I picked up one of those pick and mix German army deals from Warlord a while back with some discount vouchers, grabbing some grenadiers and pioneers to mix and match parts for a more ragtag looking late war feel where uniforms wold have been all over the shop.
The pioneer set is a pretty good deal, with lots of plastics as well as a few metal figures and conversion bits. Some of the metal components really don't seem to fit the plastics though, so I'm not entirely sure how they are supposed to work. One of my favourite models in the set is the Goliath. At least the German's remote controlled bomb was better than the Russian bomb-dogs, even if it was significantly slower. There is also an engineer laying down showing off his nice new hedge clippers
The box set also has an anti-tank rifle team for some of those heavy infantry squads that will no doubt appear if I ever get a game in.
We have an MG42 team that can either be put into one of the infantry squads, or take one of the riflemen and turn it into an MMG team for some more static support.
Supporting this is one 10 man squad of basic, rifle toting infantry, with one Panzerfaust for a bit of anti-armour if required. these are a combination of bits from the Grenadier and Pioneer kits. I know this gives a bit of a mish-mash of uniform styles that may cause some people to have sleepless nights, but I'm aiming for weird war here, rather than historical accuracy... so it doesn't really bother me much.
And a super assault-y elite infantry squad with an officer, 1 smg/panzerfaust and 6 assault rifles. By Konflikt rules, this is fine and dandy. I can even add the MG42 team to this to make it even more obscene. For normal BA games, these could be split across multiple squads or used as a very well (if not historically accurate) Volksgrenadier squad. In Achtung! Cthulhu these would either count as Black Sun Elite and remain as-is, or be split into pairs and spread across the Wehrmacht squads for a bit of additional kick.
Last night I got to play my first ever game of Bolt Action against another new player. We'd borrowed two forces from some of the regular players, so Matt ended up with a German force and I ended up with 1000 points of US troops to play with. I lost (as always), but there were some spectacular activations on both sides. My highlights were a tank hunter assault against a Panzer taking it out in very easily and an understrength infantry unit armed with rifles assaulting a building containing a maximum strength Volksgrenadier unit, armed to the teeth with as many assault rifles as is legally allowed in the squad.
This has given me a lot of inspiration to try and flesh out two full BA forces to play with. Unfortunately, it has also made me want to go back and improve them all as I can see a lot of problems with this lot and all the past squads. I also want to rebase everything that was on clear bases to match the ones above, otherwise mixing units is going to look off.
This was a cracking submission Paul, well done Sir.
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