I kind of take it for granted that historical interest is the primary draw for a gamer to Flames of War...while it is also one of the most balanced games I've yet played, and has an excellent ruleset and rules documentation, it was the fact that it was
WW II gaming that made me drop the $335 on the rule books and my Gerpanzerte Panzergrenadier Kompanie when I jumped into the game a little over a year ago...
I didn't actually start doing some real research until it became time to paint everything. I had the painting guides that came with the Late War German paint set, but that wasn't quite enough for me...I wanted to know what stuff "actually looked like."
I read somewhere during this process about "the pain of historical research," how if you just follow the guides and paint everything up accordingly that's fine, but once you start doing historical research it seems to drag on and on and once and you get wrapped up in minutiae and it really slows you down...which is precisely what happened to me, but in the end much for the better than had I not done the research at all!
I learned a LOT about German camouflage schemes and which units wore them (I could now identify Fallschirmjager, Wermacht Panzergrenadier and
SS Waffen camo schemes quite readily), precisely what all the various kit items German infantry carried on them (I didn't learn until yesterday that the little, thin cylinders on some of my mans' backs were spare barrels for MG42s), how German vehicle numbering worked, etc.
A lot of the info was right on the Battlefront website, which was excellent, but as much or more was from reenactors' websites (usually more about where to look than actual photographic evidence) and historical enthusiasts' websites...
Once I had the paint schemes down, I also wanted to know where my Kompanie would have been based on the choice of units I fielded, and you can even figure that out if you look hard enough. This website has
TO&E charts for a bunch of German Divisions:
http://web.telia.com/~u18313395/normandy/gerob/gerob.html
Through that site, which also has excellent citation notes at the bottom of pages, I was able to figure out that my Kompanie could be:
2. Panzer Division
Panzergrenadier-Regiment 2 OR Panzergrenadier-Regiment 304, Panzergrenadier-Bataillon I in either Regiment (due to being mounted entirely in Sd Kfz 251/1 halftracks)
Artillerie-Regiment 74, Panzer-Artillerie-Abteilung III (Hummels)
Panzerjäger-Abteilung 38 (Jagdpanzer IVs)
All I had left were my StuG's, which would not have existed in this Kompanie, but I can either replace them with:
Panzer IV H's : Panzer-Regiment 3, Panzer-Abteilung II
Panthers: Panzer-Regiment 3, Panzer-Abteilung I
Or I can say that it's later in the Normandy campaign, after 2. Panzer had absorbed 352. Infanterie Division, in which case the StuG's would have come from there. I went ahead and bought a Panzer IVH Platoon so that I could run 100% historical accuracy, however.
And now that means that I know precisely which Kompanies all my units could or would have been in such that I can also number all my vehicles accurately.
I have personally found that knowing so much about my Flames of War army is incredibly satisfying. Not only am I more confident in the painting schemes and the validity of the army comp, my historical interest in the period has also been extremely well-served.
So - have
you ever done historical research into your
FoW army? If so why did you start the research, what did you wind up learning, and how did you apply it to your
FoW gaming?