Tuesday 28 August 2012

Tigers In The Mud

Good morning,

Coops here with his first post! I finished my latest instalment of tigers this weekend, which brings me to 7 (I'll stop there).  These are Forged in Battle's offering and as models go, I love them to bits.

Unfortunately my airbrush (a cheap Chinese copy) has given up the ghost, so I was back to painting with a brush.  They are a lot darker than I wanted, but I'll survive.




Also, to cut down on the amount of unpainted terrain I have.  My new resolution is to paint a piece of terrain with a platoon.

That's all for now...next up a panzer grenadier platoon.

Thanks Coops

Monday 27 August 2012

New Additions To The Team

Hello All,

Today I'm proud to say we have two new additions to the Breakthrough Assault team. My good friends Adam and Dave are joining the blog and I hope will add something new content wise (hopefully for the better!). So I'll let them introduce themselves.

Hi I'm Adam and I'm a Wargamer...
Ben's asked me to introduce myself and I have no idea where to start! So let's start at the beginning, I started as a 6/7 year old with model planes, mainly WW2 hurricanes and spitfires, and that was always something I have loved. From there I indulged in some 40K and WFB  until a brief hiatus in my mid teens.
But even though I wasn't gaming or painting I kept an eye out before rediscovering Blood Bowl in my early 20's and then back on the wagon!

I'm a relative new comer to FOW only starting last year, but I really like the clever use of combined arms and the more strategic aspects of the game. This has stoked my other great love, terrain! I have an almost pathological love of terrain, and like to make sure there is enough varied and quality terrain available for a game.

Hope you all enjoy my rambling contributions.
Adam

And now Dave, AKA "Winner" Dave, AKA Coops, AKA Hangfire Dave

Good morning,

Ben has very kindly asked me to contribute to his awesome blog 'Breakthrough Assault', which I am pleased about because I'm way too lazy to write one of my own.

I got into Flames of War in August last year, when Ben wanted to run a Infantry Aces campaign.

After a failed first attempt with some British Infantry I decided I wanted to use German armoured cars. However, I'm not the greatest of players and my win to loss ratio is so bad I've stopped counting. Slowly I've been adding Tigers to my army as I figured I need something easy to use.

Coops

So there you go the new members of the team.

Just a heads up but September is a bit of a mad month for all of us, I'm moving back to Bournemouth, going on my stag do and getting married. Adam's off on holiday and well I'm not sure what Dave's doing but I know he's busy. But from October you'll hopefully see Dave and Adam appear on the blog a far bit. Also you will see me and Adam getting stuff together for a joint project... but more on that later.

As Always Thanks for your time.

Ben and the Team.

Saturday 25 August 2012

Open Fire - What I'm Planning To Do With It - The Germans

Hi All

So this week Battlefront announced their new starter set and wow is all I can say! I'm a big fan of what Battlefront have done with the plastic miniatures, especially the infantry. I'm even more of a fan of the price, £50 for the whole set! And thats going on the basis you don't get atleast 10% off at your local gaming store. Anyway I'm moving away from what I want to talk about today and that is what I'm going to do with the models from the starter set, what lists I'm looking at and how much I need to spend to make these armies.

So first off lets look at what you get, for the Germans you get Grenadier HQ with Panzerscheck, 2 platoons of German Grenadiers, 2 Pak 40's and 3 Stugs. The Allies get 8 Shermans of which 2 are Fireflies and a Platoon of US Paras. So a good amount for both the Allies and Axis (you could even say it's a great amount for a starter set! ;-)) but not enough for you to build a complete army. But I think one and a half sets would give you almost everything you would need for almost a whole army. So a quick conversion with my friend Adam and we decided to get 3 sets between us and split the 3rd set in half. This way I get 3 Platoons of Grenadiers, 6 Pak 40's, 3 StuG's (I'm trading my extra StuG's for Adam's Pak 40's) and 12 Shermans. With this core force I jumped on to Easy Army and set about working out some army lists. 

I'm planning 1575pts lists as I'm becoming a big fan of 1575pts as a stand points value as I find 1750pts gives you too many points. AT 1750pts you don't have to make much of a compromise with the list, you can have your cake and eat it. At 1575pts you still have a fair amount of points to work with but have to compromise on something weather you don't have much artillery support or you drop your armies rating from Veteran to Trained or have to drop to 6 platoons instead of 8. To me this adds an extra interesting challenge and is something I'm quite passionate about.

