Irishserb's Miniatures Adventure: More Preperations for Barbarossa

This past couple of weeks, I've been moving along with my Barbarossa campaign preparations, adapting the GDW Barbaroosa 25 campaign for my own use.

The Barbarossa 25 campaign book includes roster sheets for the units involved in the game. These are essentially TO&E sheets listing every stand and vehicle in each unit with check boxes to check off lost elements and vehicles when using the Command Decision rules for which the campaign was designed.

In my case, I will be using my own rules with 1 to 1 representation of equipment, and either individually mounted 15mm infantry or 6mm team/section/squad stands. So a big chunk of my preperation is to convert the roster sheets to work with my rules. This turned out to be rather more involved than I had anticipated.

The German and Romanian sheets came together pretty quickly. Doing them in 1 to 1 makes for much more complex roster sheets, and the German division comes in at 7-9 pages, but most company to brigade rosters still take one to two pages.

The Soviets were a little more work. Between 1939 and 1941, there was a lot of evolution and reorganization in the Soviet army, and originally, I was hoping to include a lot of this in the campaign, but after working through all of the infantry formations for the numerous Soviet tank and infantry brigades, battalions, and supporting units, I've decided to reduce the range of unit variations that will be represented in the campaign.

There will still be a variety of Soviet tank organizations represent, involving the many different models of tanks in Soviet service, but the infantry brigades will be less varied, with only 2-3 different organizations included in my game. This came about because of the number of infantry figures and formations that I would have had to paint.

In 6mm, the scale in which most games will be played, I have around 150 Soviet infantry painted, another 250 that need painted, and before the reduction in the range of units, I was still going to need over 1000 more infantry figures to represent a good range of the Soviet units accurately.

Having each infantry TO&E physically modelled would be the easiest method to manage the figs and represent the units on the table, but I just don't want to spend that much time painting extra and really, redundant figs. It would have resulted in lot of extra work, for not that much effect on the table top.

In the end, I'm going to change my method of identifying/labeling the infantry stands and units, which will allow me to build modular battalons and companies. This will still give me a range of different organizations, take little more than the figs I already have, and will allow me to field probably three battallions of infantry and much of their battalion and brigade support on a single table top.

At this point, I am done converting unit rosters and have printed out sheets for all of the formations at the start of the game. I've also created sheets for formatons that will be introduced in later turns of the campaign.

Barbarossa unit roster sheets completed.

I mentioned Romanians roster sheets above, the things about Romanian forces is that I don't actually have any yet. The plan in the coming months is to build both 6mm and 15mm armies. Infantry from GHQ along with a small number of new models, and proxies from my German and French forces will suffice for 6mm. And, I'm going to see what happens with the old True North line of miniatures, and assuming that they are re-released, will build 15mm forces around those, adding a little of the French stuff that I sculpted and cast years ago for 15mm.

Elsewise, Ive started on the remaining 6mm Russian infantry figures, so that should keep my brush busy for a the next couple of weeks.