Garish Little Dudes

  So I did more than paint buildings this summer.  I also painted (and am still painting) some little dudes.

  There's a company out of Poland called Assault Publishing that puts out wargame rules and miniatures.  They do a line of 15mm sci fi and the human faction is called the New Vistula Legion.  A fellow gamer was selling off a huge lot of them at discount prices so I snapped it up.  I figure they'll be good opponents for my professionally painted group and just good sci-fi figures in general.

  I've gone though about half the figures and have enough of them organized that I can show them off.  So let's see what I've done so far...

So here's a group shot:




 I've gone with a red color scheme for these guys.  In part because it will contrast well with the blue forces I have and mostly because I got tired of painting drab camouflage schemes on modern armies.  You're looking at about 60 figures here.  Two platoons made up of three six-man fireteams headed up by a six-man HQ squad.  On the left are the Anti-Air support teams and the Anti-Armor teams are on the right.

Let's break it down a little:





This is the basic fireteam.  A six-man squad consisting of a leader, a SAW gunner, a LAW trooper and 3 riflemen.  It's a bit larger than most force-on-force squads but they'll probably have less armor/support gear to compensate.

Three of these squads form a platoon lead by:





...the platoon HQ squad.  There's the leader, a medic, a technical officer and three grenadiers bearing rifle/grenade luachers.  The technical officer is great.  It's hard to make out in this picture but he's kneeling and is working on a laptop.  It's nice to see dedicated IT support trooper in a sci-fi model range.

Then come the support squads:





An anti-air squad.  There's a spotter/leader, the MANPAC AA-missile trooper and a two man security detail.  The extra trooper can be siphoned off to help the anti-armor teams or fill in as needed, but I put them here for now.  Actually, now that I think about it, I might make them all three man teams rather than four so that the anti-armor teams can also be three-man units.  The third guy is security/ammo bearer.

Speaking of anti-armor:





The anti-tank hunter killer team is a spotter/leader and a guided missile trooper.  As I mentioned above, I'll probably add a rileman from the Anti-Air squads to act as security/ammo bearer.

Anyway, that's all the figures so far.  Next up are the snipers/scouts/LRRP teams, then the support weapon teams and finally the company HQ and a set of TV crews.  Should be a lot of fun.

Tiny Construction Work

  So I've been remiss in not updating my various miniature gaming projects.  So let's take stock of what I've been doing this summer.  There's two parts so there's going to be two posts.  First up, more terrain.

So I wanted more Middle Eastern urban terrain both for Force on Force and just any general modern day/near future fight.  I ordered up a batch of stuff from Game Craft Miniatures.  They have a wide selection of stuff in 15mm and I had fun putting together a previous building of theirs.  So I put in an order and soon the smell of laser-cut wood filled the house.

First up are these modular buildings:





There are two types of buildings here, the smaller square ones are 4.5"x4" and the larger, rectangular ones are 6.5"x4".  The best part is that each of the floors is a separate, detachable piece.  So I can adjust the heights of the buildings up and down as needed.  In fact, I made a bit of a mistake.  I forgot that both the ground floor section and the top floor section also count as buildings.  So all of my buildings are 2 stories higher than I planned on.  I plan to go back and order a couple more ground/top floor pieces for both sets so that I can have up to 4 shorter buildings of both types -- I can put up a real city block in a hurry.

After that come these two:





These are smaller, one-piece buildings made of MDF, but I really like the Middle Eastern look and feel to them.  The modular buildings are pretty generic, but the detailing on these guys lends a sense of place.

But nothing says authority like slab-sided construction:





This is an educational or administrative building based off an actual design in Baghdad.  This was a model I'd been hoping to have for a previous game, but didn't have the time to get it put together.  Now it's ready to go and I really like it.

Finally:





It's not the Middle East without a mosque.  This model, unlike the others, was made of foam-board and I'm not as happy with it's construction as I am the rest of them.  The others were all made of MDF and it was pretty easy to work with, but the foam-board was a lot more finicky to handle.  I will admit, the spackle I used to cover up the joins produces a nice stucco look, but the dome on top is styrofoam and not given to taking paint well.  Plus, I should've applied it after I built the rest of the structure, but didn't.  Still, I now have a mosque with courtyard and a place for cowardly insurgents to flee to when things get hot.

So I've greatly expanded the range of buildings and urban terrain I have available for my games.  I can probably do some of the denser urban scenarios which should be a lot of fun.  Hopefully this will all get to the table soon.