To The Finnish – Part 5 Finnish Finished?

Well its been three months since my first article about collecting and painting a Finnish force for Flames of War and I’m glad to say I have now completed collecting, assembling and painting a a big enough force to play with in both Mid War (Continuation War) and Late War (Soviet Spring Offensive/Lapinsota War)!
In this article I’m going to recap what I’ve done and talk about what else has happened with my Finns along the way, as well as what comes next!

I like to have complete collection for the armies I have rather than just building a specific force list, even if some units rarely get played with.
Those of you out there with long memories may recall I said I wanted to focus on getting this force “finnished” and would try not to get distracted by other ideas I may have along the way. To be honest that lasted about as long as it took me to open the first parcel from Battlefront containing my Sturmi unit! Before I go into that here’s what I have got finished.

• HQ platoon of 2x SMG teams
• Rifle Platoon of 9 teams with additional Panzershrek team or Lahti AT rifle plus an additonal leader team with Panzerfaust for LW
• Rifle Platoon of 9 teams with additional Panzershrek team plus an additonal leader team with Panzerfaust for LW
• Rifle Platoon of 9 teams with additional Panzershrek team
• 2 Flamethrower teams to enable me to upgrade a platoon to Pioneers
• Panzerfaust Close Defence platoon , 5 teams
• HMG platoon, 4 teams
• 81mm mortar platoon, 3 teams
• 120mm mortar platoon, 3 guns
• 76mm Artillery platoon, 4 guns
• 105mm Artillery platoon, 4 guns
• Sturmi Platoon, 3 tanks
• Artillery Observer, 1 team

So over all in the past 12 weeks I have painted 49 infantry teams, 11 gun teams and 3 tanks and not forgetting I have written four previous articles about my experience for the blog .

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I have used a basing scheme based on the idea of a summer meadow to hopefully make them stand out on the table. For this I principally used the Gamergrass summer meadow tuft set and flowers, with some additional Debris of War tufts stuck to a base layer of Noch summer meadow flock. All platoons have orange flowers, fairly common in late summer, which contrast well against the grey uniforms and green equipment, to make it easier to tell the infantry platoons apart more easily on the table top.
I also added additional flowers, either yellow or white (common at all times). There are some equipment/debris items such as crates and shell cases on the weapons and gun teams and the base edges were finished in a deep sea green – you can see the difference this makes to the look in the HMG platoon image.

My key success in getting this completed on time has been having a plan and sticking more or less to it. I spent time at the start working out how to paint my models so I could mass produce the infantry (article link) to a decent standard and this worked really well. I also did my research on the Finnish gun and vehicle camo patterns and working out how I was going to paint them. As the Finnish didn’t have a standard template for the tri-colour pattern this wasn’t such a chore as I feared to do but did take quite a bit of time. It has taken me as long to do 11 gun teams as to do 49 infantry teams.

I have made a concious decision on my Sturmis, after doing a couple of tests using the spare superstructures, to use a darker green (VMC 890) than on my guns (VMC833) in the camo pattern. This was solely based off of the aesthetics of how they looked once painted; the brighter green on the tanks looked far too bright to my eye but in the smaller areas on the guns it works really well to make them pop.
You can see the difference in the pictures below.

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Finnally to those who will be in the UK attending Warfare in Reading in November why not drop by the FoW tournament tables and you can see them for youself.

So what else?

As I eluded to after my Sturmis arrived I started to think about options for lists and have made a few extra purchases…
I already had some spare Infantry models (these will become a Scout platoon) and I had a couple of spare T-34 kits from my Soviets earlier in the year so I decided to acquire some more.  Luckily my regular gaming partner wanted a few more as well for his Romanians so we split a box and I now have 4x T-34’s with 76 & 85mm turrets from Battlefront (the 4th is for the LW HQ option).  

I found some more Pak38 and Pak40 guns in my german bits box so I will make a some more AT platoons; I can have two of these if I use the infantry as a Light Infantry Company. 

I also did some shopping purchasing a pair of Zveda T-26’s and 4x T-28’s (I’ll be doing an article on this particular kit later on). I have accumulated more StuG’s (left over from a Hungarian starter set plus the two spare from the the original German platoon box) which await me being able to order another Sturmi upgrade pack to complete building. All of this this will give me a the option to field both the Tank and Sturmi Forces alongside my infantry. I also acquired a pair of BT-42’s (I really need one more) to add to my support option.

So there’s plenty more for me to work on for the rest of the year, but for now I am ready for my first game.

Well that’s it for this update, so until next time happy hobbying – Martin

#ToTheFinnish