming back. I might be tempted to give limited and priority planes some dice regeneration and see how it works. Sporadic would stay non-regenerating, limited would regenerate 1 die per game, and priority would regenerate two dice per game. Flamethrowers and other one use were allowed to come back, but flamers and other assets that are currently just removed need a bit of a change. Flamer teams that shoot should  stay on the board and go to a 4+ save similar to empty vehicle flamer tanks being more dangerous. They could be run off the board on a friendly edge, but must obey command and otherwise act the same as they did before, but without the option to shoot of course. Either way the opponent should have a chance to kill the teams so you don’t end up with flamer death squads in subsequent games. I don’t think anyone brought a force with naval guns, but they really should be addressed as well. Perhaps every time you fire them, roll a d6 and on a 6+ the one of the guns goes away. Naval guns generally have 4 guns to start. You’d lose 1 gun in an average game. Of course the big issue is this only works in a short format tournament and would need to be adjusted for a longer series of games. If you had a longer series of games I might just change it to a roll for support similar to the scenario version of the guns in DDay. Read more…

Tags: Flames of War, FOW, GenCon, Ironman, Late War, Tournament

My Commando Hordes

So I finally manned up and finished the other 3 platoons of late war commandos that I have been procrastinating on. Its only half my fault it took so long though. I went to buy my 4 platoons and the FLGS only had one platoon hanging on the wall. I finished that up and then put in the order for the other 3 platoons and waited. And waited. And waited. It took about two month for them to finally come in. Its not the fault of my FLGS though. I guess Battlefront has been having supply issues. There was a run on the commandos with the release of the PDF force for them and it took awhile to cast some more up.

I do have to say the quality of the molds had dropped considerably from my first platoon to these last ones. They had excess flash everywhere and I practically had to carve one guy a new leg out of a large chunk of flash. I also received considerably less figures than before.  I’m not sure if I received too many the first time, or too few the second time. Either way its not consistent. If it hadn’t taken so long to get the figs in the first place I may have sent some of it back. As a side note- With the correct composition I can actually field the 4 platoons as 6 platoons. Read more…

Tags: Add new tag, British, Commandos, Flames of War, FOW, Infantry, Late War, WWII

Late War Commandos

I painted my first platoon of commandos recently. I even modeled them sans underwear so they’ll be commando squared! While I’ve done a fair amount of infantry before, I have almost always stuck to pretty flat simple basing. The commandos are a couple of firsts for me.

Read more…

Tags: British, Commandos, Flames of War, FOW, Late War, WWII