Post Convention Malaise

 I took a week off after playing ValleyCon last weekend because by the time I got home I was absolutely shattered. I've also barely picked up a brush, but have invested some time and energy into thinking about lessons from the weekend and also how we might reach a point where infantry armies are a think in MW Flames of War again...

Here's a gallery of the armies from the event:  

Simon's Afrika Korps (borrowed from Blogger Scotty)

Octavia's Germans (borrowed from Blogger McBeth)

Blogger McBeth's Americans

Gus' British

Blogger Tank's Death or Glory Boys

Tom's Soviets (the only one!)

Blogger Pelarel's Brits

Chris' Armoured Panzergrenadiers

Steve's Brummbars and lunacy

Richard's Best Army Death or Glory Boys

Bob's British

Graham's Americans

Paddy's Secret Tech Italians

 

Connor's Afrika Korps (borrowed from Blogger Pooch)

TO Scotty's Hungarians

My Italians!

Not sure that's quite all of them but it's most of the armies that played. Clubmate Richard's Best Army winning Death or Glory Boys are really stunning and Blogger Pooch's Afrika Korps, being run by McBeth Jr (who also came in 5th with them!) also looked great.

How did the event go? Not super well TBH. Turns out M14/41s are outclassed against allied armour in MW. Definitely felt like the changes in the last dynamic points update hit my choice of force pretty hard and while M14s have always been the worst of the 'medium' tanks in MW, the much larger numbers of Grants and Shermans (which are definitely usable now and that's a great thing!) meant that my usual ability to simply outnumber my opponents didn't really work out. Also, Grants going to SA 4 at some point (which probably tells you how rarely I've seen Grants on table lately...) made my usual plan to outflank them and just get lucky also didn't really work out!

I lost my first three games against various combinations of Grants / Shermans / Valentines and then rolled through a pair on infantry companies on for the last two games, coming in 10th out of 20. When things worked the way I had played during practice games, it worked fine. But all that medium armour was not something I'd gone up against. Sofia's 4 90mm guns and Paddy's 8 Semovente 75/34s were definitely something I should have made room for.

Given the lesson from the weekend was that Semovente 75/34s were the secret tech, my thanks to Clubmate Richard for the supply, I now have enough to run them when Blogger Tank and I take these Italians out again to Panzerschreck doubles event later in the year. We'll be taking these with one other new addition - air support:

Battlefront sent us some spot prizes - these hilarious objectives. Blogger Tank gave me his so we had a pair and we decided to add those to our Panzerschreck army. I'm *tempted* to see if I can acquire another pair and use them for my Germans. Seems too funny not to TBH. 

Next Time

Painted UFOs and some other hilarity!