Hot Lead 2016 progress

I have finished painting the BTD Germans but I still have to dip and highlight them and then flock their bases. I hope to do this during this week so that I can start labeling them and constructing terrain over the weekend.

Pictures when they have been flocked.

Hot Lead 2016

I've put my name forward to GM a game of Big Chain of Command. I have the horde of Russians ready to go (130 or so). Now I have to work on the German opponents. I have 55 done already but I have another 60 or so to go.

I have 8 weeks to prepare and it starts with a list of things to do:

• Complete the German infantry and support weapons
• Create more wood fences
• Shrubbery and hedges
• Maybe a creek or stream
• Design the scenario and terrain map
• List the forces
• Label the leaders 
• Use stickers to indicate different sections
• Create player packages
• Create Russian patrol markers
• Create more trees and repair the existing ones

I have made quite a bit of progress on the BTD Germans. I have the first coat complete. I'm now at the stage of fixing the overruns. Once that is done, I can apply the wash and then do some highlighting. Flocking is the final step. I think I need to complete this by the first weekend of February. 

Then I can use the rest of February to do terrain and the first two weeks of March to design the game.

Goals are good to have.

Book Review: Encyclopaedia of German Armoured Vehicles

https://books.google.ca/books/about/Encyclopedia_of_German_Tanks_of_World_Wa.html?id=JSStQgAACAAJ

If you are building a WW2 German army that has any tanks in it, this is the book to get (but beware the prices!). Every major vehicle has an entry with multiple photographs (1000+ black and white). Each model (ausf) describes what changed and there's often a photograph that shows the changes. The armament for each model is provided along with production information.

But there's not just the important tanks. You can truly geek out on the obscure stuff where only one or models saw service or some of the truly bizarre experimental stuff that barely got off the drawing board. There's pre-war stuff and some last month of the war desperation stuff and the story in between stuff where the Germans extended the usefulness of a chassis for far longer than they thought originally.

The book also covers halftracks, armoured cars, and important captured tanks. There's armoured vehicles used to control rocket launches and vehicles that worked on land and on water. There's even a vehicle that was both an armoured car and a tank.

If you see a copy in a used book store for a reasonable price, grab it. I have immense gratitude to Alain for giving me his copy when he was downsizing his library.

Panzershrek teams

When I purchased my Warlord Germans, I realized that I did not have the Panzershrek team that the Chain of Command list called for. Fortunately, Stephen had bought a large number of German figures while they were on sale from Black Tree Designs. I bought the Panzershrek teams from him right away.


The figures painted up so nicely that I bought the rest of Stephen's Germans. Now I have more Germans to paint but they are going relatively quickly. Lots of detail but easy to paint.

German Platoon for Chain of Command

I finished the two boxes of Warlord Germans, which is enough to give me 5 sections. Though one box was actually Panzergrenadiers, I did them as regular infantry instead. (A comment on the photos; the actual color of the mat and figures is more green in real life)



The Warlord figures paint up OK but they are a lot of work as the detail is not as raised as on their plastic Russians or on their metal figures. For some of the MG figures, I substituted a thin copper painted piece of plastic instead the ammo box.

Here are the front of some of the figures:


And here is the back:


Now that I have painted them, there are a couple of details that annoyed me. First is the epaulets are under the webbing instead of under. Not only is that wrong historically, it is tougher to paint. The second annoyance is the Sam Browne style strap they added in addition to the Y straps. I'm not sure why the gave both types of strap because hat that is supposed to be doing but it is something you don't often see in pictures of German soldiers. Unfortunately, it's molded in so I was left with the choice of either painting it or scraping it off. Painting seemed like less work.

I have 60 or so Germans from Black Tree Designs and I suspect that they will see far more table time than the Warlord plastics. They are just better looking and far more durable. I've already had to fix more German plastic weapons than I have Russians and the Russians have seen twice as much action.

