All tanks, no infantry? / Spring Cleaning

[Extra Crispy]

I got started with MicroArmor kind of by accident. I impulsively bid on a tackle box of the stuff in a silent auction. For a mere $50 I picked up several hundred tanks of the Allied Nations (no Germans). Most were given a simple spray, not even primed, but I was glad to have won. And so I bought some Germans for them to fight. Over the years I picked up two more second hand collections, again of a motley assortment, again with indifferent paint jobs. Still I was glad to have them.

Well, Spring Cleaning time and I decided to get all of the boxes out, sorted, based and cataloged. You can see the start of that with my Soviet armies below. But as I began to plan a major game to run this spring it hit me: I bought 3 used MicroArmor collections and NOT ONE had a single stick of infantry. Not one tittle. Not one sausage. All the infantry you see here are mine (and there’s a bunch being based on the painting table that are not in the photos.

How the heck can you have 40 T-34’s and not a single stand of infantry?

[paul]

Not overly surprised. I suspect most casual gamers prefer vehicles over infantry.

[dragon6]

Perhaps they used counters, instead of models, for their infantry?

I did long ago

[kiasutha]

Perhaps they used counters, instead of models, for their infantry?

I did long ago

Yah, once upon a time there was no micro infantry.
There were no trucks, few towed guns, not even any Bolsheviks...
We used Avalon Hill counters. Then GHQ made "scale" infantry.
I bought hundreds. They looked pretty bad and broke if you looked harshly at them.
More counters, then some British made stuff.
I don't remember now when the current GHQ infantry appeared...

[Nepty]

I use round counters from the old Avalon Hill Luftwaffe game. I have hundreds of them that I paint and stamp them with letters or numbers for company ID and apply decals like German crosses or stars for soviet, US etc. Place a truck or APC on top of them and they are riding in the vehicle. Very simple but effective.

[Cav Dog]

I started out using Squad Leader counters for infantry but the rules I was using, and I don't even remember the name, had a ground scale of 1" = 100m. They only moved an inch per turn and that was not going fit in with the vision I had of slashing armored blitzkriegs across my Mom's 4 x 7 dining room table.

[SFCDODGE65]

I guess I was lucky in the way I started playing 6mm. I worked as the OPFOR at the 1st CAV SIM center at FT Hood in 85 (I was a PFC). We used GHQ miniatures to run the simulated exercises back then for the units prepping for various FTXs all the way up to the EGG. Me and a Staff Sergeant were responsible for maintaining the thousands of miniatures and terrain sections as well as to maneuver as the OPFOR during the exercise. Of course, we had to replicate every infantry squad with figures. That is where I picked up a lot of knowledge on Soviet doctrine as well as the "Fire Command" rules developed by the DA Civilian who ran the SIM center. It was great having my job to be painting miniatures and running scenarios (gaming). I still have those rules and a lot of the modern miniatures I bought back then to game on my own. The infantry were the original GHQ infantry molds. They are very thin and don't hold up well to a lot of gaming.

[Mk 1]

Perhaps they used counters, instead of models, for their infantry?

I did long ago

Yah, once upon a time there was no micro infantry.

Ahem ...

Quite agree that there was a time when GHQ did not make infantry. But "there was no micro infantry"???

I bought and started basing my micro-scale infantry formations sometime about 1975-77. I still have much of that infantry in my "active forces" . I also have about 40 or 50 trucks, mostly in my WW2 Soviet force, that I bought in that period.

So when was this time when there were no infantry or trucks available?

[kiasutha]

Mk1-
I bought my first GHQ around 1969. Lost some of my records years ago...
At that time, GHQ had neither trucks, nor infantry, and few towed guns.
All you had for tractors were the German 250 and 251, American M3, and the original French Lorraine model. CinC didn't exist yet, of course.
I believe GHQ claims to have been the "Pioneer" of "micro scale".
Were the Brits. making stuff before that?
If so, I just dont remember it...
Note-
The oldest GHQ catalogue I can set eyes on at the moment shows the original German infantry and Opel Blitz truck as available in Fall of 1973. They were the only GHQ ones as of then...

[Mk 1]

I started buying GHQ micro armor about 1973 or 74, while I was in Junior High School, at a hobby shop that was close enough to be accessible, but too far away to be convenient (beyond bicycle range, but within car range -- required much pestering of parents to manage my acquisition rate).

At that time, if GHQ made infantry, the store did not stock it. I never saw a catalog.

