FRONTLINE HEROES FREE MISSION AND BATTLE REPORT

I want to share with you a new free mission for Frontline Heroes: Fields of Normandy. The link to the mission is at the end of the battle report.

Frontline Heroes: Fields of Normandy is a solo/PvP skirmish wargame set in World War II. In this game, our soldiers will be members of the Allied forces battling against the Nazi army on the European front, closer to action films than to historical events.

In the game we have normal missions, as in any type of miniature wargame, where two forces face off until one prevails over the other through sheer force; and we also have stealth missions, in which we must infiltrate a small group of soldiers into enemy territory to accomplish certain vital objectives, such as sabotaging supplies, capturing bridges or blowing up installations.

This time is a mission in which my group of airborne soldiers are ordered to sneak themselves in a town occupied by the enemy, blow up a nazi warehouse and get away alive.

This is the map of the mission, we see the deployment zone for our soldiers and the two sentinel guards (one armed with a submachine gun and another armed with a rifle). The sentinels only have an arc of vision of 180º to the front (marked by a red line on the figures).

If the alarm is raised the player will roll 1d10 every turn in the reinforcement table, and for every soldier 1d10 will be rolled to see the deployment point chosen from the Entry Points. The Entry Points (blue circles with letters EP) are numbered from 1 to 0, to decide where the enemy soldiers are placed.

I begin with a team of five men: the officer, a sniper, and three riflemen, two of whom are carrying explosive devices to destroy the warehouse.

The orders are to approach stealthily, set at least one of the explosive devices in the warehouse, and then withdraw.

The warehouse is located in a corner of a 90x90 cm table, and I can deploy at any point along the two sides opposite that corner.

There are two Nazi guards: one at the complex entrance and another at the warehouse door.

If the Nazi guards spot the allied soldiers or notice anything suspicious, they may raise the alarm.

If the alarm is raised, many soldiers resting in the various buildings will appear to fight the players' soldiers.

I deploy my officer and two soldiers in one side, and the sniper and another soldier deploy in the other side. Each of the groups have an explosive devices each.

It takes the sniper two turns to get to the top of the building, while his mate takes a safe position in a corner of the alley.

The other three advance toward the street, but they encounter another guard who is unaware of what is happening. This sentinel wasn´t there at the begining of the mission, but an event made him appear there.

One of the soldiers advances, hidden in the shadows, until he reaches the Nazi guard. After a poor dice roll, he finally kills the guard by cutting his throat with his combat knife.

The officer and the other soldier carrying the explosive device reach the wall surrounding the complex and assess how to jump over it.

Up to this moment, everything was going smoothly. But suddenly, my sniper, positioned on top of a building, sees something moving on another rooftop...

...a f*****g nazi sniper is in the roof of a building!!

The Nazi sniper has just appeared on the table at the beginning of the turn and still hasn't seen anybody. This turn he appears but won't activate. However, next turn he will shoot anyone in his line of sight.

This event speeds everything up, as I have three soldiers in the middle of the street, and my sniper is just a few meters away from the Nazi sniper.

All my stealth plans are ruined, and I have to move quickly and blow up everything as fast as possible, since the Nazi sniper will start shooting my men and raising the alarm next turn.

I decide that my sniper must kill the enemy sniper while his teammate runs toward the guard at the door and shoots him. The other three soldiers will try to jump over the wall to enter the complex and set the explosive devices.

Let´s go step by step: 

First my sniper kills the Nazi sniper.

His mate runs across the street to the gates and shoots down the guard.

One of the other soldiers jumps over the wall, but the other two don't make it, failing their dice rolls.

Once the shooting starts, two more Nazis emerge from the warehouse. The soldiers dive for cover, and blood begins to spill on the ground.

The officer jumps over the wall just in time to see one of his soldiers fall to the ground.

From this point on, the Nazis kill the Allied soldier who was on top of a car shooting over the wall. As two more Nazi soldiers appear, I decide that the enemy has too much of an advantage and that the only way to survive is to withdraw.

Continuing the fight seems pointless, as I have one soldier still outside the wall (who failed his dice rolls two turns in a row—two actions per turn... that makes four failed dice rolls!), the officer is alone inside the complex facing all the Nazis, and the sniper is doing his best to take down enemies.

The nazis won today but the war is not over, and we will fight them on every street, on every road, on every house... 

'Til we kill them all....

The solo system is quite realistic (on how a real opponent would play), and the events included to make the game unpredictable are really funny and turn everything upside down in a second.

During the stealth phase, the German characters do not activate; they only have the option to spot the attacking soldiers. The Allied soldiers activate repeatedly during this phase, allowing them to make assault plans without rushing. 

However, the longer they take to make decisions, the more likely it is for events to be triggered, which can disrupt all their planning. A clear example of this is the two events that have occurred: one added an extra sentry, and the other added an enemy sniper, which sped up my entire plan.

And this has been the battle report of the mission. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did playing it. Now you have the chance to try it yourselves and stop the enemy's advance. Here is the free download link:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FRONTLINE HEROES FREE MISSION

HOW TO MAKE A CRASHED PLANE 28MM (TERRAIN AND SCENERY)

In this post I will explain how I made a rather curious piece of scenery from a 2 euro toy model from AliExpress to use in Frontline Heroes: Fields of Normandy.

The first thing is to buy the model, which for 2 euros is already more than we can expect. It has a medium quality, and it is very easy to assemble, there are just a few pieces and the difficulty is quite easy. The degree of detail is passable... and for a piece of scenery even more. But what interests us the most about this model is its price... 2 euros...

Come on... for 2 euros you can afford to screw it up as much as you want... It´s not an Italieri model costing 20 euros...

Before I´m asked many times for a link to that plane, I have to say that I don't want to put a link as the aliexpress shop that sells them may change the link or just do t sell them anymore. 

So, I would advise to check aliexpress and search for "plane model" putting the cheapest results first... And that's it... There are plenty of models to choose from... Enjoy!!! 

There are a few pieces and they fit perfectly, in fact you don't need any glue, everything goes smoothly if you follow the instructions in perfect Chinese ...

Once the model is assembled we proceed to make some big damage, in my case I am going to split a wing and I am going to put it on a different base so that I can move it on the table and use it as a cover.

With a kitchen scissors it is more than enough to be able to cut the plastic, putting them on the bases we are going to use, as advice, choose bases that are irregular in shape, so they will be better integrated into the board (a square base is seen from afar).

Once placed on the bases, we will use foam cardboard cutouts to make the elevations, gluing everything with white glue, and using filling paste (aquaplast) to give a shape to the base and hide the edges.

Once the filler paste dries, we give the plane some paint with a sandy brown texture (to represent that it has just suffered a forced landing), we give the paste a layer of white glue and we add sand to it to texturize. 

When everything is dry, we give it a layer of brown earth (dark earth from Vallejo I put on it) and this already begins to take color.

When the earth brown paint is dry, we give it lights with a lighter color (Iraqi sand from Vallejo in my case) and add grass, bushes, tufts and whatever you want ...

To simulate the forced landing, I decided to put a couple of broken logs and some oil stains on the ground, but this is already to everyone's taste.

And so, with a cheap model (rmember... 2 euros) in one afternoon we make ourselves a piece of scenery or an objective that is more than good looking and its going to attract most of the people.

And once finished... 

Stay tuned because this piece of terrain will appear in next games of weird ww2...

Things are going to get weirder...

Edit:

After finishing the plane I was told that the cockpit of that plane had a central piece that moved to open and close, and not as a whole piece, so I took it out and cut the center piece with a hot knife and put it back... 

And this is the result: