Desert Terrain

I completed my desert boards a couple of weeks back.

I borrowed some paint off John because I am colour blind and have had real issues trying to come up with decent desert colours. I bought a sheet to spray paint but it was way too green by the time I got it on the table. I bought some paint but it was too light. I don’t know what colour this is, but it works perfectly.

Desert terrain is important this year as I build my WW2 Desert Italians and aim to playtest some army lists for the Yom Kippur War using Flames of War 3rd Edition. I’m now waiting on the Battlefront big desert building and some Pegasus palm trees to complete the set.

Nate

 

Zuzzy mat finished

So here it is in all of its glory, with some Egyptian armour for perspective.

Now I will build some hills with the same colours and similar textures, a few small Arab houses (John said that he will make these for me), and I’ll purchase some Pegasus palm trees, which will bring all of my desert terrain and the whole Yom Kippur War project to completion.  I’ll put up another battle report sometime soon.

Nate

Work in Progress – Zuzzy mat

Dan bought some Zuzzy mats last year, and didn’t take them with him to Oz.  He told me to use them, so I’ve started painting up the 6′ x 4′ Despoiled Reaches as a desert to use with the Flames of War Arab-Israeli stuff.  I’m not doing much painting at he moment, but occasionally I’m adding a bit of colour to this mat to try and get it finished.  Here’s the progress so far:

You can see that I have put down one colour, the Burnt Sienna, and have begun the Burnt Umber.  I’m planning on washing the whole thing in black, then dry brushing a Pale Sand/Burnt Sienna mixed colour over the top.

Here is a close-up.  I initially put a wash of each base colour down in an attempt to limit the amount of gray coming through in the cracks.  This was a fail.  It is particularly noticeable where the two colours meet.  Hopefully a black wash and the dry brushing should obscure this.

Nate

The Battle of El Ementri – Flames of War Modern

So last Friday we fought the second playtest of the 1973 Israeli and Egyptian armies for Flames of War.  Unfortunately I completely forgot my camera and John’s wasn’t charged up, so there are no pictures of the battle in progress, only a couple of photos ripped from other sites, but I do want to make a few notes.

Rule changes couldn’t prevent a battlefield full of these…

1.  I was concerned that the points costings might be a little broken when the Egyptians got wiped off the board last time.  Now this could have simply been my poor generalship, but I did think that the Egyptians needed a little more to balance out the Israelis at 2000 points.  I rejigged the Egyptian list, replacing the BMP-1s with more infantry and a unit of five SU-100s.  This proved to bring a lot more balance to the game we played.

2. I removed the rule around the Saggers that allow wary Israeli tank crews to dodge the first missile if they pass a skill test.  This is a fairly sensible rule given that  the Israelis soon developed tactics to deal with Sagger attacks,  but takes away one of the few ‘cool toys’ that the Egyptians possessed and used to devastating effect at the beginning of the conflict.  So I proposed to Owen (the guy that wrote the lists) that maybe the ‘Sagger dodge’ could be a ‘Late War’ extra, with crews paying 20 points per platoon for the ability.  Incidentally, I credit the change of this rule with the better showing of the Egyptians in the second playtest.

3.  The lists as they stand allow you to choose only one type of tank in your company – either T-55 or T-62.  I have to admit that I simply ignore this stricture, because of the models that I have available.

4. Finally I allowed my HQ T-62 to be Confident trained, assuming that the commander of a tank battalion would have some decent experience to fall back on.

…But they did make sure that there were plenty of these left behind as well.

The battle was once again an encounter scenario, but this time the Egyptians fought the Israelis to a bloody stalemate.  Probably a fairly good simulation of the early days of the Yom Kippur War, although the IAF was getting a pretty free ride from the SAM umbrella’s absence.  I think that if the game had gone another two turns we would have ended up with an Egyptian victory, as they were only a move away from taking an undefended objective.  Quite an impressive turn-around from just a couple of little tweaks!

Nate

(images were taken from http://idf-armor.blogspot.com and http://www.qwiki.com/q/#!/Tanks_in_the_Cold_War ).  The first is an excellent resource that I have gone to many times for ideas.  The other answered my google call for a broken Patton…)

Reinforcements for the Egyptians

After my playtest of the Flames of War rules, one thing that stood out was the pointlessness of the BMP-1s in an armoured battle.  It also made no sense to have troops in APCs when they dig-in well and defend so brilliantly.  So I decided to scratch the BMPs in favour of a platoon of SU-100s (which were just lying around with my Flames of War Soviets), and to increase my infantry quota.

I also received the Peter Pig RPGs and painted and based them up.  The Israeli figures are equipped with the Galil and are more modern LAWs than what they had in 1973, but they look like captured Soviet RPGs, and the guns don’t stand out that much, so I’ll make do.  Sorry to offend the purists.