The Germans

 So I went through Grey Wolf and Earth and Steel looking for an infantry list I liked the look of. I played around with the Light Infantry Company from Earth and Steel, the Sperrverband from Grey Wolf and the SS-Panzergrenadiers from both Grey Wolf and Earth and Steel, but I couldn't get a list I liked the look of. Then I looked at the Sturmkompanie. I have always liked the look of the Sturmkompanie since I first read Stalin's Onslaught all those years ago. The added bonus being they have StuG support and lots of Pak 40's, as the boxed games comes with these it seemed the right choice.

So company decided I now had to work out what units to put into the list. I started with the HQ, from the boxed game I will have the CIC and 2IC plus at least 1 Panzerschreck (need to talk to Adam about the Panzerschreck from the joint set) but I decided to include all 3 in the list as I wanted a lot combat punch in my infantry platoons. 120pts out of 1575pts

Next up was the Combat platoons, I was going to use all three as that was part of the reason to get half of the second set. I up graded all the platoons to have Panzerfausts (lets face it that's a bit of a no brainier really), these with the added Panzerschrecks will mean tanks will have to think twice before charging the Grenadiers. 690pts out of 1575pts

Before I worked out the next part of the list I thought it was best to work out if I would aim for six platoons or eight platoons. I normally like to have all my platoons as strong and fully equippedas possible, but seeing the amount of platoons that can combat attach I decided to aim for eight platoons. With the option to combat attach two of the platoons to the infantry to give me a six platoon list. This way I could have flexibility in half on half off mission to give deploy three or four platoons depending on what I'm facing. So with that in mind I added a Sturm Anti-Tank platoon of two Pak 40's and a Sturm Heavy Platoon with two HMG's. In mission with I combat attach these I can have a two Grenadier platoons with a Panzerfaust, a Panzerschreck, a Pak 40, a HMG and 6 MG, that's alot of firepower, even when pinned down! 870pts out of 1575pts

That's 5 platoons down, time to look at what else I can fit in. Focusing on the models I'm going to get out of the starter set. I have four Pak 40's left so they were included three of them along with the three StuG's. The Pak 40's were an obvious choice because of the Pak Front special rule (this lets one Pak 40 platoon platoon deploy with independant teams, a very good rule) and will give the list some much need ranged firepower. The StuG's were really picked as I had three in the starter set, don't get me wrong I like StuG's both look wise and rules wise but I would have probably picked up some Marder's or Hornisse for the extra anti-tank ability over the StuG's. But anyway the whole point of this was to try and write a list using the starter set so the StuG's are in. 1310pts out of 1575pts

Right then time to round out the list. One thing I haven't included in list yet is any smoke, this led me to one of my favourite units in the game, Nebs. I love Nebs, they are so cheap for what they do. They can fire smoke bombardments, they are ok at killing infantry and can still annoy top armour 1 tanks, this just makes them such a good choice. After the Nebs I had 120pts left, so I thought I would finally buy a Hs 129. I'm a sucker for planes in general, but I do find they tend to have a bigger impact on the opponent than the damage they actually cause. You have to spread out a bit even against sporadic air just in case that's the turn they arrive and take out a big chunk of your army. The only real choice was a toss up between the B or the B3. I like the B version as it hits on a 2+, so even if you only have one plane turn up you will probably still hit something, I find it great for pinning. But I couldn't turn down Anti-Tank 15 hitting side armour! Their is no tank in the game that can save against that, how can you say no! I couldn't. 1570pts out of 1575pts

Confident Veteran SturmkompanieGerman Late-War
PlatoonQtyUnitPoints
Headquarters

Sturmkompanie HQ

p.53
2
3
Cmd SMG team
Panzerschreck team
120
Combat Platoons

Sturm Platoon

p.53
1
6
Cmd Panzerfaust SMG team
MG team
190

Sturm Platoon

p.53
1
6
Cmd Panzerfaust SMG team
MG team
190

Sturm Platoon

p.53
1
6
Cmd Panzerfaust SMG team
MG team
190

Sturm Heavy Platoon

p.54
1
2
Cmd SMG team
MG42 HMG
70

Sturm Anti-tank Gun Platoon

p.54
1
2
2
Cmd SMG team
7.5cm PaK40 gun
RSO tractor
110
Regimental Support

Sturm Heavy Anti-tank Gun Platoon

p.56
1
3
Cmd SMG team
7.5cm PaK40 gun
155
Divisional Support

StuG Platoon

p.59
3StuG G285

Rocket Launcher Battery

p.169
1
2
2
4
Cmd SMG team
Observer Rifle team
Kubelwagen
15cm NW41
145

Air Support

p.172
3Sporadic Air Support Hs 129B3115
Company Points:1570
www.EasyArmy.comSource document: Grey Wolf

