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Thursday, January 26, 2017

Fresh Troops For The Western Front

The end of last year I was able to get a great deal on some 28mm WWII US infantry (from Dreamforge Games) and a Sherman-T (from Warlord Games) so I could start building a force for Konflikt 47.  I must admit that I've always been interested in trying out WWII minis but dealing with the "rivet counters" is just too annoying.  "You can't actually field that unit because we are playing in the fall of 1944 and the Germans stopped using those in the spring of '43."  Thankfully that's something that just doesn't come into play for Konflikt.  Gotta love alternate history!
 
Since then I had started assembling a force but I've been stuck trying to figure out the best mix of troops to field.  Yeah, I know.  I'm gripping about rivet counters but being a power gamer... not something I'm proud of but I had inspiration strike and come up with a great solution to my problem.  Why not just make a full platoon according and pull from that?  After all, its easy enough to just break up the by the book full units into smaller units plus it lets me add some kind of story element to the whole thing which my brain likes to latch on to for some reason.  To that end I started work on the second platoon of (insert random company name here...) company, freshly sent to the frontlines on the western front in the spring of 1947 which is when the "official history" in the core rulebook ends.

For my overall force, I'm thinking a squad of veteran troops, two squads of regular troops, and a squad of inexperienced troops.  Some fairly basic unit selections for now but as time goes by I'll gradually expand their numbers.

Ideally I'd love to get in a campaign using this kind of idea; form one unit platoon of infantry at the beginning of the campaign and you use them as your pool of troops moving forward, expanding or replenishing them as the campaign continues.  After each game both the winner and loser receive a number of points that can be used to rebuild the existing units or purchase new ones.  There could also be a random chance of something unique happening.  Maybe the platoon requisition officer is able to get ahold of more supplies or they are chosen to test some new technology for the high command.  Of course things wouldn't be all good.  It would only make sense for there to be some negative effects as well; the supply lines being disrupted, sickness effecting a number of the troops.  I really like the idea of the story growing as the campaign continues so I'll have to look more into this... though I should probably work on assembling some more troops first.