As part of my project to redo my British infantry for V4 FOW, I needed to fix my Commando forces. These would take the most work, as they had a rather substantial change between version of Flames of War.
When I build my Commandos originally, I organized them around the V3 structure, taking all the options. In the old version, you would trade in a stand of Rifle MG stands for whatever the upgrade was. So, I did not have too many full sized stands, but all the supports. I had grouped all the SMGs I could find for the SMG upgrades (which was enough for three units) and made some flame thrower stands out of Sculpty to equip each unit with a Flamethrower. This worked well and I had a number of fun games with my commandos.
For V4, you do not replace stands, you add them. In addition, they combined the SMG stat into the unit base, so there is not need to represent them separately (this is the perfect solution in my opinion). So, going through my collection, I knew I was short a lot of standard infantry stands, so I had to get to work. My original commandoes were primarily beret sculpted figures, with a few helmets here and their to fill them out. I decided to pull out the helmets to fill out my polish infantry units, so that left me with even more gaps! No worries, my FLGS still had a set of 1942 British commandos with soft caps in stock. Perfect! I picked those up to fill in the gaps and give my units some variation in headgear.
I sprayed the new figures tan and worked up the details to match my existing figures. I then replicated my basing, using black pumice (Vallejo did not make the browns when I did these guys originally) and dry brushed them up. In photographing the figures, I notices a slight variation in the border color, which I need to go back and fix, but that is a quick job I will do this weekend. More importantly, my commandos are ready to take the field again!
- Manteuffel