After a very enjoyable introduction into the Italy campaign, it was time to get ready for the second scenario.
We unfortunately had a number of quite large issues, the Pigs Snout is a British commando raid on two fortified Italian gun batteries. its quite a specific board and presented us with the below problems
- Very Little suitable houses for an Italian board
- Not an awful amount of barbed wire
- No gun emplacements and not enough guns
- No Italian troops, this was my biggest headache
- No British troops
- No pillboxes, of any kind
Thankfully we hadn't set ourselves any crazy date to get ready so were able to prepare at our leisure, I'll cover the troops in part two
Commander Roy loves the terrain aspect of the game and immediately jumped into making a prototype of the table from what he had available
It was all looking a bit bare, and was obviously missing a key element - the gun batteries. thankfully i had 3d printers i could use, we had about two artillery pieces between us at this point. I had considered using 1:72 kits but even that was going to prove expensive. so a couple of STLs purchased later and a couple of nights on the resin and PLA printers I had a seven gun battery.
The guns were quite light howitzers (75/32s), but to be honest, I didn't have a lot of space to play with in the gun emplacements and didn't want to fill the compounds with gun emplacements as we'd need loads of room to stuff 3 million bayonets in there.
extremely simple paint jobs were to follow
I also found quite a nice pillbox, which was meant to be quite accurate for Italian pill box. the bunkers were from dewycat on wargaming 3d
I'm not a great scratch builder but for years I had toyed with the idea of making barbed wire sections and have never got around to it and we were going to need around 12 foot of it. I had about 3 metres of wire from various sources so presumed I had enough for the task. It turns out, once you coil it around things, it takes about four times as much. So had to purchase some more, thankfully G9 have a good set with a huge spool
The barbed wire turned out quite a therapeutic craft project, cheap matchsticks and BBQ skewers were fashioned into fence like structures and sprayed brown.
Stuck to rectangles cut from previously textured foamboard and scatter applied.
Hopefully the remaining scenarios have loads of barbed wire uses, because I now had about seven feet of it.
I had previously backed a Kickstarter from 3d Breed that contained a huge amount of Italians, so was finally able to use some of them as crew for the guns, they were slightly chunkier but beggars can't be choosers, the guns were also from Dewycat, he's amazing and can't recommend his stuff highly enough, and the bunkers were from PippoWeb on Thingiverse. eventually the elements came together to form the gun emplacements. I had found a bunch of ww2 posters on warlord site which added a little theme
Commander Roy had a far bit of terrain suitable for the table but he was determined to be point thematically and proceeded to build vineyards and more buildings, I believe them to be from Sarrissa
all the terrain fits together to make a great farm compound but Roy had opted to spread them out and utilise them more effectively. They were then painted up, stunning to see on the table
Part two to cover the troop preparation, which was the majority of my time spent
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