I didn't even know there were such things as gaming cons or clubs, nor even gaming magazines at that time. So I figured it out as I went along. We used actual 1/285 ground scale. Points? Game balance? Pah! We played with what we could buy and paint, and the guy with the better stuff (or the bigger allowance) had a big advantage! The battles I had with my schoolmates were predictably adolescent. Tiger IIs and Panthers vs. SU-100s and T-34-85s at 100- 250m range on the tabletop in my den, with pipe-cleaner walls for hull-down positions. When we could we did battles in the dirt in the backyard, where we could get ranges up to 3,000m (about 30 feet), but we suffered high loss rates (so many turrets never found in the dirt!).

Then when I was a couple years into the hobby (enough to be easily identified as a fanatic), one day my father returned from an overseas trip with a catalog from a UK producer. It seemed entirely remarkable to me. All I knew of GHQ's product line was what the hobby shop chose to stock and put on display. But here was a listing of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of 1/300 scale items I had never even imagined! And on that list were so many things I had never seen from GHQ!

And so I bought IS-2s and IS-3s and SU-152s and BA-10 armored cars and GAZ trucks and 76mm guns and 152mm howitzers and a whole European town's worth of vacu-formed styrene buildings ... and INFANTRY!

Oy it was some ugly stuff. GHQ models were not as nice then as they are now, but still they were SO FAR ahead of the UK stuff it was a shock to me to see what I got for my mail order dollars (or pounds sterling, if you will).


Here is one of the SU-152s from that original order. These were among the better models, and so I used them and kept them in my active forces box until I finally replaced them with the GHQ models (also shown) about 10 years ago.

A few of the UK vendor vehicles can be seen in this pic, in civilian colors.


Note in particular the truck with the light gray back entering from the lower left. That's an early UK vendor GAZ-AA truck, with the sides and top sanded to look like a panel truck rather than a tarp. The blue-and-white SUV-style vehicle in the roundabout and the red-and-white van are kit-bashes of the BA-10 armored cars (cut off the turret and the 3rd axle, add putty, and paint!).

Some day I shall take a pic or two of the old infantry. The ammo drums on the Russian SMGs were as big as the drums on their LMGs. But hey, I had infantry and my opponents didn't. Fool that I was, I thought that would be an advantage against all the Tiger IIs. Alas, it wasn't.

[Mk 1]

So after that not-quite-brief-enough detour down my own personal memory lane ... back to the question at hand.

I think that infantry has been present in the market quite long enough to be a factor. But ... most game rule sets just don't manage to mix armor and infantry well. The rules I used when I first started, called interestingly enough "Armour and Infantry 1925 - 1950" by WRG could in fact more appropriately have been called armor OR infantry. I guess the infantry rules were reasonable. As long as you only ran about a platoon of infantry per player you could probably have had an interesting game. The armor rules were rather on the quick-play side. You could quite reasonably run more than a company of AFVs per player. But put the two together? A company of infantry had 3x more stands to move than a company of tanks, but only about 1/2 or 1/3 the combat power. So the fool who ran infantry stopped the whole game when it was his turn to move or shoot, yet never had an effect on the outcome.

When your rules work like that, you quickly learn not to use infantry.

I saw much the same in many rulesets over the years. The problem was that faster playing armor rules just didn't correspond with faster playing infantry rules. And even the very detailed armor rules did not have fast enough infantry rules.

Infantry-focused rules may run well as long as the gamers limit themselves to only a few vehicles. But at this scale most gamers want to see the armor in action, and so you really need rules that play the infantry quickly and easily, so they can participate in the same battle with company-per player (battalion-per side) tank battles.

I like Mein Panzer and Jagdpather II for these reasons. They seen to have achieved a reasonable balance, and I've had better combined arms games with these two rulesets than with any others over the past several decades.

But ... it's always possible that I've achieved that result more because, after about 30 years of gaming, I finally managed to move beyond my "initial" adolescent ways...

[kiasutha]

Mark1:
I was 15 when I bought my first GHQ. My local shop didn't carry it.
I was into plastic models then, and saw it in one of the hobby mags; so mail order for me.
I'd have to dig to find my old British mags, but I'm pretty sure their stuff post dates GHQ.
(I've got a bunch of it too, some infantry & gunners, but especially trucks, I'd been building them out of balsa and card stock...)
I ordered the GHQ infantry as soon as it came out, and still have most of it.
Over the years I've had a few nearby shops that carried some GHQ, but all are long gone.
My "local" dealer now is a dedicated game shop, actually almost 5 hours away by interstate, and hasn't restocked in a long time.
The owner says GHQ requires a $500 minimum order every time, and just moves too slow to be worth it.
FOW on the other hand, sells well, and he has lots of it...
So it goes, I'm back to direct order now and then when anything of interest comes along.
Re your last post-
I also had the WRG sets and found much the same thing.
We also used "Angriff", and a couple other sets. Pretty much the same.
I haven't done much gaming in a long time, mostly just collect a bit now.