"Need help with contents of CD 15mm infantry bags" Topic

Hey all, I'm just getting into historical minis gaming, via Flames of War, and I'm starting to shop around for my first army so I won't have to keep borrowing a friend's. One of the companies I'm considering is Old Glory/Command Decision, but I'm having trouble finding any info on their 50-man bags of infantry. I'm mainly curious as to what sort of mix of stuff would come in, say, a bag of 50 of their Afrikakorps Command or LMG minis. Are there any plain riflemen at all in those bags, or are the 'specialist' bags all composed of specialists? Also, I see that there are two Afrikakorps Rifleman bags available – can anyone tell me what the difference between them would be? I don't really need 200 men (frankly, I don't need 150, but if I have to buy a full bag each of command, LMG teams, and plain riflemen I can live with that), but if there's some real neat stuff in bag A versus bag B or vice versa, it would be nice to know.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

Basically, a bag of Infantry will consist of various poses of that type of figure, standing, running, kneeling, firing etc. Sometimes for popular ranges there are two different bags for Infantry. A command bag usually contains officers, NCOs people with binoculars etc. The various specialist bags contain different posed figures of say HMG,LMG or mortars.

They are excellent figures in my opinion.

flintlocklaser:

Check out Skytrex.com.
They sell the CD/OG line of minis over in the UK. The cool part about this is that they have the pictures of the minis themselves!

They do sell th eminis in bags of 50 or in packs of 10. Depending on where you live, this might be the way to go.

Also, congrats on trying out FOW.

Regards,
Marc

Cool, many thanks to you both! It looks like I'll need a bag each of command, LMG and riflemen. This is going to give me 150 men when I only really need 40 or so, but they're so much cheaper than the stuff I'm used to that I guess I don't really mind. Plus I'll should have all the men I ever need if I decide to field a rifle company instead of the panzers I'm starting out with.

Thanks again!

A lot of those CD bags come with command (at least the Germand and SS rifles did) – I wouldn't buy the command pack unless you need tons of them. There were even a couple of Panzerfausts IIRC.

You can always pick up individual command packs from QRF or Battlefront if you need a few.

If you are using these for FOW just be aware that sometimes the OG bag sizes don't fit well with the list options and you could end up with a lot of spares – a lot of lists don't give you the option to get some items in 3s.

Also I have found that the vehicles (particularly the halftracks) don't mix well with Battlefront so check before you mix and match.

Another option is to buy the CD riflemen packs and then use Peter Pig for specific packs like Command, LMG's, HMG's etc. Peter Pig figures work in good with CD.

Also I have found that the vehicles (particularly the halftracks) don't mix well with Battlefront so check before you mix and match.

I'd heard this too, and I glanced on the topic in my armored car question, but this is a slightly different issue I guess: If I solely used OG/CD halftracks, would that look alright? As in, there won't be any other halftrack models to compare them against, but are the OG ones just ludicrously undersized? Or just small compared to the BF ones?

I'm already thinking I'm going to be spending as much money on BF armored cars as I will on the rest of this list, and if I can economize on the halftracks I'm buying for my tiny infantry contingent that would be great.

Just a note on the LMG packs: The ones I have (German and French) seem to come in two forms.

The German bag has 50 "teams" where you get an LMG gunner and an assistant carrying ammo. So you end up with only 25 LMGs.

The French LMG bag on the other hand has only LMG gunners. So you end up with 50 LMGs. I had to use French officers with pistols and do a head swap to get the assistants for my French LMGs. You could also just use a rifleman.

I will say I really like the OG early war Germans and French. The variety of poses for rifles between the two packs is amazing. You have enough unique rifles to do whatever you want. Prone, advancing, firing, loading, even a few squad leader or assistant squad leader variety of poses holding rifles and pointing…

Also, between the assistant gunners and ammo bearers for the German HMG and LMG bags, you have all the ammo humpers you need to make nice LMG teams AND full HMG squads. You also have the option to have assistants with rifles and ones with just pistols as there are enough of each to swap out depending on your needs.

I also love the variety of LMG poses. I dislike prone models, and the OG bags come with enough advancing poses that I didn't have to use any prone and I could have several unique teams for variety.

All in all, I would say despite buying in bags of 50, I got a lot of use out of my bags and had hardly any leftover unused models. You only really need one bag. But I did do a complete company of each of 3 platoons, so that might have something to do with it.

The Quality Castings infantry sculpts are a little better overall in terms of realism and look (IMO), though the OG models are still good and I was happy with them. The deal breaker for me was that the German bags of Quality Casting infantry simply didn't have the poses for LMGs I wanted.

I also didn't like how the Quality Castings bags are organized. I found it harder to get what I wanted out of the bags without buying too many extra to get the mix of poses I wanted.

I do think that when I do Russians I will end up going QC though as I don't like the Russian sculpts in the OG line.

I don't know if that would affect your purchase or not.

Also, as far as vehicles. I like the OG vehicles better than the Quality Castings vehicles I have bought.

I would say with just one brand on the table you won't notice anything. I like the OG halftracks better though.

individual command packs from QRF

Wasn't me said that :-)

I agree with Iron Ivan Keith's assessment (you can go back to some very old TMP threads, and find me extolling the virtues of buying 600-700 French at a time…), except:

"I like the OG vehicles better than the Quality Castings vehicles I have bought."

With me, it's literally by specific vehicle. I tend to like most OG trucks and lorries, and the Staghound and Daimler armored cars. My favorite QC vehicles are the British carriers, the White Scout Car, the PzKw 38(t), the Italian L6 light tank and AB41 armored car… It's all in the "eaches" with me.

Allen

Buy the packs you need, pick out the figures you want and e-bay the remainder.

Theres always someone else who only needs a few.

Even with buying a pack of 50 'Commanders' it still usually works out cheaper after discounts than buying a couple of 8 fig packs of Peter Pigs.

The leftover figs are handy as give aways to newbies interested in joining.

I have both LW Brit and German from CD and QC. The QC figs are rubbish, so bad that I am completely rebuilding my British inf company + support weaponns with CD.

Funny enough the QC bren carriers are very nice why the Lloyd carriers are junk.

Because the (n.b.) Loyd carriers are original Comet recognition models from WWII: never been updated.

Allen

Thanks for the further followups everyone, but they raised yet another new question, mostly for GeoffQRF and sort of off topic for WWII – who's a good US seller for your product? I see a tiny bit of your stuff on Warweb, and none of it is the stuff I'm interested in from you folks. Frankly, what I'm looking at is your FoG Free Company starter army (like I said, I'm jumping into historicals with both feet right now!) and they don't seem to carry any of your pre-WWI stuff at all. Do you have a US reseller you can recommend? Or if I take the plunge, am I going to need to order from you directly?

GeoffQRF – who's a good US seller for your product?

Try Mark at Scale Creep, scalecreep.com or David at Miniature Armies.

Geoff