Building Armies in Bolt Action: A Primer

Guest Post by Troy from Sonic Sledgehammer Studio

  If there’s one question that comes up more often in Bolt Action groups even more than “How do I paint my army?” it might well be “How do I build my army?” If you’re someone already familiar with how squads, platoons and companies are related to one another, it’ll probably not seem so daunting, but for someone encountering historical gaming for the first time or branching into a new era of play, there’s a lot to take into consideration. The period that Bolt Action covers starts in 1937 with the Sino-Japanese War, ending in 1945 – and that’s without taking into consideration Konflikt ’47 or the Korean War supplement. The rapid development of new weapons and new troop types over that period means a wealth of opportunities for someone to paint interesting miniatures for use on the table, but finding out just what’s available to your army at any given moment can make for an interesting challenge. Bolt Action is a game I think best described as Hollywood History. Rather than being a strict simulation, it is at its core a game – it plays loose and fast with history in some instances, or uses what are essentially stereotypes and long-held battlefield myths to give certain armies or units flavour. It isn’t intended as criticism to say that it has a slightly arcade game approach to some mechanics; the game is meant to flow smoothly and keep both players engaged up to the last dice roll rather than accurately replicate the grinding horrors of warfare on the tabletop. Part of this is reflected in how you assemble an army for battle, so let’s take a step by step look at where to begin, what you’ll need, along with some general tips and suggestions on how to get the most out of your infantry platoons!

WHAT BOOKS DO I NEED?

There are a lot of books available for Bolt Action! What you’ll need to get started is just two, though. First, the 2nd Edition Rulebook is available as a full-size hardback book, an A5 softback which comes in the two-player starter boxes, or as a PDF download available from the Warlord Games website. Personally, I’ve got the A5 softback and the PDF version, with the latter being one of the nicest digital rulebooks I’ve got. Everything is properly indexed and bookmarked in there to move around quickly between sections of the rules, which is real life-saver. Secondly, you’ll need the ‘Armies of…’ book for your chosen force. Think of these as being similar to Codexes if you’re familiar with Warhammer 40,000. If you’re looking to play Germany, you want the ‘Armies of Germany 2nd Edition’ book. Some armies, such as the varied forces of the British Dominion, are covered in the ‘Armies of Great Britain’ book. Others, like Romania or Finland (for example) are in ‘Armies of Italy and the Axis.’ If you’re confused by which book you might need, the product descriptions on the Warlord Games site will usually let you search quickly for the lists you’re looking for. In our example, we’re going to assemble a US Army force, so that’s nice and simple: I’ll need the ‘Armies of the United States.’ You’ll also find that there are campaign books which center on specific actions, periods of time or theaters of battle. Some of these will include additional units you can add to your army, and these will almost always feature additional rules which add flavour or special abilities to your army to reflect how they fought in those particular areas of the conflict. A couple of examples are ‘Duel in the Sun’ or ‘Empires in Flames.’ You don’t need these specifically to create your army, even if you’re looking to recreate one of those specific theaters to play games in. They are ordinarily very nice to have, though, and if there’s a particular theater or period in WWII that interests you, I recommend checking out the campaign books for inspiration. For now, though, we’re going to skip these and concentrate on the basics in the rulebook and our army book.

