The Road to Art of War Too - 3RTR - Part One

Hello All,

Art of War Too is around the corner (well September 26th and 27th) and I was struggling to work out what army to take. I played around with British Infantry, British Paras, US Armour, US Infantry, etc etc. Nothing quite seemed right.

I almost caved in and took 7th Armoured to help free up my painting time for Great War and the AIW painting challenge, when a conversation with Adam and an Interview for an upcoming Beyond The Foxholes: Eyes and Ears made the choice for me.


Adam pointed out that out side of EW I had used US in all major tournaments this year. So it got me thinking what could I do, this is where Freddie cames in. Freddie is the French ETC team captain and has a controversial view on the current LW meta, he thinks that British Armour is the best list in LW. Thats right and he makes a good case for it (listen out for that on a future episode of BTF: Eyes and Ears to hear it). Well I'm a believer in trying something out to try and understand it better, so British Armour is my choice and Freddie better be right....

Now before I get into the list I feel I'd better explain what Art of War is. For those of you who don't know Art of War is run by Steve Charlton and Tim Harris and is one of the best run and supported tournaments in the UK, I would highly recommend to you. This is the 4th Art of War and they have an interesting format this time around, it's Late War 5 games, the first two games are 1675pts, games three and four are 1750pts and the last game will be 1800pts. You have to use the same briefing for each list but each list can be completely different. You can get more info on the Forum and Facebook.

So of my Shermans I painted up for the Tale of Four Gamers at the beginning of the year.

Following Freddie's advice my list was going to come from Overlord. Overlord is the better option really as you are not over paying for the AT 15 17pdr, which is a waste of time IMO as AT 14 is good enough. I ended up going with the 3RTR (and yes thank you Adam for pointing them out to me) after playing around with a Trained Canadian company for quite a long time. Being trained put me off even if they would have a lot of hulls on the table and more smoke than a fire at a petrol station. A lack of armour and skill rating would mean I'd bleed platoons (saying that I might still try this at another comp but not for this one). The 3RTR having Veteran tanks and trained support made a nice compromise as I could still get a lot of platoons on the board.

I do have a lot of work to do painting this list in time. 11 more Shermans currently live on my painting table, along with 2 Chruchill AVRE's and a Carrier platoon. But being armour I expect it should only take a couple of good painting weeks to bash them out.

My painting spread sheet, a lot more green than I first thought.

My biggest worry is practice, I think I'll need a lot of it! Ideally I'd like 4 or 5 games before the event if not more (double that would be preferable). I haven't really used an army like this before, direct fire smoke and knowing when to get aggressive and when to sit back are going to be the biggest issues. A Sherman is equally a great bargain and an easy kill target if used wrong. All my lists do have 9 or 10 platoons so I can lose one platoon and still win 6-1, but I do not what to go into a game with that attitude so I will lose 3 or 4 platoons (I know how aggressive I can be when I'm not careful, I will try the low percentage shot).

My 1800pts list for the competition

In the next update I hope to have most of the list painted (this will probably depend on how well my Israeli's are coming on) and hopefully some practice games to chat about.

Until next time thanks for reading

Ben