"figures and rules compatible with FOW figures" Topic

I picked up a good deal on some Russian and German FOW figures. Never owned WWII land figures before. Any other ranges compatible with them? Also, do I have other options in rules?

Yes! Battlegroup Kursk, Overlord and Fall of the Reich can be used with FOW figures and basing with no adaptation required other than some way to mark off individual figure casualties (rings, mini dice etc). My regular opponent uses his FOW collection unchanged for our games.

Plenty of 15mm WWII figure out there Old Glory Apring to mind. Similarly there are plenty of other rules sets available, depending on what size of action you want to do. Skirmish, Small Unit, Comapny, Battalion, larger?

Chain of Command works well in 15mm.

Most 15mm figs are compatible as far as I can tell. Battlefront vehicles tend to be taller than other manufactures.

There are a ton of great options for rules. If you want something to try out immediately, feel free to check out "Hail Of Fire" which you can download for free and is only a few pages long. It was designed with FoW's basing in mind.

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Forget listing games. Any WW2 game can be played with your figures :-)

15mm stuff is usually pretty compatible but you are often best off sticking with one company for vehicles.

I have Peter Pig, Battlefront and Command Decision WW2 figures and while the BF guys are a little chunkier, they mix and match just fine.

Hi,

I have a mix of Peter Pig, Battlefront and Command Decision 15mm, with some QRF and Forged in battle too! I think they all mix pretty well together.

As for rules, as Weasel points out, ANY ww2 rules can be used with 15mm figs. We all have our preferences, my suggestion would be the Battlegroup rules, by iron fist publishing.

I have also played bolt action with my 15mm stuff, works fine, and the weapon ranges I think work even better with the smaller 15mm!

Steve

Weasel's right that you can play any ruleset with 15mm, however, it's the basing that can occasionally be problematic. For example, playing Hail of Fire or Flames of War with individually based figs would be a little difficult and confusing, while playing Chain of Command with figs based in teams can lead to other problems.

Are your figs based individually or as teams?

Ah, good catch on the bases.

For miniatures, you will find lots, so no worries there.

For rule sets, there are a couple out there, but take a look at "Blitzkrieg Commander II". BC2 is one of the reasons why I don't really play FOW anymore.

blitzkrieg-commander.com

You can use FOW bases with BC2.

As above, I have yet to find a set of WW2 rules which doesn't work with any old bunch of 15mm figures. My FOW figures are mixed in with the other usual suspects, Peter Pig, OG and increasingly PSC.

My Peter Pig and FOW chaps (Fow and PSC vehicles) are individually based on washers and are used for Chain of Command, battlegroup: Overlord and Bolt Action. As Yorkie says the ranges and feel in Bolt Action are better in 15mm IMHO. Multi basing should be fine as long as you can find an acceptable (to you) method of record keeping and you and your opponent can be reasonable in regard to actual positioning and cover.

I use Peter Pig, Plastics Soldier Company, Command decision and more recently Eureka miniatures for playing Rapid Fire. The basing you have will probably be compatible with RF.

we play Bolt Action with FoW minis , mostly based individually but with mortars MGs etc. on their Battlefront bases . we use measurements as listed in the rules .

As based for Flames of War, you can use the "A Leader of Men" rules. Command Decision:Test of Battle can also be used, as long as both sides are based the same.

If you base your figures individually you can allways use them with any rules (that is THE advantage of basing them that way). What I mean by this is : make your own movement trays, how hard can that be for any multiple based gamesrule ?

@BelgianRay: It's a bit problematic in Flames of war, the base sizes control your spacing and therefore artillery effectiveness.

But you can reduce your models per base a bit in Flames (idea is in the v1 rules for identifying Veteran troops). I based all my Fallschirmjager infantry at 3 per base, which let me stretch the two FJ platoons and small FallschirmPionier platoon to 3 full FJ platoons and 3 squads of Pioniers. Later, I bought a third platoon of FJ and based them singly to use to make change for games that have individual basing as the default.

Battlegroup PanzerGrenadier will work fine with figures based for FoW and gives a very good game.

