Right, if I’m going to start a new Flames of War army I’d better finish my first! So I’m on a painting drive to get the New Zealanders squared away. This week I’ve finally finished the HQ and Artillery Staff teams pictured here.

The HQ team is pretty bare bones, just plonked down in the desert. I gave the CiC a couple of 40 gallon drums and a little row of reject resin sandbags I had laying around from my original entrenching experiments. Those coupled with the fact there’s a radio man in the team make them stand out fairly well on the table. I fully expect them to be on the receiving end of a lot more incoming arty and fire from now on!

My artillery staff and command teams have been unpainted for so long now it’s been ridiculous, particularly considering I finished painting the gun teams some time late last year and the central table has been painted pretty much since I started collecting Flames of War! At last it finally has a team of men to stand around it.

Painting them up I noticed the gentleman on the left in the staff team is actually wearing a pullover, so no Kommando Khaki for him (yes I’m using GW paints). Incidently, I believe I’ve painted the soft hats of the officers entirely the wrong colour. They should actually be a light green like that man’s jersey. Ah well. The New Zealanders served for a number of years in the desert…so possibly the sun has err bleached the officer’s hats?

Right, barring the interminable transports and two objective markers, all I have left to paint to complete this army is:

- Three rifle team bases.
- Three British Sherman III’s.

I aim to have these painted by the next gaming evening, which is roughly a fortnight away. Rest assured that once I finish painting the main force I’ll post them up here!

Well, it’s finally upon us! The updated version of City Fight with a bunch of nifty new plastic buildings. Unfortunately the kits themselves are fairly expensive imho. So expensive in fact I was tempted to do a little cost breakdown versus Hirst Arts molds.

To me the ‘basic’ Cities of Death boxed kit is an ‘Imperial Sector’, which allows you to create four buildings (although corners is probably a more accurate description), including one large one. Locally this retails for $150 Australia, or $180nz.

Now Hirst Arts molds generally cost $34us each, or roughly $55nz at the moment, and with the Gothic Church and Gothic Belltower you could cast equivalent buildings for a City of Death. Of course you’d need some casting material. A 22kg pail of Ultracal 30 from TopMark in Auckland costs around $65nz. In my experience a 22kg pail will be sufficient to cover a 4′ x 4′ table with ruined buildings.

So for $180nz you could buy Games Workshop’s fixed plastic sprues and use them to cover maybe half your table, or you could take that $180nz and order two Hirst Arts molds and a pail of Ultracal and completely cover your table with your own unique and totally custom ruined buildings.

Of course the Hirst Arts route will take you more time because of the casting it requires. However trust me when I say if you like building terrain, you’ll enjoy yourself a lot more with Mr Hirst’s molds and experience a considerably larger sense of satisfaction when you sit back and contemplate the finished table…

I finished my first piece of Egyptian terrain for Pulp 28mm gaming over the weekend. The painted piece looks a little sterile to me though. I think I either need some large rocks or a thorny bush or two to break up the ground a little and present more cover for the figures to hide behind.

In fact if you’re familiar with the Hirst Arts Egyptian molds you may notice the obelisk base is actually larger than the suggested construction. This is an accident, mainly because our PC printer is currently out of ink so I had no plans in the garage while building, but it’s probably fortuitous because the larger base covers more of the CD.

I guess the risk you run with throwing terrain together at high speed is that sometimes it’s obvious you didn’t quite pay that much attention to detail. Still it’s not a bad piece considering it’s constructed from an experimental 15mm palm tree and the first test castings of my new Egpytian molds. The paint job was also a trial using Kiwi brown shoe polish and the Hirst Arts ‘antiquing method’.

The results are quite passable imho, although the high shine from the polyurethane furniture varnish I used to seal the finished piece is a little annoying, except for the palm fronds. I’ll probably hit it with a light dusting of matt art varnish to dull it down.

