Challenge Day 52 - I've Decided

Last night I left you awaiting my decision on what to paint this week. My two options were:

i) Try to paint up all of the NSL Panzer Grenadiers
ii) Paint a mix of the NSL and some 6mm ACW

Well, I've decided.

Yes, that's right. I'm going to try to paint up all of the NSL. If I'm successful, that will be a very nice points bomb to submit for next Saturday's slot. Want to know how big? Well, it puts this week's entries into the shade...

So far, I've done the base green colours on the command bases, heavy weapon specialist and the fan bike troops. I'll be doing the weapon base coats after posting this.

Tomorrow, I'll be taking the bulk of the grunts in to work with me, to do the lighter green base coat during my lunch breaks over the next couple of days.



I'll just give a quick report on today's refight of Talas. Strategically, we'd done a great job and our plan did seem to have caught the Chinese by surprise. Things were looking very good for our main force on the Chinese left flank. However, we were unsure of when our diversionary force would come onto the table. We suspected that they couldn't be too far away, as their light horse lancers were on the table chasing some Chinese and Qualuk skirmishers off.

Things were looking good when the rest of the diversionary force began to arrive on the first turn and the Qualuks were clearly looking as though they would sit out the battle. Things looked even better on that flank a few turns in when our Tibetan allies (who we'd written off as a likely no-show) arrived.

Back with the main force we made a few stupid errors that came back to bite us in the derriere (with the assistance of some truly awful shooting, impact, melee, casualty and cohesion test dice). First of all we rather stupidly decided to redeploy most of our cavalry from the left wing to the right wing across the face of our infantry (and slowing down their already slow a advance). Then we decided to charge their light foot with some of our light foot, in front of our approaching infantry. That created a big problem for us when the Chinese light foot decided to fight it out instead of evading. Several turns later, the fight was still going on and blocking our wall of heavy infantry from crashing into their infantry.

Meanwhile, the other contingent, who had been doing so well suddenly started rolling really bad dice and in the space of 2 or 3 turns had lost nearly 12 units. As it was already 5.30 pm (we started at 10am) we decided at that point to call it a Chinese win, a reversal of the historical result.

I'll try to sort out some pics later this week.