SITREP: D-Day

D-Day layout, a photo by The Gonk on Flickr.

Things are coming along well for my D-Day beach landing game. I finished painting up the water and sand, and I think they look pretty good. Here it is set up on the short (five foot) end of my table-- the grass mat is rolled up on the other end, giving me room to work with my sons. There's a few more inches of water depth hanging off the end. It didn't seem necessary until I put the LCT out there!

I sat down and started reviewing the scenario and the rules, thinking about putting everything on the table. In doing so, I ran across the Overwhelming Force special rule-- "The Allied force has 75% more troops than the Axis Force." Whoops!! That's a bit of a bummer as my Germans can be used for anything, so I have lots of them. But it's the American forces that will limit the size of this game...
I'm not in terrible shape. The suggestion is 1,000 points of Axis, and 1,750 points of Allies. I can get to 1,490 Allies no problem:

Unit	Points
Full company-- command, 6x boat sections in LCVPs	790
General Cota	25
DD Sherman platoon (proxies of normal Shermans)	345
Off-shore naval support	200
Priority P-47 support (unpainted!)	130

1,000 points of Germans just doesn't seem like much, so I feel like I need to maximize my Americans. So, a lot of crap just got added to my painting queue.

• MG and mortar platoons. I had these for a normal rifle company, although it makes sense to paint them now. But should I base them for sand? How were such platoons actually used on D-Day? I'm not sure. But, the good thing about basing on sand is that's easy enough to turn into any other basing scheme down the road. They are primed and ready to paint. And I don't have landing craft for them, although I think that's okay for now. And, I'm pretty sure FoW has rules for attaching the teams to regular platoons.
• Over the weekend, I mostly finished my six DUKWs. That will give the the option to land some AT guns or my 105s (both based on grass-- but I have my limits). I need to read the rules on how the 105s would work when landing widely separated.
• I got my LCAs assembled; although, after finishing, I noticed I did some parts wrong. You see the roop hook just before the L in this picture? I put it ON that lateral trim, instead of abutting the end. Not terrible, but WRONG. Not sure I'll be able to get the fragile resin piece back off, but I'll try. And, I have their Rangers primed and ready to paint.
• M7 Priests-- are they allowed, or not? I bought some Priests on sale a while back, based on the D-Day book. However, looking through Turning Tide, I didn't see them available. Yet Easy Army show them as being available on page 233. They would be cool, easy to paint, and free up the DUKWs for something else... (Edit: Indeed, I appear to have overlooked that-- it's pretty clear you may take six M7 Priests and an OP Sherman-- all of which I happen to have)

Assuming I go one section 3 57mm AT guns and a two gun battery of 105s with the DUKWs, here's what I end up with:

Unit	Points
MG platoon	100
Mortar platoon	120
3x 57mm AT guns in 3 DUKWs	75
2 gun 105mm battery in 3 DUKWs	145
Ranger platoon (allowed 1 but painting 2 for Total War)	135

That gives me a total of 2065 points. That's...a lot of effort for not a whole lot more points! And would let me use 1180 points of Germans. The Priests would edge it up a couple of hundred points. That ought to be good, though. It seems to me that our group has found games much above 2,000-2,500 difficult to complete in a night, although that may be due to our infrequent play. Plus, another player has, I believe, four boat sections of infantry with LCVPs. That should all be quite large enough and with some variety for a big, multi-player club game. And, I always have the option of making them 1st ID instead of 29th, making the same figures better and thus more expensive.

I also picked up the FoW German HQ objective, as it seemed fairly apropos for this scenario. Any suggestion for a US objective? I can always use my Airborne objective, which is fairly appropriate for this as well.

Here's what it looks like on the table. Pretty nice!

For my own reference, here are the paint colors I used for the beach and waves. Other than white, of course.