In summary, while the Warlord plastic Russians are excellent, the plastic Germans are not all that good. I understand that Warlord have redone their panzer grenadiers and they are better. If so, make sure you are buying the new ones and not the old ones.

A Horde of Russians

Having basically completed all of my 28mm Russians, I thought I would take a picture of them. I basically have a full rifle company according to the 1944 TO&E (of course there's lots of disagreement on what that actually looks like).

I also have a scout section and a tank rider section. I could easily make a full platoon by moving figures around. The observer doesn't actually do anything in Chain of Command but I have the figure so I put him in anyway. The observer and radio men were for communicating with the division, not for artillery (or they used flags if the radio wasn't there or working)

The tank hunters can use a molotov cocktail, panzerfaust, or AT grenade. I just remove whichever AT weapons they are not using.

The mortar is actually an 81mm but I'm going to use it to represent the 50mm mortar that was with Russian companies earlier in the war. I have another one that I haven't finished and a 120mm mortar that I will use to represent a pre-game barrage.

Not pictured are my two T34/85s. One is finished and the other is partially finished.

Oh, and there's also one rifleman who got placed into the wrong box.

Game day at Stephen's

On Saturday, Stephen hosted a day of gaming with three sessions on tap.

First up was Mike running home brew rules for ANZACs vs Turks at Gallopoli. The Turks had a full division with 4 offboard artillery batteries, two onboard artilleries, and two machinegun batteries. The Aussies and Kiwis had three battalions, three MG batteries, and 4 batteries. Here is the battlefield with the Turks on the left attacking the entrenched ANZACs:

I had the Kiwis (having been binge watching Outrageous Fortune over the summer) on the ANZAC left and this was what I was looking at:


The Turks surged forward (moving 2 zones per turn, shooting, or removing wire). On the first turn, the Turks used their artillery to remove wire from in front of the MG position. Our rifle fire was pretty ineffective (as was the Turks when they finally tried shooting) but artillery was nasty. We chose to target the onboard Turk guns to get rid of them. (In hindsight, we should have targeted their offboard stuff afterwards).

The Turks overwhelmed the MG position rather easily and swept up to the first trench line.



The Turkish assault removed 3 of my 4 stands (as a consequence of being a bit softened up by artillery and then not rolling very well infantry vs infantry). The lone stand fell back and reinforced the 2nd line. On my right, the Aussies were in a similar pickle. But way over on the right, Stephen's Aussies were repulsing the Turks and then wiping them out.



I was holding on and gradually wearing down the Turks. But on my immediate right, the Turkish artillery managed to wipe out the troops in the second line. We had no choice but to put our last reserve unit into the open and assault the Turks occupying our second line. Atrocious shooting by our artillery meant that our assault was repulsed. The Turkish artillery then blasted our troops into oblivion, leading the way open to the beach.


The rules were a one page affair and very simple. Maybe a little too much was sacrificed to make sure the troops moved and did not get shot up. It's impossible, for example, for one infantry battalion to kill other infantry battalion by rifle fire alone. I'm not sure rifle fire killed a single stand all game. The other thing that bothered me was how quickly battalions recovered. If you took some hits, you roll a die. Beat the number of hits and you recover automatically and can do stuff. Fail and you don't do anything. But you rally all of the hits at the end of your turn. Perhaps it shouldn't be so easy to rally hits. Give the player the choice of falling back one square and rally all hits or roll. If you roll and pass, you rally the number of hits the die roll exceeds the number of hits and do an action. If you fail, stay in place and rally 1 hit at the end of the turn.

The game was still enjoyable as it was but it really was just a game of artillery wiping out opposing units.

We also played a game of Chain of Command with two full Russian platoons facing off against 1 2/3rds German platoons (all I had painted at the time, which I am rectifying). The Germans lost the patrol phase and then consequently lost the game. I had the German left and was the focus of the Soviet attack. I really should have been far more aggressive from the start. I probably would have ended up with the same result though. No pictures (conveniently) of this defeat.