So there you go my German list. I'm quite happy with it if I'm honest, it's different from most of the lists I have played with before and hopefully as it uses the starter box as it's core it'll be fairly cheap. Gaming wise I think I have enough Anti-Tank shots to stop the horde tank lists. Enough MG's and HMG's to take on infantry and some with a little luck enough firepower to take on Heavy Armour. The only thing I'm missing is recon, but then the only recon option in the briefing is a small bike platoon, so there isn't much I could have done about that.

Shopping List

One and a Half sets of Open Fire - £75.00
4x GSO112 Panzerschreck Teams - £4.60
GE734 HMG Platoon - £7.50
2x GE590 15cm Neb Blisters - £28.00
GE709 German Artillery HQ - £7.50
AC006 HS 129 - £11.00

Total - £133.60

Now the price does include 12 Shermans so it's a little disjointed, but without adding to much to the one and a half starter sets I will have a fairly descent army. I will be ordering all of these once my GW clear out has finished on EBay.

Well this went on for far longer than I thought it would, so I'll save the British for next time.

As always thanks for reading.

Ben

Thursday 23 August 2012

European Houses: Carentan House - Overview

Hello All,

This morning the postman brought me my second European House from the Battlefront subscription deal. I have decided like when I got the first building the Calais House that I'm not going to do a review. My reasoning is I don't see the point in doing 12 similar reviews of the buildings. Instead I will be doing an overview for this house and the next 10 comparing them to the other houses and pointing out any big problems or improvements over the series of buildings.


So when I first got the building out of the box quite impressed. The grey was a lot more consistent than the Calais building, but on the down side the white is a little patchy in places.


Now to compare it to the Calais House.


I know a lot of people are worried that all the house will end up looking to similar once you have all 12. While I can see why people are worried I do think there is a case for the fact that most builds in a village or small town would look the same or atleast similar. Having said that in my opinion these two house are different enough that it's not something I'm worried about anymore.

Overal I'm still very happy that I bought the sub deal and I'm looking forward to getting a few more so I have enough for a village for the gaming table.


As always thanks for reading.

Ben

Monday 20 August 2012

Token Effect - 11th Armoured Gaming Token Review

Hello All

About a month ago I was on the WWPD Forum and came across a post on custom Flames of War tokens. One of the users (Dvalin) had set himself up to small company called Token Effect that make tokens that can be used for Flames of War with any unit Badge or icon you want on them. Well I'm a sucker for add on products so I was straight onto him and ordered myself a set of 11th Armoured Tokens for my 15th/19th Kings Royal Hussars, a couple of weeks later the arrived in the post and I thought I'd do a review of them.

On first looks I was very impressed with the tokens. They are well made and so far have been very durable (after all whats the point of wargaming tokens if they fall apart from being handled?). One slight negative was a few of the tokens had what looked like slight air pockets what distorted the colour of the tokens in certain light, but this is a small gripe that didn't really bother men a great deal.


Sunday 5 August 2012

The Black Bull - Heavy Mortars

Hi All

Been burning through the British and I have painted up a Heavy Mortar Platoon. I'm not sure they'll see the table top too much (Luttrells CS Platoon is just to cool not to include!). But they are a nice option to have and if I do a British Infantry company I'm sure they'll find a place in the list (I have been toying around with a list that includes Heavy Mortars, 25 pounders and 5.5's.... it does make me feel a bit dirty!).
They aren't my best paint job ever, in fact until I added the static grass and the tuft clumps I really didn't like them (might have something to do with the bases being brown and the uniforms being brown). But I think they turned out to a good table top standard.
I really like Heavy Mortars in Flames of War. For the British I see the Heavy Mortar fills a similar role to the Nebs for the Germans. It's cheap (which is nice), it's great of smoke and it's not to bad at knocking out enemy infantry (Firepower 3+ is bloody good!).
I'm still waiting on the next lot of tanks, so the British might slow down for a bit for a few weeks. That isn't a problem for me as I have about 30 Soviet tanks on the painting table.... I'm massively thankful for Soviet Armour Spray!

Anyway as always thanks for reading and until next time.

Ben

Saturday 4 August 2012