Building a Western European Battlefield the easy way!

Battle Front moves into real estate

Battle Front has just come out with a new subscription offer which is outstanding!  Basically for roughly $21 USD a month you get a new house (pictured above).  The houses come once a month and are shipped free to you.  In addition to the houses you get a bunch of extras like a fountain, walls and extensions for the buildings you can see them all here.  Now I just need to get some roads and and I have everything I need for a battlefield.  As the buildings come in I will be doing a review on them and they will start being featured in upcoming AARs.

Summer Siege 2012 in Ottawa!

88's enforce a no fly zone at SS 2012

This Saturday the Dice Devils held the Summer Siege 2012 in the Barrhaven legion, it was outstanding!  The prize support from Perkins Hobby House, FDB and the Hobby Centre was far and above what you see at most tournaments.  The venue was outstanding, air conditioned, beside pizz and burger places and it had a bar!  This was also the first time I've gone to a tournament that started after noon.  Thanks to Pripyat and RKelly for running the event.  I have a bunch of pictures (if you've already checked out the Dice Devils gallery you will have seem them already) but I've cut out the ones from my games so there will be three new AARs coming over the next couple of days.  Congratulations to the winners:

Overall - Ca$h
General - Big Willie (combined/axis)
Allied General - Louie
Best Army - Matt Varnish
Best Sport - Matt M

Enjoy!

Be warned there is over 100 pictures!

Extra Tobruk Pits

I recently bought Hellfire and Back!  the FOW early war in the desert book.  Pretty fun stuff, especially all those silly light tanks flying around.  Anyway I've been looking for a way to modify my Australian MW Div Cav force to an Early War force.  A "morph" if you will, since all the equipment except the Grants is usable EW.

Since I'm not going to buy a another infantry platoon and command for them just yet, I figured I could make a decent Tobruk Defense force.   Since my other favorite tank, the Matilda II features in that.  Haven't bought the Matilda yet, but I did buy a pack of "Tobruk Pits", which are MG nests in a small concrete bunker like thing.

The blister comes with 2 nests, and 2 of each nationality that uses the pits, 2 brits, 2 aussies, 2 french, 2 italian, and 4 German (2 early, 2 late).  It seemed a pity to waste the extra guys, so I measured and created on a 3D printer 2 more pits.  These will be usable for my Germans if I do any Beach/dug in type scenarios.  So LW of course.

Here's a pic of the finished pits.  The printer isn't SUPER high res, so I had to do a bunch of priming and sanding to get the surfaces smooth.  The "ground" doesn't matter as I will cover that with pummace anyway.  Anyway they came out really nicely.  Hopefully the paint will last the test of time.  The originals are on the right, the new ones are on the left.

And while I was doing 3D printing, I figured I would finish the turret ring for my 28mm Matilda II tank for my jungle Aussies.  I might want to change the gun from a 2lbr to a "Frog" flamethrower but it'll be fine for now.  The turrent just never fit on correctly, but its nice and snug now.  Can't wait to get this guy done.  And it will probably inspire me to pick up a few 15mm versions for the FOW Aussies.

The original tank:

Bottom of the sanded turret:

New turret Ring.

28mm Australians Snow Followup

Ok, this'll be weird but I wanted to give a followup to the snowy dull coat problem I was reporting last post.

Someone over on AmbushAlley forums suggested painting on olive oil over the snowy looking parts.  I was surprised and delighted to say that it worked perfectly.  I wiped off the remaining oil and the snowy surface is no longer snowy.  The pic is below.  I tested on this guy, and when it worked, I did the rest of the snowy squad.  Thank God I didn't have to repaint them again.

The original:

And post olive oil:

28mm Australian Platoon Continues

And in case you haven't had enough of my obsession with my old homeland, here are some 28mm Jungle Australians to be used in Burma or Kokoda Trail campaigns.  Haven't started their Japanese opponents yet, but I'll get to that..

So first up, a group shot of the entire platoon.  Granted, no Heavy MGs or Mortars (or tank support) yet, but still a good start for a skirmish game.

And squad 1 next up.  

