Basing the Hordes

Continued from Painting the Hordes


With a horde of little Soviet soldiers all sitting on plastic bottle caps garrisoning my table, it was time to begin the basing.

I set myself two main rules for the basing. The first is that it had to be simple to do. I have a lot of bases to do. The second is that it had to be a method I could easily use on the pre-cast bases on Battlefront's one-piece resin vehicles.

I recently used a very simple basing technique on some larger fantasy miniatures, but it involved using a sand base, which is ruled out by my second restriction of being able to use the method easily on pre-cast bases. Still, I like the method, so I decided I'd use a variation of it. Instead of a sand base I used a pumice base (Vallejo White Pumice) mixed with a darker brown color (Vallejo Model Color 826 German Camo Medium Brown).

I applied the pumice to an empty base, spreading it evenly to an approximate depth equal to that of the base of one of the miniatures. I then put a dab of white glue on the bottom of each of the miniatures and pressed them into the base. Using a sculpting tool, I then smoothed the transitions between the bases and the pumice and removed any extra pumice.

It's easier to spread the pumice onto the empty base than to try to spread it around pre-glued miniatures. I used white glue instead of superglue in the hope that it will be easier to remove figures from the base if I ever want to rebase them. The combination of the white glue and the pumice seems to hold them in solidly.

I mentioned that I mixed the pumice with a dark brown color before applying it to the base. This results in a light tan color that looks pretty good when inked over, but once again this breaks my second rule since I can't easily achieve the same light tan on a pre-cast base, so when it dries I paint over it with the same dark brown color.

After finishing the tank rider company using the above method, I don't think that I will continue to mix the pumice with paint in the future. Instead I'll simply paint over it. This should speed things up a bit and I don't think it will effect the final results.

At this point I originally tried inking the base, but found that any extra detail it brought out in the base was countered by the fact that it emphasized the differences where the pumice meets the edge of the bases of the miniatures. So I decided not to ink the base.

After everything dried I applied some static grass using it both to add some character to the base and to cover up any major flaws in the application of the pummice. I used the same method that I described in the writeup on my dwarf miniatures.

Once the glue dried on the grass I chose a slightly lighter brown (Vallejo Model Color 983 Flat Earth) to paint the edges of the base, and then it was on to the final step of the protective clear coats. I used my standard method of one coat of Testor's Gloss Cote followed by one or two coats of Citadel Matte Varnish.

I'm rather pleased with the results. The bases are nothing special, but I think they do their job of showing off the figures without distracting from them.

I'll save talking about my future plans for this force for the next article.


Continued in The Horde Grows.

Painting the Hordes

Continued from The Next Step.

While there's not much assembly involved in Soviet Infantry, there is a good deal of preparation involved. I started by buying the Strelkovy Company box and an extra Strelkovy Platoon blister. This gave me most of what I needed to make a full strength Tank Rider Company, plus several extra troopers since a Tank Rider platoon is smaller than a Strelkovy platoon. This is useful since there always seems to be a few damaged or miscast models in a package.

Unfortunately, there are a few other differences between a Tank Rider company and a Strelkovy company, mainly in the options they can take. I wanted to take both a machine gun platoon and an anti-tank rifle squad. Strelkovy companies don't have anti-tank rifles as an option, and only take a single machine gun squad instead of the two present in a platoon. Since neither machine gun nor anti-tank gun squads appear in Battlefront's special order catalog, that meant I was going to have to buy a whole company blister of each in order to fill out my Tank Riders.

I decided to put off that purchase while I got started on my infantry. As I cleaned each model of any extra flash, and straightened any bent weapons, I then sorted them into rows of identical models. This was so I could paint a group of identical models together, which was to prove helpful in speeding the painting process. I also took the worst of the damaged and miscast models and set them aside.

Next I took all the individual models and glued each one to a plastic cap from bottled water using a dab of Elmers' white glue. This gives me something to hold while painting the model. After the model is painted, then I can just pop it off the cap, clean up the bottom if necessary, and stick it on a base.

After that I painted them pretty much the same as I did my tankodesantniki, the only differences being that I tried to pay a little more attention to detail on the face and where different base colors met so that there was a bit of black left as a border. I didn't worry too much about this, just enough so that the wash effect was enhanced a bit.
After this, all that was left was the basing, but I'll go into that next time, along with what I plan to add to this force to bring it to 2000, 2500 and even 3000 points. I'll also go into the changes that I had to make in order to become compliant with the 2nd edition rules of Flames of War.

Continued in Basing the Hordes

Reactions to Flames of War V.2

So, it's been a couple days now since the mini-rulebook and the mid-war compilation lists came out for Flames of War and the official forums are still full of noise, mostly of the negative sort.

I'm still reading through the rules, but they seem ok to me. There are a few errors, but not too many, and some were caught in time to be fixed in the hardcover printing. The changes seem to be good to me. Some have had problems with some of the changes, but overall it looks like a good revision.

The compilation lists are a different matter entirely. At current count the errata thread has reached 10 pages, mostly with errors related to the two compilation books. Leaving aside the complaints of those who are simply unhappy with changes in their army list, there is simply too much missing or incorrect data. I won't go into details but these are mostly things that could have been caught with more proofreading. They simply should have sent the proofs out to more players for review before sending them to the press.

I'd give them more of a break, but they knew they had problems after they released the preview lists for the minor axis powers. Within hours of release people found mistakes with each of those lists. They should have realized at that point that they needed better proofreading of the whole book and gotten the proofs out to more eyes. The result is going to be the need for large PDF files to correct all the mistakes. The mistakes are so many that people are going to feel compelled to repurchase the books when they are eventually reprinted, undoing much of the goodwill generated with the free rules upgrade.

So, ignoring all the errors, the changes in the lists are a mixed bag. Overall prices dropped on a lot of units, mainly armor and artillery. I've seen some complaints that certain HQ teams have been dropped from units, making them less historical. For example, in the US lists, the halftrack command team has been dropped from the assault gun unit, and the jeep command team from the self-propelled AA unit. This could become a bigger issue after the errata is dealt with as now BF appears to be changing actual historical composition in order to make gameplay easier. Something sure to annoy those of us with an interest in the historical side of things.

Finally, BF response is slow as usual. They have made a few responses to issues, but only a small fraction of the issues brought up so far have been answered. Hopefully, they are going through their notes and trying to figure out what went wrong. More likely they are simply taking the weekend off.

I don't mean to rag too much on BF, but they really botched the mid-war compilation books. Even the fanbois that frequent the official forums have been hard pressed to defend the amount of errors present (although they still jump on anyone who has an issue with an intentional change in the rules or lists).

With that out of the way, how does this effect my armies? For the Soviets that I've been describing it doesn't effect them much at all. I'm dropping the tankodesantniki for a couple reasons. One, they went up in price, which combined with increased costs of air support mean that I either need to drop the air support and add tankodesantniki to the KV-1e tanks, or drop the tankodesantniki and keep the air support. Two, the rules for tankodesantniki changed a lot, and there are a lot of questions about what the changes actually mean, so until some of those questions have been answered I'll probably stay away from them. Besides, dropping the tankos means I don't actually have to paint anything new.

I'm not sure how I'm going to proceed to increase my force to 2000 points now, but I'll be working on that soon. Meanwhile, my German armored company got a windfall of new points to spend, but I'll go into that in an upcoming post.