Seems I’m posting these things on Mondays…
The Plan for last week was to:
#1 Cast, base, prime and goop remaining Germans.
CHECK!
Monday I cast just over 100 Great War Germans to make up the
rest of the Germans I’ll need for the project – plus a few extra, in case I
hadn’t counted right or I noticed any terribly miscast figures after the fact.
I thought I’d taken pictures of the workbench during the
priming/gooping process… but apparently I didn’t. Anyway, I DID get them all
primed and enough of the ones I actually need to do gooped.
I made a couple of realizations this week regarding the 5th.
First, I don’t need the ENTIRE 5th Brigade, probably only two battalions.
Second, I already HAVE enough of my own British/Canadian figures cast to make 3
Battalions. Unfortunately I realized AFTER I’d don’t the casting of the Germans
that those three battalions worth of figures lack Lewis Gunners and Officers!?
So I will need to do some casting agains at some point in the next week or so.
I didn’t get these based, but I’ll have one more batch of basing to do when the
rest of the 6th Brigade arrives anyway, so…
#3 Base, prime and goop remaining 6th Canadian Brigade (miniatures
should be arriving on Tuesday)
CHECK! Well... sort of...
They didn’t arrive on Tuesday – some mix up with import papers, sender not assigning broker or UPS being confused about something... Held up in Winnipeg.
They didn’t arrive on Tuesday – some mix up with import papers, sender not assigning broker or UPS being confused about something... Held up in Winnipeg.
Or Wednesday… Still in Winnipeg.
Finally arrived Thursday
morning. (These are from Irregular
Miniatures)
Unfortunately it was missing a bag of 16 Advancing British,
so I am unable to complete the four units of the 6th Brigade right
now as I have to wait for replacements to arrive…
I also ordered a bunch of
Machine guns and mortars and artillery from Irregular
Miniatures because… well.. they are cheap – like less than half the
cost of the any other mortar or MG teams from any other manufacturer – and I’ve
gone WAY over budget for games and toys this past year. You get what you pay
for though – the German and British MG teams are basically identical – they
just have different helmets (and some minor modifications to the guns, I
noticed when I actually assembled them).
The Mortar teams were the same – these they didn’t even cast
separate crew with different helmets – they just have a generic crew with
separate heads! That doesn’t matter so much – they’re in shirtsleeves and
puttees and minimal equipment – the crew will probably look alright when
they’re done – what was really disappointing (which any of you that know
anything about Great War Equipment will have no doubt already noticed…) was
these mortars they have come equipped with. The German trench mortars of the
Great War ( the Minenwerfer
did not look anything like Stokes mortar or any of the tripod mortars used by
most nations by the Second World War…. I know, both sides made use of captured
equipment, but I don’t think it was done on a large enough scale that it would
be reasonable to produce this as the only option for the Germans… I’m not sure
if I’m even going to use these. I do have four Mortar teams… I’m not really
sure how many I was thinking I needed? One per regiment, is that what I was
going for?! They’re not going to be a priority - I have four other much nicer
ones, three of which are complete.
Even crazier is the Artillery crews – I ordered a British 18
poinder, a French 75 and two German Krupp 7.7 field guns. The guns are
okay-ish, if on the small side. But the “crews” are two sets of machine-gun
crews (two kneeling with hand out to fire gun and two prone looking like they
want to feed belts of bullets into a machine-gun) and an infantry officer with
his pistol out!? I would have much rather had more of the generic MORTAR crews
– thwy would have worked much better!? Ah well… I’m probably not going to get
to the guns for this project…
And then there’s the Turkish
Cavalry I ordered… oh, don’t get me started about them.
I did get them based and primed
– but ran out of goop before getting to them the evening I was doing all the
base gooping… Though I did manage to get all the Boxers gooped (which I also
ordered from Irregular) I think the justification was that I knew I’d have to
do some more basing priming and gooping to finish this brigade of Canadians, so
I could do these ones at that time – the Boxers ended upbeign higher priority
as now that they are gooped I can squirrel them away in their storage box and
not have them haunting the painting table… tempting me…
(pay no attention to the jet
bikes in the back ground I TOTALLY wasn’t working on those… okay maybe I was…
just a bit… I ordered them from North
Star Figures as they were blowing out some Warzone stuff and these
were 50% off and I’m planning on doing a jet bike racing game for ToonCon
and… well.. it’s a long story… never mind…)
I did get the Machine-gun teams
assembled and based yesterday. Hopefully I’ll get to the Mortar teams today.