 

Squad 2:



The command squad with a some really nice sculpts by Brigade Games.  The other more cartoony guys are made by Artizan.  Both mix well, but I prefer Brigade as they have a more "Rodin" feel to them somehow..  Maybe its the lack of eyeballs. I dunno.



I have kept my squad ID numbering system, so you can see Squad 3 here with an MG as one of the corporals/fireteam leaders.  The main reason I do the MG labeling is because the Bren guns these guys are carrying aren't the most obvious.  You can also see on the middle guy a white powdery looking effect on his base.  More on this in a moment.



Squad 3.  You can see the white powder on the middle guy... grrr

Here's a close up of one of the worst.  This happened before when I'd finished painting my 2nd squad.  I dullcoat sprayed 'em, and it looked like they had just come in from a light snow storm = HORRIBLE looking.  It looks worse in real life.

Anyway in case anybody out there has run into this "white powder snow dullcoating disaster", I looked it up on the web and found that it sometimes happens with dullcoat, either because of humidity, or over shaking, phase of the moon etc. etc.  Here are a few links that hopefully should help.  I'll probably try spraying one guy again with dullcoat to see if I can't get rid of the snow.  Quite bummed about it because these fig sculpts are so good, and I want to get moving on their Japanese counterparts.

http://airfixtributeforum.myfastforum.org/archive/cotes-and-varnishes__o_t__t_3476.html
http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?183180-Brush-on-matt-varnish

FOW Aussies Finished

So its taken forever, but I finally finished my 1500 point Australian FOW MW Divisional Cav force.  I started this force WAY back when for 2 reasons: 

1. I wanted to have some guys in the Australian Army hats
2. I wanted to use Grants because I fondly remember the movie Sahara with Humprey Bogart.  Yes I know he was commanding a Lee, but its close enough.
3. Ok 3 reasons, I didn't want to paint too much infantry.  They were the reason this took so long, so an armored force it is.

First up, a group shot of the whole army.  Technically there's a kittyhawk as aircover, but he's not quite finished so I left him off so as not to ruin the rest of the army, which I think kicks ass.  It'll probably get its butt handed to it in combat, but it looks nice.  The other reason it took so long was it took ages for infantry to get painted, and after finishing my 40k Tallarn force, I just couldn't take any more tan... (heck even the display board is from them)

Next a shot of the Aussie infantry.  There are technically only supposed to be 6 bases of infantry, and technically I didn't buy the light mortar, but I figured I'd paint the whole blister.  Since the blister happened to come with an entire squad of extra guys (even using 5 men per base), I just went with it.

Close up of the grants. These guys are my heavy front armor hitters.  The crusaders meanwhile will fly round the flanks and blast away with their crappy 2lbr gun hoping to hit something.  Since grants (or Shermans if you add them) are 8th army, they only get to be Confident Veteran instead of Fearless Veteran that the rest of the army is.  I've heard what you end up with using this army is a bunch of single Crusaders flying around that won't run away but have lost the rest of their platoon!

These are the older guys I finished like a YEAR ago, but they are still cool.  Like I said the Crusaders will fly around flanks and blast away since they don't have side armor for shooting (a special rule).  The carriers meanwhile actually have something that can hurt infantry, so they are there to shoot up any enemy footsloggers.  Apart from the kittyhawk I don't have any artillery, and basically that's by design since I simple didn't want to paint any.  I'm not really a fan of those armies that take the bare minimum of company requirements and then take a crapton of support weapons.  It just seems a bit gamey.  This army does have support but at least has 2 platoons each of the required units.

Early War 8th Panzer Regiment, 15th Panzer Division vs The BAR in Free for All

Flaming tanks everywhere! This was both my first game of early war and also the first game I've gotten to play in for the Dice Devils EW escalation league. Unfortunately I haven't had the chance to paint any new models so you may recognize the DAK Panzers from MW. The actual models are IV Es but for this game they were representing IV Ds. Bob and I agreed to play on a 3'x 4' table and the mission was Free for All.

8th Panzer Regiment, 15th Panzer Division DAK OC in IV D 3 x IV Ds

British Armoured Regiment OC in Crusader 2IC tiny light tank (if someone knows the right name let me know) 3 x Crusaders 2 x CS Crusaders 3 x Vickers Mark VI tanks