New Flames of War project: For mother Russia

It's been a busy last few weeks with painting. We started a Flames of War escalation league at our club slowly going from 500 points to 1750 points, which has actually gotten me painting regularly for the first time in a long long while. Since the spring I've had periods where I didn't get any painting done for weeks and at best painted for maybe one or two days before having a long pause again. Now for the last few weeks I've been putting in an hour or two every day and it's actually felt great. The first few days felt a bit meh, but when I powered through it I actually started to really enjoy just relaxing while painting and sipping some good whiskey or craft beers. Hopefully this good flow will keep on going.

For my new army I'm building a Soviet Tankovy Battalion. I've been wanting to do a Soviet force for a while and actually bought most of the required infantry for a Strelkovy in early 2016, but the inspiration died of when Battlefront took nearly a year to get everything delivered and even 4 months to get the first blisters to me. I'd originally wanted to do a Strelkovy Battalion, but reality kicked in with the escalation league when I calculated I'm going to need about 250 infantry + masses of guns to have a decent list. So I took the easy way and went for a T-34 Battalion with some supporting infantry to get playing and maybe sometime upgrade to an infantry force.

I started with some infantry as with 500 points a tank force really isn't practical in Flames of War. With a two platoon strelkovy company and a small machine-gun company and command stands I should have a decent basis for my force. All in all 76 infantry and three machine guns which took me the better part of two weeks to get finished. And with that it's only really representing about a third of the infantry I'd need for a fully fledged Strelkovy list and I'd still need about 20 guns with their crews on top of that.

These actually aren't even the original infantry that I bought when I wanted to start my infantry battalion. I was planning on doing a Berlin themed force and will still probably build it sometime in the future. I'm leaving the metal infantry for when I continue on that and decided to get the cheap plastic ones for this league that I can also kind of test colours etc. on. BF plastic infantry is bit of a mixed bag. On some areas the detail is far superior to their metals, but then you get the normal restrictions of plastics and there are some really distorted areas and bad detail. Still for about 30 euros you get enough minis for two medium sized infantry companies so they're a really cheap way to build up a force. What you see here is actually only about half of the box so there's plenty of stuff in there.

Painting them actually proved a bit challenging as most of the equipment is of a very similar shade. Trying to figure out which paints to use so that everything would stand out took a while and I actually ended up painting some equipment with "wrong" colour shades so that there would be more variety instead of having everything in various tones of Khaki. Not exactly historically correct, but looks better and I think I can always claim that they probably made equipment in that shade in some obscure factory far off in Siberia. And it's probably not even that far off as the Soviets really had massive variety in equipment shades etc. judging from what I've seen in different museums and online.


 

The project will continue with some T-34s and BA-64s. Almost done with them, just missing final weathering in the form of streaking and mud effects. With the missus being out of town for the weekend I should have plenty of painting time ahead of me in the coming weeks as well. Some more Alpha Legion almost finished on the table as well with just the bases missing so I have plenty to keep me busy.