HBG Russian set painted

I thought that the French preferred clean white uniforms that they could quickly improvise into flags of surrender! :-D

I’ve gotten several private messages and some responses in this thread… so just as a head’s up and a community service…

Because of the private messages, I have ALREADY made a deal to unload my custom units, and they are, in-fact, already mailed off.

I know its kinda pointless now, but if you’re still that curious as to what I did have, here’s the complete list of the custom HBG units I had purchased in the last few weeks to beef up my bins… since I later made a decision to pull them and not use them, I did eventually re-order equivalent numbers of default/original OOB A&A units from HBG to beef up my numbers (like if I didn’t like the two HBG Japanese Fuso battleships, I reordered two OOB Kongo or Yamato battleships to replace them… so-on and so-on.  Anyways, here’s the (now kinda pointless) list:

(BTW: you may notice that for the most part, planes are missing from this list… I found most custom HBG aircraft to be good enough and scaled well enough to survive my “off-scale axe”.  So there are many HBG planes like P-47s and F4F/Hellcats that survived the cut and made it into my permanent bins)

HBG Battle Pieces (custom units)

US - Olive Drab:
5x Pershing Tanks
5x M5 Stuart tanks
15x M4A3 Sherman tanks
5x P-51 fighters

5x Essex CVs
5x South Dakota BBs
2x Nevada BBs
5x Baltimore CAs

UK - Tan:
10x Churchill Tanks
10x Valentine Tanks

5x Ark Royal CVs
3x King George V BBs

Russia - Brown
2x KV-2 tanks
11x T-34 tanks
4x T-26 tanks

German - Black
2x Schleswig Holstein BBs
2x Seydlitz CVs
8x Pz-III tanks

Japan - Pumpkin Orange:
10x Type 97 tanks
5x Ki-43 fighters
2x G8N Rita bombers

2x Kaga CVs
2x Ryujo CVs
5x Nagato BBs
2x Fuso BBs
5x Mogami cruisers
5x I-400 subs

MyHBGrejects.jpg

Nice work , lots of detail

@IdaRed:

Thanks for the input John and Marc.  The differences Marc mentioned do matter to me as I am somewhat obsessive about details. I suspect I will end up a piece junkie eventually as well as I’ve always liked miniatures and model building.  I’m not going to be painting my newer pieces anytime soon.  I am very tempted to start practicing on the older pieces first and work my way to the newer sculpts when I am satisfied with my skill level.  I actually got interested in painting game minis by a friend after he showed me his Battlelore set.  He showed me how just a little bit of paint–even a basic paint job–could make a mini so much more appealing and more fun to game with.  I’ve been really impressed with the painted minis posted in this forum.   Â

I need to sit down and budget out minis. I think I am leaning toward just buying new copies of the games and supplementing with HBG minis for additional sculpts.  The main drawback to just buying HBG minis is a number of the basic ones for ANZAC and Italy are out of stock right now.

It sounds as if you already fully qualify as a piece junkie (even if you don’t necessarily own a lot of sculpts right now), so welcome to the club.  :)

It also sounds as if we operate on a very similar wavelength when it comes to the kinds of details that we consider important.  I have a huge amount of respect for enthusiasts who paint their sculpts – often to an awe-inspiring degree of detail – but in my particular case I’ve never been interested in painting or otherwise customizing my sculpts (which is a good thing, because even if I had the interest I wouldn’t have the time and that I doubt I’d have the required eyesight and manual dexterity).  In fact, for me one of the fun challenges of collecting A&A sculpts has always been: how can I organize the sculpts to make the best possible use of the range of designs and colours available, without actually modifying the sculpts themselves?  How can I make use of the changes in design and colour that have taken place over the years to represent more powers that the current OOB represent?

I’m still waffling over some of the choices available to me, but one example of what I’m talking about has worked out so well that I consider it finalized.  I use the nationally-distinctive butternut-grey ANZAC pieces from G40/2 to represent the southern self-governing Commonwealth Dominions (Australia, New Zealand and South Africa), and I use the British-patterned butternut-grey “ANZAC” pieces from G40/1 (boosted with half of the G40/2 ANZAC AAA units) to represent the northern self-governing Commonwealth Dominions of Canada, Newfoundland and Eire.  Initially I had planned to use the “blonde” UK units from D-Day to represent Eire, which starts out as a neutral, but then I realized that this distinction wasn’t necessary: if Eire is neutral then there’s no point in giving it any units at all, and if Eire joins the war then it acquires the same status as the other northern Commonwealth Dominions and thus there’s no need for its units to be different.

So very true. When I first started painting my aircraft I had to include decal roundels for the players to distinguish the pieces from one another. My naval units are painted mostly with a color scheme for playability except for the capital ships like the Carriers and popular Battleships. All of them have a decal or flag to show which nation they belong too. I actually replaced the OOB British Cruisers because I thought they looked too close in size with the destroyers. I ended up replacing with some ships I found on Shapeways. The biggest problem I had with naval units is that they can exist in the same seazone with enemy pieces unlike land territories. Because of this I decided to keep the subs, destroyers, cruisers and non unique battleships following a color scheme. There are so many colors in the spectrum though we should be able to come up with a solution that will make them look more historical yet keep the pattern or color scheme for the nation. I really would love to paint all the ships historically and maybe I will revisit them again someday. Every time I go back and repaint my pieces I seem to get better at it. Or at least I think I do, hehe.

@CWO:

@Fishmoto37:

Flags to designate armies to place on army cards off the board.

Very nice.  Is there any particular reason why the Russian tank is flying the ensign of the Soviet Navy?

That matches up with an army (navy) off board card that I was using in the Barbarossa game. No navy in that so just used for army. No other reason.

Russia (in maroon) and especially France need help.

RU.png
FR.png

Very nice! Love them all!