#4 Finalize Terrain Plans
I did a bit of work here – thinking about things and trying
to redraw old sketch plans, but I can’t say they are “finalized” just yet…
#5 Reorganize Germans – repaint collars on old 261
Reserve Infantry Regiment to match collars on 11th
Bavarian Infantry Regiment reorganize those two regiments to form 11th
Bavarian Infantry Regiment, Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 1, and
Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 3.
I did start reorganizing them. This is the first part of
that.
On the left we have three regiments of Bavarians – they are
not all part of the same Division. In the front is the 11th Bavarian Infantry
Regiment (part of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Division), which held the
north end of the Ridge and “The Pimple” just to the north. The other two
Bavarian regiments (Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiments No. 1 and No. 3) were
part of the 1st Bavarian Reserve Infantry Division which held the area at the
south of the ridge.
In the center are Reserve Infantry Regiments No. 261, No.
262, and No. 263, which were all part of the 79th Reserve infantry Division
which held the center of the ridge.
On the right are a bunch of extra regiments I cast, primed
and (mostly) gooped to field as a few of the reinforcement battalions that
appeared on the day – I actually only need four of them.
In front are a few casualty/morale failure markers, in the
back are an assortment of achine-gun and mortar teams, field guns and higher
command figures all in varying states of completion.
I do have a few more Germans for the Great War – early war
cavalry and a Jäger battalion
Distractions!
There were a few…
One thing I’ve been meaning to do for a LONG time once I got
the table cleared off was to make a star field battle board for various
spaceship battle games. This didn’t take a LOT of time 15 minutes per coat of
black (x2) and about 20 minutes to do all the stars. Then board itself was one
of the DBA
Game Boards I made five years ago. I think I made four of them for
use during campaigns, but in all the HOTT and DBA campaigns I ran I don’t think
we EVER used all the boards in one campaign turn, so one is beign repurposed
for battles among the stars!
Did I overdo it on the stars…? I’m not sure.
My local game store (Dragon’s Den Games) is having a 50% off sale on Reaper Miniatures
metal miniatures. So I went and picked up a few weird things – mostly
anthropomorphic animals and plants to use as mutant plants and animals in Mutants and Death Ray Guns (which I have
become a bit obsessed with lately…) plus a pack of familiars and halflings and such.
I even started basing and
assembling/converting some of them last night (as a “treat” for getting all the
German infantry based and primed and machine-guns based…) - there is also a pair of old RAFM REptiliads and an old Citadel Firmir I assembled along with them.
This Week:
#1 Paint ~45 Great War Germans
to add to those
painted last week and reorganize into 10 figure battalions to form
the 3 regiments of the 79th Infantry Division.
#2 Repaint collars on old 261
Reserve Infantry Regiment to match collars on 11th
Bavarian Infantry Regiment reorganize those two regiments to form 11th
Bavarian Infantry Regiment, Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 1, and
Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 3.
#3 Work on (and maybe try to Finalize!?) Terrain Plans
#4 Begin refurbishing rest of 4th Division’s Terrain…?
Rest of February
Finish Germans – 4 more (10-man) battalions of units in
reserve plus machine Guns and mortars
Build Terrain for 3rd Division.
March
Finish British and Canadians 2 battalions
Build Terrain for 1st and 2nd Divison
April (one last week!)
Make more wire and barrage
markers
Coming soon on Tim’s Miniature Wargaming Blog:
Hopefully some painted Great War
Germans!!
Congratulations on the progress! Your output is truly amazing. I'm hoping to finally finish my 2mm ACW tonight and that's been quite a few years coming.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteOh, I have plenty of things I've had on the shelf for years as well... Heck THIS project is now 10 years old - I just happen to have gotten motivated to try and finish it because there's a nice deadline I can set for myself (100th anniversary)
I just noticed this is the 1500th post on this blog!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations! Impressive output, irregular minatures, you really do get what you pay for, generic stuff is ok I got a few cannons from the great Italian wars they were the cheapest of any manufacturers but needed a bit of work but alright. Your doing well on Vimy keep it up!
ReplyDeleteBest Iain