A Spot of Armour...

Why hello there! It's Tuesday night, so clearly it's time for six German tanks. That's convenient, because that's what I've painted.

Command StuG!

Even though I have no immediate plan to play Flames of War, I decided to finish of the Germans I've had sitting around for ages.

Non-command StuGs!

These don't give me a new army or anything, but I've at least got more support options for my Panzerpionierkompanie now. Maybe they can lose slightly less often than they used to before!

Panthers!

Of course, that will mean playing some Flames of War, which I don't have any immediate plans to do, so it's back in the cupboard with these for now. I'm sure they'll eventually make an appearance though, so it's good to have them finally done.

Command Panther!

So, what's next?

Who remembers Flames of War?

You know, the really popular one with the 15mm World War 2 stuff? That I suddenly stopped playing ages ago for no real reason?

Yeah, this sort of thing

Well, I seem to have remembered it all of a sudden. So here's a couple of AA wagons. More of this sort of thing may well follow!

Kasserine: Passed

Remember when this blog used to be about painting? Well, me too, and it's high time it went back there, however briefly. As I still have plenty of "new dad" duties, I don't get to spend as much time at the paint station as I used to, but dogged persistence has eventually paid off, and I've managed to get my Flames of War US Armored Rifle Platoon ready for the table.

The platoon arrayed in all its many-weaponed glory

This really is a pretty spectacular platoon option for the yanks in Mid War. 255 points gets you 5 half tracks, 5 stands of riflemen, a commander, a mortar, 2 machine guns, 4 bazookas and the choice of an anti-tank gun or another bazooka.

Throw enough men at the enemy and eventually they will go away!

With 14 teams on the table when dismounted, the platoon is big enough to spread out and cover a wide area of the table, or can obviously jump in the half tracks and quickly redeploy - with its own AA machine guns to protect it from marauding aircraft or infantry as it goes.

The M3 37mm anti-tank gun

With a full loadout of bazookas, the armored rifles are a fearsome prospect for enemy tanks - they can scramble all over them, fire shots into side armour, and then assault with the means to destroy tanks, or they can sit back in their foxholes, fairly safe from enemy firepower, and repel assaults from tanks as they come in.

The M3 gun has a high rate of fire and decent range, but isn't that powerful against armour, so for me it's a toss up whether to include it or swap for a bazooka at the start of the game. It would depend on whether I was planning to assault with the platoon I would think, in that case an extra bazooka would be very handy.

If the enemy gives up on the tanks and tries sending in infantry, there are two machine guns to start with, with the option to dismount the guns from the half tracks and swap the rifles for another five machine guns. 

In case any infantry get ideas, this platoon has its own machine guns

I found these fairly simple to paint, and they would have been pretty quick if I'd had a few hours to spend on them in one go. All I did really was follow the guide on the Flames of War site for the base colours, and use an ink wash. To my eyes, flames of war infantry models are a bit small to do anything else with, so I save the more in depth techniques for the armour. I quite like how the bases have come out though (flat brown followed by drybrushing english uniform and then usa tan earth), so at some point I'll go back to my Airborne and make their bases match these.

I do still need to paint the dismounted machine guns - at the moment I don't have that option as they are still in the blister pack, so I've dealt with that by cunningly arranging to fight against German armour!

And with that, I've segued nicely into a quick battle report from this weekend's game at the club.

Kieron of Cheaphammer fame is running the campaign and is also my teammate on the US side. As I went into Sunday's game against Andy, Kieron had just lost a game against Andy the week before, and so I had the opportunity to be Patton to Kieron's Fredendall...

I was using the US Armored Company I've been putting together, and Andy had his panzers. We rolled Cauldron for scenario, and since we both had tank companies rolled to see who would attack. With Andy attacking, I was left with defence. Since "at least half" of my platoons had to be in delayed reserve, I had to pick two from the 5 I had available. I chose the armored rifles, which I deployed without the half tracks, and the security section from the tank destroyer platoon, which I placed in immediate ambush.

Andy deployed some panzer IV's, but my attention was immediately drawn to the Tiger on his left flank. I knew it would be in his army somewhere, since it had given Kieron so much trouble the previous week, and so I placed the ambushing security section as close to the Tiger as I could, knowing that the scenario gave me the first time and a chance to take out the Tiger before it mauled my other tanks. This was especially important as nothing else in my army had much chance of hurting the Tiger at long range.