You can see that the Peter Pig figures are slightly larger than the Quality Castings and are much more detailed sculpts.  In fact, I felt like I was letting them down painting them in the same rough style as the QC figures. They do fit in well enough though.  I’m looking forward to taking them for another game, but this Friday they will be rested in favour of a Flames of War game with Late War Soviets.

Nate

First game of Modern Flames of War

It was a week ago that this game was played, but life just keeps getting busier, so apologies for the delayed playtest.

I compiled two lists of 2000 points to take around to John’s place on Friday night, the Israelis and the Egyptians.  Note that I had to add in some WW2 Germans, Brits and US paras as proxies for the dedicated RPG teams.  I’ll have this fixed in a couple of weeks with an order to Peter Pig I hope!

We chose to play an encounter scenario with half our points off-board at the beginning of the game.  I don’t believe that this favoured the Egyptians, but I’m not sure that anything would have!  The Egyptians rolled high and were the attacker for the game.

The initial forces on board were:

Egyptian -1 company of 6 T-55s; 1 mechanised company of infantry with 2 platoons, 6 BMP-1s and 4 attached Saggers; HQ of 1 T-62; and the platoon of 2 ZSU-23-4s.  Note that the Egyptians have centralised control and the Hen and Chicks rule the same as if they were WW2 Soviets.

Israeli – 1 platoon of 3 M48A4s; 1 platoon mechanised infantry riding in M113s; the 2 M106 Mortar carriers; and 2 x Sho’t Cal Centurions as HQ.

Initial deployment saw a weak centre and strong flanks for the Egyptians, while the Israelis deployed on top of their objective markers.

The initial turn was not too bad for the Egyptians as they moved forward with the T-55s on the left flank;

but failed to dig in the infantry on the right (despite a reroll special rule for Egyptian infantry digging in..).  They even managed to take out one of the Centurions from the HQ section.  Then…

Oh, dear…  The T-55s decided discretion was the better part of valour until the reinforcements arrived, and hid in the town to avoid further air pummeling:

On the right the Egyptian infantry once more failed to dig in:

It would be third turn lucky for the hapless infantry and their spades, but in that very same turn the arrival of reinforcements saw the Israelis switch over to a counterattack:

The Israeli infantry hopped out of their M113s as the newly arrived Sho’ts of the reinforcement platoon came rolling through;

The Recce jeeps advanced.

Of course the next round of Egyptian shooting convinced me that in a real war I’d much rather be in a tank than a jeep!!!!

On the Egyptian right flank a Sagger forced the Centurions to rethink their axis of attack.  They pulled back to dodge the ATGW missile (it is a special rule to account for the slowness of the weapon) and managed to get out of line of sight.  Then they went around the hill and struck from the centre.

Finally the Egyptian reinforcements arrived - a company of 5 T-62s and a company of 6 T-55s.  The Israeli players looked at all the armour and began trembling.

Then they began shooting…

Oh…

dear…

The Egyptians weren’t without minor triumphs from then on in – here you can see a brewed up M48A4 in the background.  But the Israelis closed in on the dug-in infantry:

And another Sagger put paid to one of the pesky Centurions!  It was all pretty much over, though, and the HQ T-62 also met its end: The final turn looked like this:

I’ve got a pretty great gaming group with John, Chris and Terry and they all enjoy playing Flames of War.  But I’ve never seen everyone have so much fun in a game.  Chris and I were the Egyptians, and John and Terry took the  Israelis.  There was a lot of laughter, and everybody wanted to play this again, which I will put forward as evidence for the success of the rules that Owen has crafted.

In practical terms, I came to a few conclusions.  Israeli tanks are dead ‘ard.  You can’t outmanoeuvre  them and they are not going to break until they are all dead.  Their gunnery is exceptional, and in a straight tank on tank combat, the Egyptian player needs three to one superiority I believe.  Hmmm, might have to order another half dozen T-55s.  Where would I shed the points in the Egyptian list?  The ZSU 23-4s were extremely effective on the right flank – you simply have to take them with the Israeli air force about. The BMP-1s were pretty much useless given the points paid for them.  They do have Saggers, but you are much better off with a dug-in infantry gun team than a frontal armour 1 vehicle that costs loads of points.  The Egyptian infantry are extremely resilient when dug in, so why worry about any transport at all? I’ll reconfigure the forces and have another go, and see how things turn out.  Overall, I’m really happy with the look, the feel and the fun of playing FoW for 1973.

Nate

 

1973 Yom Kippur War armies complete

I thought I’d take a couple of photos of the completed Israeli and Egyptian armies for my 1973 Flames of War project.

As always, click on the photos to zoom in.

First up, the Egyptian army:

And the Israelis:

So there we have it.  There are still a few touch ups I want to do (Arabic numbers on the tanks etc) but ready to get on the table.  All I have to do now is play some games with them.  I have the playtest stats from Owen and I’ve built these forces around those points totals.  With the Vietnam sourcebook coming out with the next Wargames Illustrated I hope to find some M48, M113 and maybe some T-55 stats to cross-reference them with.  I am very much looking forward to it.

