Heavy Gear Blitz! Tournament: Part 1

In 41 days I'll be participating in my first wargaming tournament. It's the Second Annual Heavy Gear Blitz! Canadian Championship and will be held this year at Cangames. As I said, this will be my first tournament. I wasn't planning on participating until my wife decided it would make for good motivation to get my Heavy Gear forces painted and ready to play. She suggested that I put together a list of everything I would need to build an appropriate army, order it and work at painting it in time for the tournament.

Cangames May 18th-20th 2007

Painting for a tournament is a great idea for those that have trouble finishing projects. Most of the projects I've finished have had deadlines where I was trying to get something ready to play in a club campaign or with my wife. When I have only a vague idea of when I'm going to play something I find myself less motivated. To combat this I switch projects rapidly, painting something different every week. This does a good job in keeping me productive, but it does nothing for getting a force painted and ready to play.

I'm a very isolated wargamer. I don't have a group of friends who follow my interests and are willing to jump on the bandwagon when I get interested in a new game. This means I need to look for new friends to be my opponent, or paint both sides of a force in order to convince some of my non-painting friends to play. I find it hard to start looking for opponents without a painted force though, especially when I'm aware that I'm a slow painter. I'm afraid to commit to something I won't be able to achieve. With a club campaign or a tournament it is different. I'm not seeking someone to play, I'm participating in an already established event.

The Armylist

The first step is to create an army list. This will give me a chance to start thinking about tactics and strategy, but also give me a shopping list of miniatures to order. The tournament has an army limit of 750TV. This is just slightly above a skirmish and very restrictive on what forces I can take. For example, the Strike Squad I've painted is 405TV. This leaves me only 345TV for the rest of my force. The General Purpose squad I'm painting is 215TV. I could add an Infantry Squad for 60TV and then find a place to spend the rest. My concern is that I'll be low on numbers and very fragile.

After some though I came up with the following list. I'm still looking at different options within what I've ordered and won't really have to decide until I'm actually painting the squads.

109th Heavy Gear Regiment

The Lionhearts

Heavy Gear and Lionhearts © Dream Pod 9, Inc.

There are three squads in the force, two GP Squads and a Fire Support Squad. The force is modeled after the 109th 'Lionhearts', a UMF Regiment detailed in the Gear Up! newsletter of the mid-90s. I'm planning on writing some special rules for Aurora, DP9's in-house pdf magazine. This force will not have any special rules other than following the UMF's army composition rules.

This gives me 15 Gears on the battlefield, which should be on par with most of the competitors. It also gives me some heavy firepower in the form of the Fire Support Squad coupled with a lot of grunts that should be able to take a bit of damage while acting as a screen for the Fire Support Squad.

Images marked as such are copyright Dream Pod 9, Inc. Used without permission for review purposes. No challenge to copyright intended.