The "entirely suprising" trap was sprung in my first turn, and the M10's appeared and drove around the flank of the Tiger - I decided to sacrifice rate of fire for a greater chance of hurting the big cat with shots that hit. The M10's let rip, and... managed to bail the Tiger. Oh dear.

I wasn't too worried given the low rate of fire of a Tiger. Surely my M10's would be reasonably safe, until Andy brought on his reserve Panzer III's immediately next to them. His first round of shooting destroyed one of the M10's and bailed two others, leaving me with a single operational tank destroyer. I had more luck in my second turn and was able to destroy the Tiger (without which I think I might have started to get into some trouble) before the Panzers destroyed the entire tank destroyer platoon in return.

Meanwhile, back in my deployment area, the sheer number of teams in the armored rifle platoon and the short distance between the objectives I had to defend (thanks to the smaller deployment area in the Cauldron) meant I was able to use the single platoon to hold both objectives with dug in infantry, bristling with bazookas and an anti-tank gun. Since Andy needed to take the objectives he threw his tanks at them, but wasn't able to winkle them out - in the whole game they only lost a single rifle team, in an assault.

Andy got a platoon of reserves in each of his first two turns so soon had his whole army converging on my dug in infantry. Oddly, this actually helped me out as it meant that when my own reserves finally arrived they came behind Andy's tanks and he was forced to choose between engaging them and continuing his attack.

Also, having my reserves off-table for so long meant that my air support could keep hunting stray tanks while Andy had to call off his aircraft as they were too close to his attacking forces, and he had no luck at all in shooting down my planes.

All of this combined to allow me to destroy quite a lot of panzers (many of them in defensive fire as they assaulted the armored rifle platoon), including Andy's commander, and eventually forced the company to break. A 5-2 win to the Americans, giving me bragging rights the next time I see Kieron I think!

I found time between nappy changes to do some painting

It's a busy life, being a dad, as I'm sure many of the adoring millions who read this blog must already know. 

On the one hand you have to go back to work all too soon after the little bundle of joy arrives, and on the other you spend most of your free time when you're not at work either looking after your offspring or catching up on some of the sleep you've missed. 

Family members are drawn to the new arrival like moths to a flame, and your doting partner doesn't get much time to do anything other than mothering during the day so there's always housework to help out with when you get home.

Even if you didn't have to do all this, having your own child around is fascinating and a lot of fun, and you can happily waste hours playing with them and seeing what faces they're going to pull, or things they're going to be sick on, next.

This all makes finding time for painting a bit tricky, but I have persevered, and by not paying enough attention to my daughter waiting until my daughter is asleep, I've managed to achieve some results - the M3 halftracks for my US Armored Rifle platoon for Flames of War!

The photo isn't great unfortunately, but hopefully you can make out that I've used the same style of painting as for my other recent US armour models - a base coat with two layers of highlight, trying not to go too overboard with it and make the highlights unrealistic. I've also left off the transfers for now, and I'm going to stick to the plan of doing these all in one go later.

After some deliberation I decided that my "purple heart boxes" would have the mid-war style mounts for the machine guns, instead of the pulpit mount which appears in late-war. I've reasoned to myself that there must still have been some older unmodified half tracks in service in the later war, and it makes more sense to use mid-war models for late-war than the other way around!

Obviously I now need to paint the infantry for this platoon too. That should probably be my next target (the club FoW campaign starts next week after all), but in fine wargamer's style I've been distracted by something new, so details of that will follow...

There may be something of a slowdown...

In the previous thrilling installment of Paintbrush and Superglue, I mentioned that we were expecting a baby girl, and had lowered my painting expectations accordingly. Well, a couple of weeks ago, Jessica arrived...

"Wait, what are you going to do with this photo?"

... and I haven't picked up a paintbrush since. Still, I'm going back to work on Friday for a rest, so we'll see how things go from that point.

However, before the 4:30am drive to the hospital, I managed to do some work on my Stuarts:

These pictures aren't fantastically well exposed...

... since I was taking them between nappy changes and didn't have time to set them up better.

I'm not approaching the tanks for this army as I normally would - I'm putting more highlights onto them than usual. Now, I'm never really sure about highlights on things like tanks that have a lot of flat surfaces. A lot of the models you see that win awards and suchlike have highlights that just look wrong to me - they've been very carefully blended and all the rest, but the effect for me just doesn't seem convincingly like a real life tank. Maybe it's me, but highlights that are way over the top seem to be in fashion as a way of showing how good you are at applying highlights rather than making the models look realistic. Anyway, I'm giving it a try but I'm trying to keep them reasonably muted. There are two layers of highlights on these, but I'll be taking those down with ink later, after I apply transfers. The transfers should be going on to the entire army in one go once I have it ready, so for now, these are done.

