Posted on 01 March 2014 at 00:13:29 GMT Now that my 3mm Not-Quite-Hammer's Slammers are here, I'm starting to consider the OPFOR structure to face the St. Vincent Brigade as they battle their way through Balkan countryside in the First Upheaval. I've finally come down in favor of the Earthlight Division. The Earthlight Division is one of the first national military units to be outsourced to private military contracting by the government of Mitteleuropa. They are not quite mercenaries, since they only work for Mitteleuropean contracts, but after the Upheaval they became much more independent. I have a force for them in 6mm with gravtanks, but this being an earlier milieu, hovercraft are more appropriate. I haven't quite worked out their TO&E yet, but it's based on five or six Action Groups or "Aktionsgruppen," each a combined arms force of variable size and capable of independent field maneuvers. Generally, each has one or two battalions of heavy mechanized infantry, one or two battalions of armor, an artillery section, an electronic warfare section, a command company with attached military intelligence and UAV assets, and may or may not have its own spacecraft. The Division also has a standing contract with Donnerschlag-S.U., a company that is pioneering the battlefield use of powered armor and orbital interface rapid-deployment operations, so any given action group might also have one or two companies of transatmosphärischen fallschirmjäger attached for rapid strike maneuvers. And there will also, of course, be Mitteleuropean cybertanks of the Ausf. E type, with more missile weapons than the Vinnies' Oscar-class Rumblers, though with lighter armor. All in all, I think they will be pretty versatile, and able to be ramped up or down as a modular force to face the Vinnies in a variety of situations. I'm working out the details, and will probably put together a full TO&E pretty soon. Something I'm working on for both units is a series of unit cards for deploying full companies and detachments quickly, to forestall the kind of rules-lawyering that a fine-tuned tank-for-tank selection of these forces is likely to generate. In scenarios, you'd select a base force and a number of detachments and assets. We'll see how this works out. Suggestions are welcome, of course! |