Nate

Israeli infantry finished

Finished off the Israeli army today with two platoons of infantry.  That rounds off the whole project bar the two T-62s and last Sh’ot that are still in the mail.  Below is a picture of the first platoon.

And just to see how it would look when finished, here is the commander for my Soviet WW2 Tankovy battalion:

I used magic wash on these guys, mixing Klear floor polish with quite a bit of black and using that to shade the basic dark green colour scheme.  It has worked quite well to shade the recesses.  I still need to wash the HMG so that it isn’t quite so shiny.

My next project is my Soviet army so this is really just a taster for the next few months.

Nate

Israeli armour complete(ish)

I finished off the Israeli armour last night – 3 M48s, 4 Centurions, 2 M113s, 2 Mortar carriers, 3 jeeps and 3 Egyptian T-55s.  There is still 1 Sh’ot Centurion and 2 T-62s coming which is the last of the armour.  I now only have to finish off 50 Israeli infantry and these last three tanks and the armies are complete.  Then I’m planning on concentrating on terrain, which will probably be a cloth and some hills with maybe 2 or three small buildings.  I am keen to build a couple of defensive positions as well, so might get the Osprey on Israeli fortifications from the YKW.

Anyway, here are the boys:

4 Sh’ot Centurions.  One is going to be seconded to HQ platoon.

3 MuTT jeeps for a recon element

Mortar platoon.

Both platoons of Magachs.

The Egyptian T-55 Company.

I am aware that the tanks should have 2 aerials each, but could only squeeze in one.  Plus, it makes handling them tricky.  They look cool, but I can see the need for superglue every time they are played with…

Which is appropriate, because hopefully next weekend we can take them for a test drive with the FoW mods that I’ve got.  John has some desert terrain already constructed for WW2, so they might make the trip out to his place in the car.  Expect a battle report with a lot of missing aerials (sigh).

Nate

 

The beginning of the 1973 Israelis

I’m finally finding a bit of a painting groove, and the Israelis are beginning to roll off the production line. First up are six M113 APCs and 3 M48s.  All vehicles are from Command Decision’s (Old Glory 25s) post-war US range.  The initial order was for plain M113s but for some reason we were sent the flamethrower version.  Living so far away from the US I didn’t want to make a fuss, so I’ve added Battlefront .50 cals to them and not gone with the turret option.

As far as Israeli vehicles go, neither tank is quite correct.  I’m thinking of buying up some extra stowage for them just to give them that ‘rough’n'ready’ Israeli look.  The M48 is equipped with the US 90mm gun rather than the upgunned British 105mm of the Magach 3.  I pondered the possibility of scratch-building a 105mm barrel for them, but in the end left the original as I couldn’t guarantee making a decent job of it.  I’m not particularly anal in this respect as I am sure many would be.  Whilst I do have standards (I would never field a Tiger tank as a proxy for a Centurion for instance), when it comes to a slightly different barrel, I’ll wear the complaints of the wargames fashion police.

So here they are:

The aerials are nylon bristles off an old brush and dustpan set.  Nice and strong.

The terrain boards were originally built by Dan and I a few years ago for Legends of the Old West games and consist of 6mm MDF with scattered rocks all painted and a drybrush over the top.  However we only have a 4′x4′ surface and an 8′ x 4′ table that I would like to be able to use in its entirety.  I’m not sure whether I want to build another two boards that are identical, or buy a cloth and spraypaint darker patches on it as a base.  A cloth is very easily stored and simple to transport, so that is in its favour.  These boards have been pretty durable, though and I have the paint to be able to construct matching modular hills.  I’ll have to mull it over some more.

Even though I’m concentrating on Flames of War at the moment I couldn’t resist painting a test unit of Principes and Hastati for my Mid-Republican Roman Field of Glory army.

Many years ago I interloaned Charles S Grant’s Wargames Scenarios book from my library.  It had 52 scenarios for wargamers and I remember being very impressed by the variety, even though at that stage I didn’t have any intact armies that weren’t Warhammer 40,000.  I’ve been wanting to get hold of a copy, and this month I finally bought Scenarios for all ages by Grant and Stuart Asquith.  With my multitude of periods I feel that I might finally be able to carry out a secret ambition – to play one scenario a week from 1 through to 52 throughout the space of one year.  I’m hoping to have my FoW armies finished within the next couple of months, and the FoG armies not long after, so 2012 could be the year. Better get painting…

Finally, just a thought for all the people in Christchurch who have been experiencing a living nightmare over the last couple of days.  My wife has family down there and I know that Dan has a lot of friends, so I wish them all the very best as they try to rebuild after the earthquake.

Nate