I find CD terrain is strangely addictive, while the painted obelisk was drying I was messing around with some other test cast pieces from the Egyptian Temple mold and suddenly ended up with this piece of terrain glued down to another CD!

Hmmm it looks a little sterile too, mainly because I’ve neglected to include any reasonable rubble around the base of the ruined wall I think.

Although I’ve base coated the piece I may do a little more work and build up sand into that corner over a ruined block or two. That would improve the piece no end I believe.

Then of course I’ll have to actually paint some of the 28mm Copplestone figures I keep throwing into frame for scale!

Right, after doing a little research and some re-reading of ‘Desert Fox’ Intelligence handbook here’s what I’ll go for initially I think. This army list is based on the 15 Panzerdivision around Dec 1942 - post the Second battle of Alamein. Specifically the British ‘Left Hook’ operations that the NZers were involved with in the closing of ‘42.

15 Panzerdivision operated in the same area as the NZ 2nd Div at that time so they’ll be a great force to play against my existing NZ Flames of War army.

15 Panzer Armee Armored Coy

HQ Platoon

200 2 Panzer IIIj (Early)
  30 Upgrade all to IIIj (Late)
   5 Sd Kfz 9 Recovery Vehicle
—–
235

Combat Platoons

300 Panzer Platoon, 3 Panzer IIIj (Early)
 45 Upgrade all to IIIj (Late)
—–
345

300 Panzer Platoon, 3 Panzer IIIj (Early)
  60 Commander upgraded to IV F2
  60 Upgrade two to IV F1
—–
420

Support (1 per Panzer Platoon)

220 Panzergrenadier Platoon with 3 squads
  5 Command Panzerknacker SMG team
—–
225

Divisional Support (1 per Panzer Platoon)

240 Heavy AA Gun Platoon with 2 sections
 20 Extra gun crew on both guns
—–
260

====
1485

Drat! 15 points left to spare…or is that a ‘lucky 15′ because they’re a 15 Panzer Armored coy? Here’s hoping.

One of my regular opponents fields a European themed Panzer Armored Company as well, fortunately this force is a little different from his. From memory he’s fielding light Panzers and AA armored half tracks, whereas I’ve gone for the 88 Flak battery and a Panzergrenadier platoon.

The good news is that since I’ve already purchased most of the core of the army I only have to add an additional few blisters to field the force. Namely:

$18nz GE600 Recovery half track (if I can get one).
$42nz 3 x GE042 Panzer IV F1/F2 blisters.
$28nz GE703 Panzergrenadier blister.
=====
$88nz

All up that means this army will cost me less than $280! Man that’s cheap. Good luck building a GW 40k or WHFB army for that much. The only down side to this force for me is I can’t field those nifty Mechanised Panzergrenadiers I mentioned in the last post. Ah well just as well I didn’t just grab a box of them then!

To be honest the more I play Flames of War, the more I look at all my old GW armies and think why did I bother? Hopefully Battlefront won’t screw up the system with their soon to arrive Second edition rulebook.

Ok, I admit it: I was so jealous of an gaming friend’s recent Flames of War Army Box purchase that I just had to rush out and start a new army.

So last night I wandered up to Vagaond in Auckland City and purchased a ‘88′ FlaK 36 Battery box, a Panzer IIIj box and a Vallejo DAK paints box.

German players know that’s pretty much the core of a DAK ‘Desert Fox’ Armored Company there and it won’t take much to pad it out to 1500 points. I will need at least another Panzer IIIj box before I can start add more interesting bits and bobs.

The Armored Panzergrenadier box is very attractive to me mainly because of the nifty models. However I should probably check their stats as I have a bit of a bad history of purchasing based on what I’d like to tinker with and paint rather than the tactical or strategic merit of a particular unit in the actual game! For example I’m not entirely sure they’re even an option for a DAK Armored Company…

Speaking of painting the DAK colour set is the first Vallejo paint I’ve purchased. There’s an endless stream of rapturous painters on the Flames of War forum that swear by Vallejo so I guess I should try it. Personally I’ve been painting with GW paints for years and am pretty familiar with their working properties. However their colour range does lack a good German tank colour so I figure a new army is a good time to try a new paint manufacturer. I’ll also be interested to see how Vallejo mixes with GW paint.

