Showing posts with label NSL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NSL. Show all posts

Thursday, 11 January 2018

A new army for Alien Squad Leader - Second Global War Soviet Confederacy

In ASQL V3.0 there are several new army lists. One set of armies that I liked the look of from reading the playtesting version of the rules was a group covering the "Second Global War"

The rule book has this to say about the Second Global War;

"The 2nd Global War occurred within an alternate timeline in the Earth's history, in which each side developed strange new weapons within their laboratories and workshops of war, some of which worked sufficiently well to put into production."

The rules go on to list five separate armies, three for the Allies (The United Kingdom of Albion, the Soviet Confederacy and the American Union) with a bias towards new technologies, and two for the Axis (German Occultists and Far Eastern Empire) with the emphasis on arcane knowledge and the supernatural serving the cause of creating genetically-enhanced super warriors. This is clearly a "Weird WW2" type of thing, which I reckon has a fair few fans and should prove popular.

The list that particularly appealed to me was the one for the Soviet Confederacy army. I just needed to decide how I was going to put this army together.

Of course, I could just have bought a load of WW2 Russian infantry, tanks, vehicles and artillery, but where's the fun in that? In any case, I already had an army painted up that could easily be used for this, once I'd rebased it onto 5cm square bases. All it really needed was some suitable vehicles.

The army I wanted to reuse was one of the first 15mm sci fi armies I ever bought, using Ground Zero Games Neu Swabian League miniatures. I really like these figures, they have a certain "look" that just appeals to me. Not too futuristic, but suitably different enough to work in a parallel Earth setting.

The other thing that I like about this army list is the number of tanks that can be used, together with the optional use of indirect fire rocket artillery.

So, I set about rebasing my infantry and collecting and painting some tanks and other vehicles. Finally, I've finished the job off and here are the results. First, an army general (the three figure base) and two political commissars;


Four bases of Green Recruits (inferior infantry), with three figures per base.


Four bases of "anti-tank guns", a.k.a Heavy Weapons;


Four bases of mortars, representing "field artillery", a.k.a more Heavy Weapons;


Two sniper bases (front) one heavy, one standard, one base of Mechanical Scientists (rear left) and a command base (rear right);


Four bases of power-armoured Battlesuit Wearers (I love these figures);


The next two pictures both show three bases of Veteran infantry and one Command stand;



Note that in all the above pictures there are a mix of weapons on each stand. This is just for aesthetic reasons,  they all count as having small arms (apart from the Heavy Weapons stands and one of the two snipers). The Mechanical Scientists are a specific unit that can repair broken-down Unreliable vehicles, unhappily a feature of these army 2nd Global War lists which reflects the experimental weaponry.

Now, here is the armoured fist of this army. First, we have three tanks (which can be upgraded to heavy tanks at the cost of +1 point). These are from Brigade Models;


Next two armoured transports with rocket launchers, from TheSceneUK. To save points, these could be downgraded to unarmoured trucks;


Next, also from TheSceneUK, two experimental super-heavy tanks;


And finally, from GZG, four stands of Light Vehicles in the shape of NSL hover-cycles.


So, I have now created a different kind of Human army, one with some plus points, e.g. stubborn infantry and commissars who can motivate the troops to advance and ignore Fallback dice rolls but also some negative ones. i.e. unreliable experimental technology and slow and unreliable vehicles and tanks.

I am looking forward to getting these onto the table at some point. I've clearly, as usual, got too many troops for a basic 150pt army, and even a 200pt one, but at least I have a lot of options here.

I am also wondering if, with a few suitable additions, I can deploy my Corporate Mercenary army as a Far Eastern Empire force. It looks like a distinct possibility.

Sunday, 28 August 2016

It's been a while .....................

....... since my last post, so here is something to keep the blog ticking over.

There are mitigating circumstances; I've been gardening a fair bit and I've been having PC problems, which eventually led to a complete hard disk crash, which necessitated a complete system rebuild and a load of data restores. Everything is all back to normal now, and I've even upgraded my operating system to the latest Kubuntu Linux release.

The moral of this story? Simple. Always take regular backups to an external device, and if you think that there is a problem, do a separate baseline backup of essential data to somewhere else as well.

So, what with all that, I've not been doing anything with my Sharp Practice ACW or imagi-nations projects. However, I think that it is about time I introduced my Quadrant 13 project to the world. Q13 is another excellent set of rules from TooFatLardies, and is basically I Ain't Been Shot Mum in the future, i.e. company-level wargaming.

I started this off at the back end of 2015 and made a fair amount of progress with my armies. Pretty much everything is from Ground Zero Games (GZG) 15mm ranges, but I do have some odds and ends from elsewhere.

Anyway, here are some pictures of some figures.


These are troopers in power armour from GZG's NSL range, but in my universe, they represent power-armoured heavy infantry from the Western Condominium (WestCon), one of the major factions on the planet Novotelluria. I have a back-story written for this, which I'll post another time.

Here are some more WestCon troops, again using GZG NSL miniatures. These are two platoons of basic infantry in light armour, plus a support platoon with man-portable plasma guns, heavy automatic weapons and laser rifles and a heavy weapons platoon, equipped with mortars, autocannons and tripod-mounted grenade launchers.






Finally, to round off the infantry, I have a company commander with a couple of forward observation officers.


Then, there are the more mobile aspects of the force. There are a variety of drones with a drone operator, a recce squad on turbo-fan hover bikes, an armoured command hover tank and another hover tank with multiple missile launchers, which could serve as air defence, as anti-personnel artillery or as a tank destroyer.





The camouflage scheme for the vehicles is based upon the Caunter scheme that was used by the British in the early stages of the North African Campaign in WW2.

I have a few unpainted odds and ends to add to this force, but as it stands it is already a pretty formidable prospect.