With the Stuarts completed, I decided that the next thing my US Armor company needs is an armored rifle platoon, since tanks without infantry support can be very vulnerable to assaults from enemy infantry (something I like to exploit with my Airborne company, heh heh heh). The .50 cal machine guns strapped to basically every vehicle the Americans fielded help a lot with this, but I still want some infantry support and so I started on the halftrack riders. 

Like Kieron, I've realised that the recon platoon is basically bits of an armored rifle platoon plus jeeps. So, with the aim of acquiring table-ready platoons for as little work as possible, I've started to paint a halftrack and a jeep. I also started the anti-tank gun from the armored rifle platoon, since it was just sitting there.

Errr... that's it. I'm not sure when I'll next paint, or post, or anything, but as life with a daughter sinks in and gets less hectic, something like normal service should be resumed in due course, and I'll ramble on about it as boringly as possible here. I'm sure you're looking forward to that as much as I am!

Mobile Phones Don't Have Very Good Cameras

The month has ended, and I've painted something. 3 Shermans, in fact:

Apologies for the not so great photo - the good camera is now packed in the "The Baby's Coming, We've Got To Get To The Hospital" bag, so I used my iPhone to take this.

Anyway. These still need transfers adding, but given that I have a big pile of tanks to paint I've decided to do all of the transfers together at the end. I particularly like the baseball bat on the the turret of the lead tank, nice bit of character for a US tank I thought!

As I hinted at oh so subtly above, Mrs Matt is due to give birth this month, which is likely to have something of an impact on my ability to paint stuff. Since I've started them already, I'm just going to aim to paint 5 Stuarts, which would probably make my US Tank Company big enough to use in some games (although until I do the armored rifles I think it will struggle a bit with no infantry support at all).

Better Living Through Chemistry

It had to happen sometime.

Admittedly, it took a convenient confluence of circumstances - rain that stopped me doing work in the garden, a cancelled meeting at work so that I unexpectedly finished 90 minutes earlier than I expected - but here we are.

Not only have I started painting something, I'm blogging about it too!

Right. So, errr (clears throat). How do these things go again? Oh yes, targets.

I've always liked the American army in WW2. I suspect this comes from movies and video games that tend to feature the yanks heavily (often in fact to the exclusion of everyone else involved), but in Flames of War there's an obvious attraction - the US Army seems to have an unlimited supply of equipment (especially bazookas...) so playing as the Americans gives you access to a lot of fun toys.

When I first started playing FoW I got myself a US Airborne force, which I've had a fair amount of success with - big, Fearless units can be very effective when they're flung with reckless abandon at enemy armour, especially when they also have gammon bombs. Eventually I added some armoured support of my own, and now I have a full (fairly large in fact) armoured company that I'd like to play some games with. However, it's not painted.

We're planning a mid-war campaign at the club over the winter, and I'll be playing as the Americans. So my goal is to get a mid-war version of a US Tank Company ready for that, to allow me to alternate between the Airborne and the Armored guys.

I've also got some late-war tanks to paint, but I'll put those on the back burner for now.

There's not much of August left and I don't expect I'll get a lot of free time for painting (my wife is eight months pregnant, so there's a lovely list of DIY I need to do) so I'll start small and try to get three Shermans painted. That will give me eight painted Shermans, so I could field that as two command and two platoons of three.

Here they are as they stand at the moment - base coated with some highlights, but the tracks and stowage still need to be done.

I also started a couple of M18s, just because they were undercoated and sat on my desk...

 

I'd also like to sing the praises of some new technology I've acquired. First off, "Zip Kicker". I picked this up in Modelzone, it's an accelerator for superglue.

 

Really works, too! It makes it much, much easier to put fiddly things together, especially stuff like Battlefront tanks which have resin and metal components. The superglue bonds and sets immediately, so you aren't trying to hold things in place as it slowly dries.

Next, I thought I'd try some of Games Workshop's (boo! hiss! etc!) Liquid Green Stuff.

 

I'm not quite as big a fan of this as I am the Zip Kicker, but it does work, and I was able to fill some gaping holes in the hulls of these plastic Shermans pretty easily.

Using Liquid Green Stuff is a bit like painting with toothpaste - it's thick and dries quickly, so you have to move fast and use layers to build up any big areas. It is certainly easier than solid Green Stuff for things like this though.