Down on the Farm

I finished two buildings to use during games with my Russian army. These buildings are from Musket Miniatures and are some of the best for 15mm games.

I like the fact that the building roofs are removable and troops can be placed on the inside.

Most of their buildings come in an intact and demolished version and there are different architectures for Eastern and Western Europe. I bought a demolished Russian church along with these two and will be working on that soon.

I also stopped into my local hobby store and picked up Festung Europa: the new late war army book for Flames of War. I was curious how the late war affected my Russians and I was also interested in starting a US Paratrooper army. My Russian tank army will need two changes: first one is that the T-34/76’s will be replaced with T-34/85’s. The second change will be to replace my SU-152’s with ISU-152’s. In the end, I think I can make my Russians into a late war list by changing 9 models. Not bad!

The one thing about Festung Europa that is rather upsetting is that the book contains NO army lists for US paratroopers! These lists will be coming in a forthcoming supplement. Unfortuntely for Battlefront, my memory is good enough to remember a promise to release a single army book to cover the late war: "Our initial release for late war will be a 180 page full colour book covering every late-war list for every country as at January 1944." You can read the press release at this link to the Google cached version. Battlefront removed the article from their site; conspiracy theorists might say so they could cover their tracks.

So in the end Battlefront can manage to get US Paratroopers in their Afrika book and get Falshirmjagers into Festung Europa but now players will have to buy the "D-Day codex" to get a paratrooper list. To that I say: shame on you Battlefront! I thought you had moderated your Games Workshop like business practices with the single army books and free mini rulebook; but, I may have been wrong. It’s enough to make me say "to heck with it" and stay in the mid war period.