But before I assemble and prime any Germans I must finish my poor bloody New Zealanders.

I’ve re-jigged my original army list somewhat based on play testing against my erstwhile opponents. This current list is also mostly painted - with something like two objectives, five Infantry bases of various sizes and three Sherman III’s left to finish. It’s not the best list tournament wise, mainly because the Shermans are quite expensive considering they’re only Confident Trained while the rest of the army is Confident Veteran (being NZers), but it’ll just have to suffice!

Infantry:

New Zealand 18th Battalion Company HQ (Company HQ)

1st NZ Rifle Platoon with 3 Rifle Squads, a Light Mortar and 6 Teams with Sticky Bombs.

2nd NZ Rifle Platoon with 3 Rifle Squads, a Light Mortar.

Weapons:

Recce NZ Universal Carrier Patrol with 3 Carriers, each with an additional 0.5″ MG.

Support:

NZ Divisional Cavalry Light Tank Platoon 3 Honeys, each with a 0.5″ AA MG.

British ‘Desert Rats’ Tank Platoon 3 Sherman IIIs, each with a 0.5″ AA MG.

NZ Field Battery with 2 Gun Sections.

My Egyptian Hirst Arts molds arrived late last week and I’ve been slowing casting up a bunch of pieces for ruined 28mm Pulp Egyptian terrain.

These molds are different because the pieces all have a sandblasted texture, which will be interesting to paint but does mean the pieces aren’t quite as rich in surface texturing as usual.

Initially I’m not building anything large as I still have the gothic Cathedral in bits to finish yet! I will probably throw together a handful of small terrain pieces like this one to use as cover for a .45 Adventure demo game of “Quest for La Calavera Negra de la Luna“.

Out of curiosity I slapped one of the 15mm Palms down next to the Egyptian obelisk for a scale test. I think it looks fine next to 28mm terrain and figures.

This is obviously another piece of ‘CD’ terrain and you can see from these WIP shots how heavily I’ve abused the disc surface before starting to lay down the terrain.

Since these shots I’ve also applied ground texture and gravel effect. I’ve also broken the obelisk apart and done a bit of sanding and re-gluing because after I took these photos I noticed it wasn’t actually straight.

The whole lot is sitting in the garage primed at the moment, so hopefully I might get it painted up this weekend.

Crikey! A Post! Yes I am still alive, I just haven’t been doing a heck of a lot of modelling lately. Goodness knows why since we’re heading into the depths of winter here in New Zealand and the World of Warcraft account I was gaming on finally expired. Man that game is addictive, best I just let it go I think…

Anyway, some time ago I inherited a set of 28mm scale palm trees made by a gamer friend of mine. They’re perfectly nice and playable but the anally retentive modeller in me simply didn’t like the smooth trunks they’d been modelled with, plus they’re a little large for a 15mm Flames of War table.

So this weekend I threw together a handful of my own palm trees using the same gardening wire/masking tape technique. I also spent a little time winding each tree with a ribbon of epoxy based builder’s putty for some extra texturing.

They’re not too time consuming to create and with some decent basing and a reasonable paint job should look fine on the table. They will also be considerably less painful to game with than the etched brass palms I was looking at recently.

I suspect 15mm (roughly) scale palm trees will also be fine for 28mm gaming too, because a true scale 28mm palm tree would be a liability for any heavy handed gamers at your table.

One last thing, I’ve been getting a lot of automated comment spam recently from some asshole so I have cranked up the settings on my own automated comment filter. My apologies if you get presented with a ‘captcha’ to post or your comment doesn’t immediately appear on the site.