(So, I'm coming up on 6 months of being in the Flames hobby and the first big milestone I set for myself, the NOVA Open Tournament, is quickly approaching. As a part of that I'm going to do a series of blog posts looking at how I thought about the army I'm bringing. What I did to paint it up. The Tournament itself and my thoughts overall on the game 6 months in. I'm calling this the Capstone Series as it caps off the first chapter of my FOW gaming life)
The first big goal for this blog was to showcase how me and a group of my friends discovered Flames of War, learned to play, paint and enjoy the historical WW2 war gaming hobby.
A major part of that for me was setting some goals in terms of painting and competing. I made
NOVA open a major benchmark in my early FOW path, because for me, competitions give me goals and let me get out of my local meta, get drunk and meet cool people. So, I knew I'd need to choose an army, paint it, test it and get to know and love it.
And I've finally done it. I've figured out, bought and painted my 1750 late war army for 2012 NOVA Open.
As you can tell by the name of the post and the giant image, I've settled on
Panzer Lehr Panzer Grenadiers.
Why? Well a bunch of reasons. First off, they've got a ton of cool history and were one of the key units of the
Normandy Campaign. Secondly, they get all the cool toys. Rockets, tanks, flammtracks, recce you name this mechanized list can pretty much be built to taste. Finally, I think it's a stronger "all comers" list than a standard PzrGren list do to the addition of the tank hunter teams as organic elements in each platoon.
This is my first fully painted, cohesive army. I've only been in the hobby for 6 months and I've painted up a bunch of dudes,
King Tigers,
Stug batteries and a slew of
panthers and
panzers. But, this is the first time I've tested and winnowed down a list to what I think I'd like to play and will be most effective.
 |
A classic image from the Korsun Pocket and a key influence in
the visual theme of my army. |
That's a critical balance for me. I could go out and buy and
the coolest new toy on the block, paint it up and play. But is that as fun and figuring out my own play style, how to best implement it and then researching the history on the units that best fight that way? To some, sure, to me, most certainly not.
Back to the army at hand. I went with a winter scheme, partly by necessity and partly because I think there's something about German's in winter that just looks sweet. It was by necessity because my original army was going to be a straight Gepanzerte Panzergrenadier army out of Grey Wolf, and I wanted to set it around a
Korsun Pocket theme.
Because of that many of my early models were painted in a winter scheme with long coats and unless I wanted to buy new grenadiers/Lehr infantry I was stuck. But that's ok, like I said, winter is fine by me. At first I was a little nervous because, historically, I wasn't sure of Lehr's operational history after summer of '44. But after some (very little :) digging I found they fought under
Manteuffel during
Wacht Am Rhine/Battle of the Bulge and actually were involved in the fighting around Bastogne.
So while they were not going to be painted in a classic, summer '44 Lehr scheme, they would be at least arguably accurate in a winter look. Having decided that, it was time to build the army.
