Motostrelkovy for the Euro GT

So here's my list and plans for the Euro GT on Saturday at Wayland Games.

My initial plans were to run my amazing Stuart horde from The Bridge at Remargen, but sadly work and traveling have got in the way of my ability to paint up a completely new army. Rather than botch it up, I've fallen back on an army I had lying around - Soviet infantry.

Now I like playing with soviet infantry, there's something about the point the army at the objective and keep going until either you get it, or you run out of army which means I don't have to think too much. This is particularly helpful when I have a dreadful hangover on day two.

The reason I stopped using my soviet infantry before is I got very fed up with not being able to hurt tanks. No matter what I did, integrating pioneers, adding really big guns or just keeping attacking until my army's corpses were clogging the enemy's tracks, I would completely fail to do anything and my men would die and then the tanks would run over them unmolested.

This is why Desperate Measures cheered me up. Finally, good antitank assets within a soviet infantry company. Certainly good enough to scare off the king tigers and panthers which had been causing me trouble.

Now I had a few problems in getting my soviet infantry to the point that they can kill tanks. The first issue is that my infantry are Rifle/MG strelkovy teams while DM's lists are only SMG Motostrelkovy. The second issue is that I don't have any panzerfaust stands.

I decided to ignore the first issue, an infantry stand of rifles is not that different to SMG's and I'm doing this army because I can get it ready in time, not to win best painted (which I can't due to not using all Battlefront models, given that this is a Battlefront tournement is fair enough)

The second issue was easy enough to sort out. I had ordered the Panzerfaust Motostrelkovy models from Battlefront ages ago (they came very quickly, excellent customer service). So I put these together as Panzerfaust SMG teams to increase my SMG count to try and reduce problem 1.

So with that done it was time to dust off the Red Army and go to war...

After playing around with the fearless trained guards list, Ben successfully persuaded me to go with confident trained on the basis that my soviets always fail their morale (note the spelling of this word Adam and Ben) tests regardless of if they are confident or fearless. 

It's really annoying.

So putting the list together my initial thoughts were as many faustweilding infantry blocks as I could put together. As I have two full companies, that meant two full companies of motostrelk along with a battalion commissar to work with the 1IC to keep everyone moving along.

Next up, some recon and something to pin opposing teams so that said blocks of motostrelk can get into combat and use their fausts. 

Going for cheap and cheerful, this means a minimum size squad of spetznaz (who can also have a faust, whoop!) and some mortars.

These units have two additional benefits, the spetznaz can infiltrate which means a lot less time running motorstrelk towards gunlines while the motars can volley fire with firepower 3+ which means that they can dig things out of foxholes if there isn't anything worth pinning. In terms of keeping things cheap, no point going for an observer...

Next up on my list of mandatory stuff is smoke to help me charge in safety.

Oh no, these are soviets, no smoke here. I suppose that saves points at least.

Having got my basics, it's time to think about what this list cannot do. Faust wielding motostrelk are pretty much a Swiss Army knife. Whatever the problem, the answer is 22 men with 3 fausts and a liberal approach to casualties.

The only thing that this doesn't really work with is medium tanks armed to the teeth with machine guns. (You know, like my Stuarts). Against enough unprintable MG's, my fausts can't get into blow up the juicy tanks. 

So I need some medium anti tank stuff to stop worrying about nasty Stuarts (the king of tanks), Sherman's, panzer IV's, StuG's etc. Now the thing which works well here is T34-85's, and I can take 10. That should screw up medium tanks and also doubles up as a tasty ambush.

I've got a few points left, to add to my anti-medium tank assets, I added 8 Zis 3's from the artillery battalion. Now these are pretty rubbish as artillery, they are also pretty rubbish as anti tank guns with AT 9, but with volley fire and a 3+ firepower, they can replace quality with quantity. Which is pretty soviet. They can also be a second ambush option as medium guns. It also brings me up to a round 6 platoons.

This leaves me with 15 points left. That's one observer, either for the mortars or the 'artillery'. Now the Zis 3's really are for pushing forward and blowing things up with direct fire, so let's give the mortars their observer after all.

So my final list is:

Confident trained

HQ and Battalion Commissar

2 Companies of motostrelk each with three platoons and 3 panzerfausts

Company of 10 T34-85's

6 mortars and flamboyant observer

Motor artillery company with 8 Zis 3's.

Spetznaz platoon with 3 stands and a Panzerfaust

I've had one practice game against Ben's  armored rifles. We played breakthrough and the army worked pretty much as planned. The T34-85's killed Sherman's, the infantry killed infantry and the Zis 3's died horribly. I won 5-2. That must mean I'm ready to take on all comers.

Right?