I've been reading Panzerfaust Armored Fist. The rules seem solid, especially the armor rules which appear to be more complex. That's a good thing because FOW is pretty much focused on armor and the rules for armor are so abstracted and stupid that it isn't enjoyable. For instance what's the point of a Jagdtiger having almost 4 feet in range if it will never hit anything at that range, ever. More often than not this same vehicle misses at 4 inches in range. It's just stupid. Give these rules a look. They support multiple scales and FOW basing for infantry (infantry based in teams of 4 or 5 figures rather than 1 figure per base IE fire teams).

Re Panzerfaust Armored Fist.

I doubt I would recommend this set. They have been around for a very long time (though they have been through quite a number of iterations). They certainly do appear 'more complex' because they have their origins firmly rooted in the data-driven rules era of Firefly / GI Commander / Combined Arms / etc, etc…

Thanks for all the ideas. As far as basing, nothing is based, yet. Basically, I got about $400 USD retail value of figures and vehicles for a little over $100. USD The local game store pulled a bunch of random stuff off the wall and had them in a Black Friday bin at 75% off. While looking thru I realized there was pretty much a mid war Soviet vs German game there. Couldn't resist. Just started painting this weekend. A bit new for me, never done 15mm before. Most of my collection is 10mm CW, 1/300 aircraft or 28mm Gnomes. The rules question came about as 1) I wanted to know if it was considered good manners to use other rule sets 2) figured their rules were a bit over done, but probably not the very best to use. I'm intrigued by the single basing idea. I have my 10mm CW based at 8 figures on a stand, but on movement trays for 4 to 10 base regiments. Of course the gnomes are single based. Anybody have pictures with single based 15mm on a tray? I can see that pretty much unlike my CW infantry I have a variety of weapon types in a WWII company.

Have a look at Fireball Forward:
fireballforward.com

Card-driven initiative system gives a "cinematic" feel to the action (great so long as you don't have more than 4 players). Really nice clean innovative movement and combat mechanisms.

Chris

Bloody Big BATTLES!
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So, checking back in. Been painting the soviets, but have put off the rule search. I'm reading thru the recommendations so far. O.k., narrowing my search for rules. 1 figure is 1 man. based loosely as fire teams. Example: 4 to 5 rifles on a base, officer base, 2 man Russian light machine gun team, 2 man sniper team, 1 tank on a base, 1 cannon and crew on a base, etc. Figure on a few companies a player. 4 to 8 players on a convention sized table. Easy to teach/play at conventions. Not at all interested in point systems. I rather have objectives balance out the scenario than equal strength forces, i.e., historical forces. Rules can be condensed down to a few charts (easy to teach), but still has some depth. It can reasonably do small skirmishes up to a good sized convention battle 0n a 6 x 12 or larger table with 15mm figures. Definite WWII feel.

a few companies per player in 15mm ww2 would be a massive game.

A lot of skirmish ww2 rules put you at a platoon per player. Regardless of individual or team basing I play Disposable Heroes, it'll work both ways. You'll just need a way to note individual casualties.

yeah, I'm looking big. Maybe a long run of doing part of Stalingrad or Kursk for a convention. So I need enough detail to show individual weapons are different, but not bogging down in firing each rifle.

I can only agree with Weasel, most rules works quite well with 15mm, i have combined them with PSC models, bit only the new ones as the older figures are somewhat thin.

a few companies per player in 15mm ww2 would be a massive game.

True, but most players can handle ~6 elements without too much trouble. Good players can handle up to 12 elements.

Two infantry companies is ~8 elements (3 infantry platoons plus weapons platoon), plus the battalion weapons company makes ~12 elements. That's a rump battalion if you're talking Germans, assume that the 3rd infantry company is held in reserve.

For Soviets, Italians, and Romanians (IIRC), swap "company" for "platoon", and you now have a player in charge of a Regiment. And I mean that where the regular rules have you move a platoon as a single unit, you move the whole company instead.

That's how Flames of War handles things, and it seems to work in other games.

If you want to play battles at higher levels then using rules that have each model/base representing a higher level unit is probably the way to go, eg Command Decision which has each model/base representing a platoon.