Empress Chinese PLA here at last!

What's this? Another blog post? Less than a fortnight after the last one? That's right, I'm inspired at the moment, after spending Sunday at Vapnartak in York.

I picked up some dice for Force on Force, and the USS Excelsior for Star Trek Attack Wing, but much more interesting than that, I was able to collect my Kickstarter pledge from Empress Miniatures!

In the end, I picked up a full squad of People's Liberation Army, plus a Chinese Mortar and Anti-tank weapon. I also got a fireteam of Painting Chinese type 07US Navy SEAL Frogmen, which will go nicely with the US Army squad that I got as part of Empress' sale for Kickstarter backers last year.

So far I haven't been brave enough to paint any of the Americans - the Empress models are so nice that I'm afraid to sully them with my painting!

However, I am plucking up the courage to tackle the Chinese. These are posing a bit of a conundrum though as I'm not entirely sure what colours to go for.

It looks like this is the standard camouflage:

And it is possible to find a few images dotted around the internet:

So, I'll have a bit of work to figure out the exact colours to use to get as close as possible to this. Also, since it's a digital camo pattern, I'll have to figure out a way to paint that without going mad, blind, or both...

My intended use for these will be a "Red Dawn" style scenario as China invades the US. This is (hopefully) entirely unfeasible in the real world, but allows for some modern combat between major powers and will allow me to use my existing collection of urban terrain.

Since I'm intending to use Force on Force for this, both the US and Chinese forces will be based around fireteams of four men. My plan is to paint a couple of Chinese fireteams first, followed by a couple of US fireteams. If I keep things up in this way I'm hoping to start with some small games to learn the system, and then build up to more interesting scenarios as I get more painting done.

So, watch this space, I might even get something painted to share with you all...