Sunday 16 June 2019

New Recruits

I finished my second French cavalry unit last week, the Apchon Dragoons, a nice red coat with light blue facings, this gives me two cavalry squadrons for each side now. It was time to order up the next batch of SYW figures and I drew back from the Grenadiers I wanted to get two more cavalry units, one each. Now I am not a big fan of painting cavalry and have reduced the squadrons from twelve to eight figures so I came up with a brilliant idea, you get two cavalry flags for the one regiment from GMB and if you just continue to add different squadrons you end up with a lot of flags left over, so why not build two squadrons instead of one. Now the really clever part is that if I ever do need a large unit of cavalry I can combine two eights for sixteen, voila!




The not so clever bit comes next, instead of ordering basically the same figures I made a mistake and ordered up a new set for the British, these will not fit as the 10th Dragoons second squadron so I had to order up another set of flags as this lot will be the 7th Dragoon Guards. I get the infantry of the SYW, light, line and Grenadiers, but the cavalry organisation I find confusing, Horse become Dragoon Guards but are not really Dragoons, Cuirassiers, Hussars, Heavy, Light etc, and there are the Gentlemen regiments, royal regiments, non royal regiments, pass me the paracetamol.

Once this cavalry are done I think more artillery then the Grenadiers, in between possible new vehicles for WWII with the new releases from Rubicon in July. I also have to settle on what I am going to use for buildings as I am getting close to having an actual game with the SYW stuff. I could go cheap and just get MDF from Sarissa, Dutch/Belgian types or the more expensive, resin I think, from Total Battle Miniatures, or I could go really daft and get them commissioned, watch this space.

I also managed to finish off my extra SS LMG teams and a couple of extra figures, I almost forgot, in amongst the stuff above I have to do two British Para squads, that will be it for WWII for now until the winter months draw in when I think I shall be looking East.



As I type Rob and Julian are in amongst it in Glasgow at the big Waterloo refight, with modern comms I know that Rob's Nassau brigade is under pressure but holding while Julian has won an 'Eagle' for destroying an enemy cavalry brigade with his artillery, so a good showing so far.

So now to Warlord's D-Day Overlord book, I have had more time to digest the contents, it is a hefty tome and I have to say worth the money if you have an interest in fighting D-Day. The information is fairly general and I don't know many wargamers to whom it will be new, it does however give a flavour to the nineteen scenarios contained within, six of which involve the British and one the Canadians, a bit of a disappointment for me considering Warlord are a British firm. I have nothing against the Yanks at all but it is a bit lop sided. There are a lot of new troop types along with weapons specific to the landings, new rules as well to cover this type of fighting, there are also 'Theatre Selectors' aimed at recreating the troops on the day for unique operations. I have my doubts about the experience given to many of the German defending units, I would suggest that the only troops who should be considered Veteran are the Fallschirmjagers and possibly the 21st Panzer Division, the 352nd Infantry for instance does not deserve to recruit Veterans, despite having a small core spread out within the division.

I would still recommend this book if you are a Bolt Action player, or even if you are not and simply want D-Day scenarios to convert. One word of warning, you will need a beach, ridges and lots and lots of defences, from large casemates to small Tobruk postions with one machine gun or mortar. During our recent Graignes game we were perplexed that entrenchments/foxholes were not covered in the main rule book but lo and behold there are such a thing, they are in the Western Desert Campaign book and in this one too, so only more money and hey presto!

12 comments:

  1. Trooping along well, and a splendid idea to expand and utilise. With regard to Bolt Action D-Day Germans it would not surprise me if you couldn't arm them with assault rifles as well.

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    1. There are options to use them if you have no self control or historical commonsense. They will not be seen in my Normandy fields. I watched closely the Russians raising the flag on the Reichstag and I am convinced that I saw one carrying a StG44, let's hope Warlord don't cotton on. I had to give way on the Russian use of Panzerfausts in the same programme.

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    2. Probably a PPS which had banana clip, not sure if the PPSH had similar at this point.

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    3. I thought that at first but the point looks more like the German gun, albeit you only see it for a fraction, early AK :)

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  2. The Apshon Dragoons are looking very nice, I have these guys in 15mm, minifigs which probably shows how old they are.
    The standard does look very nice.

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    1. Thanks John, I would hate to paint SYW in 15mm, I find 28mm bad enough. I managed to source finials for cavalry standards and these do make them stand out.

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  3. George, fine additions to your growing SYW collection :o) Go ahead and get the resin buildings... you know you want to!
    I'm holding off getting the D Day book for now (mainly due to "funding restrictions"). I hope the German forces aren't too powered up; as we know a lot of the troops were either second rate or recovering from a mauling in the East. I wonder if the US market for BA is bigger than the UK market and, if so, perhaps that dictated the number of US-German scenarios?
    Cheers
    Matt

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    1. I probably will get them but like you my finances will be better at the end of the month. I am arguing with myself about more German Armour, and they thought Braxton Bragg was mad.

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    2. I am reading Holland's book on Normandy and the Bolt Action book is a complete 180 on the 352nd Division from his. The BA description seems to rest on the first couple of hours on Omaha beach, they even get 'expert Machine Gunners' new rule! Won't be seeing that around here.

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    3. Oh dear, if there is such an animal they would be in the east not twiddling their expert trigger finger in France surely :~)

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  4. Fine new sue cavalry George. Warbases have some very nice new buildings which might suit, a Prussian range I think it's labelled.

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    1. Looked at Warbases, they should do nicely, ta.

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