Vampire Gazpacho

A recipe. 

But first, a rundown of a game of Flames of War with clubmate Steve - my Sturmgrenadiers meeting his Heavy Assault Guns at the tip of the Spearpoint (see what I did there?) in a game of Flames.

A bit of an experiment...

Blogger Pooch and I were having a bit of a list build natter and were discussing the merits of the new Flames of War Late War Veteran Volksgrenadiers. I decided that I'd take a fairly conventional German infantry company, built from the Bagration book and see how it ran, then compare it with what a Bulge Volksgrenadier list would look like with a similar build.

German deployment with the attacking Soviets at the top of frame

 Turn One

The German turn one was uneventful - the rear Sturm platoon withdrew rapidly to cover the rear objective (as the Russian recce was likely to come screaming up the road) and otherwise did a big pile of nothing.

IS-2s advance under ISU-152 overwatch

Soviet Turn One was a bit the same, although Steve's ISU-122s arrived from reserve.... 

Turn Two

I popped my PaK40 ambush to start the turn, looking for a couple of cheeky kills on the IS-2s. I got plenty of hits and Steve saved like a BOSS. Spoiler alert, this continued for the rest of the game... 

'

Steve dropped an ISU-152 bombardment on my PaK40s, mortars and infantry and in a staggering display of dice driven incompetence, I lost three PaK40s, a mortar and my infantry were firmly pinned.

And in a cunning plan, he sent his IS-2s into the assault on front of the German platoon, saved all the defensive fire hits (*grumble*) and in the ensuing combat, lost two IS-2s for around half the stands in the defending platoon. I'll note here that the remaining IS-2 passed every single last man save for the rest of the game.

 Turn Three

Steve's armoured cars pulled off the road so I decided to come out and fight them. One went down in a screaming heap to the SiG33s but the shrecks all missed.

In return for my arrogance, Steve dismounted and decided to give me what for. His assault bounced off in a hail of MG42 fire.

Entrenching tools!!

Turn 4

Tigers. I was holding on to the front objective for dear life with half a Sturm platoon with two Panzershrecks and as such, Steve was reluctant to wade in with either the remnant IS-2s or the truly-awful-in-assault ISU-122s.

Reinforcements, finally!

My Tigers arrived in...not the worst spot but their long range fire did nothing to the IS-2s as Steve continued bossing his armour saves. All I managed to do was assault the remnant of his scouts and force them to flee...

...just in time for T70s to arrive from reserve and force me to run back to the objective. In the rest of his turn:

 

 he scored a janky hit from an advancing ISU-122 at a long range, concealed Tiger and I (surprising no one at this stage) failed the save and died but his ISU-152s failed to upset my Sturmgrenadiers any further.

Turn 5

This is kind of where the game ended. I continued to pointlessly bail out ISU-122s with Tiger fire (even getting enough hits to force saves on the whole platoon - for one bail....) and Steve went into the tank for a bit debating whether it was worth assaulting me off the objective, even if ISU-122s are terrible.  

In the end, he decided to shoot and rolled 4 shots, three hits (on 6s!) and, with Brutal, the 4 ISU-122s blasted the last infantry stands off the board as my consistent inability to roll saves carried through to the end of the game and the remaining IS-2 took the objective.

 Conclusions?

Disappointed but not surprised. I enjoyed the 58 Sturm Division lists in v3 but this just ain't it. Short of looking for a truly historical matchup, there's not really a good reason not to take Veteran Volksgrenadiers from the Bulge German book. They're straight better and cheaper, especially once you bolt on extra shrecks, with Panzerfaust 2 and Assault Rifles. They also have the option to take on cheap supports like Brigade Panthers which helps counteract the significant cost of the infantry core. I'm struggling to see why I'd run this list from Bagration at this point. I might take Sturm Platoons in support of other lists but I'll be running Volks in future if I'm running infantry.

 Warhammer Underworlds

Blogger Scotty and I played our first games of Warhammer Underworlds at the club! I had so much fun I totally forgot to take photos but here are my first crew, The Crimson Court. 

They were a lot of fun to play and worked like an absolute scream against Scotty's skinks. The first game was a bit of a slaughter because he attacked me (!) the second was a lot tighter. Being able to reliably one-shot things makes blood drinking (even though it must be like Vampire gazpacho) beasties very pleased. I also took my Ossiarch Bonereapers out for a run against Scotty's Sigmarines and had a much rougher time. Turns out getting three skeletons to do something together when you only have five and they collapse in a stiff breeze is quite hard.

But the game is super fun. We played four games in 4 hours, including a coffee stop and a lot of looking things up or stopping to read cards. Super cool. 11/10, will play again.

Next Time

I've decided that I need to make some more progress on my 15mm Renaissance so I'm going to be painting cavalry for the next week. I've got 4 bases of Knights, two of medium cavalry and three of light cavalry to paint so I think just getting into it will be a good plan.