Sunday, June 30, 2013

Flames of War: My plunge

...into World War II.  I'm not a huge WWI or WWII buff, the Crusades, Viking, and Roman history is more my thing.  That said a couple of people that I game with talked me into trying out Flames of War.  So on we go, I'm planning to do a U.S. Force.

What I did was purchase the FoW Open Fire box set.  That is a pretty good buy for the entry level.  I traded the German Infantry out for more Airborne Infantry. So now I have a bunch of English Shermans and a pair of Fireflies.  The Shermans I will use for the U.S. forces for the time being.

I've worked with a lot of bad plastic kits over the years, I must say Battlefront's plastic Sherman kit ranks right up there with the worst of them.  Not very impressive at all.  The right set of tracks are warped on all of the sprues. The tank chassis does not fit together well at all without lots of clamping and filing.  After doing one of them with a minimal gaps, I decided that was just too much work for a 15mm miniature, so I just glued the rest of them together and filled the gaps with greenstuff.  For more Shermans in the future, I will probably try the Plastic Soldier Company ones.

The kit does have some nice stowage, and there is enough left over that I will save that for the next batch for variety.  The turrets are definitely nicer than the chassis. Above and below are the first batch of three.
And below is the next batch of three.

I'm not sure how I'm going to paint these yet.  I was thinking of priming them in some sort of olive drab color from a rattle can if I can find something from Testors.  Don't know yet.  I do plan to avoid using metallic paint on these, as at this scale I think the metal flake in the metallic paint will look odd.

Below are the Firefly tanks.

And below are all eight of the tanks, ready for paint.


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4 comments:

  1. DeanMJuly 1, 2013 at 12:03 PM

    Nice work, PC. I just saw someone else pick this set up (from another blog post). Sounds like this starter is a good deal. Best, Dean

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  2. AnonymousJuly 1, 2013 at 12:16 PM

    Hi

    Loving the fact that you've taken to WWII games or at least willing to try one.
    I bought the FOW m18's for battlegroup overlord last week and I found them similarly disappointing though not as bad as your description of the shermans.

    I thought I would share some info you may or may not have. the plastic soldier company publish a game called battlegroup kursk which is the starter rule book for the battlegroup series. (kurk and Overlord) my experience is that while a little complex it provides a very entertaining evenings play in 15mm scale.

    also the plastic soldier company shermans are nicer to put toghther and you can make all 5 76mm shermans (still an awful gun but that's why the americans have the M10 Wolverine)

    i hope your sally forth into WWII Games is a succes

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  3. PsychosisPCJuly 1, 2013 at 5:44 PM

    Thanks guys. Yea we will see once I tackle some of those Airborne. And thanks for the comments on the plastic soldier shermans.

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  4. Michael ButcherJuly 2, 2013 at 10:33 AM

    I have about a gazillion Germans waiting on you. I did not have the same issues with my shermans, maybe you bathc was warped. I like that FOW events usually only required %50 of your army to be Battlefront minis (take that GW!).

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