First Grenadier Platoon Complete, what next?

Hi All,
Andy here with another small update!

So here they are, my first finished platoon for Flames of War, and for the first time ever I finished them on time! I was rushing  them a bit towards the end as I'd been away for work and ended up going a bit dark on the wash for the faces. Other than that I'm pretty happy with them.
With my mind temporarily off painting I started to think about how I was actually going to use them. In theory I could've used the basic lists at the back of the Open Fire Quick Start Guide and built a Grenadierkompanie from there. The list is perfect for using all the stuff you get with Open Fire but unfortunately that's about it. There's so much variety of units available for the Germans (albeit not necessarily at the same time) that it would be a shame to build an army with at least one eye on all the other cool stuff. With that in mind and £50 burning a hole in my pocket I decided to splash out on a pair of Intelligence Briefing books.

However I didn't really know where to start. The models you get with the Open Fire box are for Market Garden so the most logical step would be simply to buy the Operation Market Garden books. On the other hand £50 is a lot of money to spend if you're not getting the right thing so I thought I'd better take a look at all the other books out there. The scope for sourcebooks for WWII is huge and pace at which technology advances is phenomenal. By separating  the war into three periods, Early, Middle & Late, Battlefront have done a very good job of ensure armies are fairly evenly matched without choking out the tournament scene by forcing players to all use armies from the same operation/theatre.

Luckily for me I was able to visit Ben & Adam and take a look at their books before buying anything. There's definitely some interesting stuff throughout the war but I have to say if you want all the cool equipment, like Sherman Firefly's and Panthers then its got to be late war! Its a shame to be so predictable but at this stage I just want to get to use all the awesome tanks! So with D-Day books due for an update soon it had to be Market Garden! I may ended up right back where I started but at least I know know what else is out there!

I also happened to pop into Ben and Adam's FLGS and bought these guys. I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this German army yet but I fancied trying my hand at painting some Waffen-SS camo and see how I get on before committing myself to anything!

 

Anyways that's all for now and lets see if I can keep this vague sense of painting momentum going!

Thanks for reading.

Andy