METHOD ONE: THE GENERIC REINFORCED PLATOON

Now that we’ve picked our army, it’s time to start choosing what units we’re going to take to battle. For our example, we’ll assume it’s a meeting engagement between two platoons on combat patrol, expecting to meet some resistance and with firepower enough to destroy or rout enemy elements – a common scenario on most tables! The Generic Reinforced Platoon Selector (referred to from now on as the Generic Selector) lets us take almost anything we want to battle with no regard for what period of time it saw combat in reality or how likely it would have been deployed alongside other troops. Its only real purpose is to limit how many of certain units we’re able to take, such as mortars, tanks and the like. Let’s get a look at the generic selector from the rulebook: So, as we can see, there aren’t really a lot of limitations. At 0-1 we might choose not to take a tank in our force at all, or we can take a maximum of one, but we aren’t restricted to what type it is. In that position we might take a dinky M3 Stuart or an enormous M26 Pershing, a tank destroyer, or a self-propelled artillery piece. Let’s concentrate first on what we must take: a lieutenant and two infantry squads. Warhammer 40,000 fans of a certain age will probably recognize the ‘two troops and an HQ’ style of army building here, but it does fairly well reflect how a real platoon would organize for a combat patrol. Since the generic selector doesn’t specify what quality our choices here must be, we could elect to take the lieutenant as Inexperienced, Regular, or Veteran. Each of these have a different points cost associated, as well as veteran units being harder to kill! Let’s take a 1st Lieutenant for the extra morale boost he’ll give nearby troops, and pay the points to make him Veteran; maybe he’s fought his way across Tunisia and Sicily already… We also have to have two infantry squads. The US Army has a pretty broad selection of troop types here – you could take inexperienced infantry squads, Paratroopers, Rangers, Marines, and so on. There’s nothing stopping you from taking multiple squads of flamethrower-toting engineers in the generic selector, either, but we’ll address this a little later. For now, since I’m sticking to regular troops for my platoon, I’ll pick two Early/Mid War Regular Infantry Squads. For our example, let’s take eight men in each; we could take twelve in each squad, but eight is a decent size for regular infantry. They’ll take a couple of hits without breaking from the fight, but we’ll want to make sure we back them up with support. US infantry squads don’t have a lot of native firepower since they can’t have the light machine guns common to other armies, but the BAR is a respectable addition to the arsenal. We’ll take an SMG for each sergeant, and a BAR operator. In total, each squad will come to 88 points.   The bare bones of our platoon. Laid out here is 266pts worth of miniatures. Not a big dent in a 1000pt army so far! One thing we’re definitely going to need is more men. In reality, a platoon would usually consist of an officer to lead it, a small command staff around him, and three squads of infantry. At ‘paper strength,’ a US rifle platoon would be 41 men, but reality would seldom see that reflected on actual strength that a fighting force could muster due to casualties, replacements filtering into squads, promotions and inevitable shuffling of men to fill gaps elsewhere. In a scenario like our planned meeting engagement, our platoon would ordinarily be backed up by a couple of squads from another platoon in the company, along with some of the assets available either from the company or even battalion commander if the mission were deemed important enough. Let’s add another couple of infantry squads. We could use the men in the fourth squad to bulk out the numbers in our original units, but having four squads gives us a little more flexibility to hold one unit in reserve and shore up a flagging defence or help drive home an assault. In Bolt Action, it also gives us another order die in our force, which are pulled at random during the game to determine which side acts with its next unit. An order die doesn’t have to be attached to any specific unit, but having more units in our force will give us more chance of drawing our dice when the time comes – very useful in a game where there’s no set initiative.   Five units – the officer counts as a unit by himself – gives us five order dice to play with, and we’re sitting pretty at 442pts worth of infantry. Not a bad total so far. Personally, I like to have around 40-50% of my army taken up by infantry units, so this is looking good. We’re still quite closely reflecting reality with our choices, but you can see how easy it would be to swap in a Paratrooper unit for some veteran troops, or filling the table with inexperienced hordes of infantry! Now let’s look at some of the support options. The generic selector allows us to take a mortar and a machine gun team if we’d like, and they’re pretty good choices. We could choose anything from a light to a heavy mortar team, and the US also have access to heavy machine gun teams that aren’t mounted on vehicles, which is pretty rare in most other armies. However, it gets more interesting: because of the availability of machine guns at the company level in historical terms, in our game the US forces can take three MG teams instead of just one. They still count as ‘one choice’ in our generic selector, and on the table they operate as separate units to one another, but we’re able to throw a lot of lead down range for that one selector slot!   Some people don’t much like MG teams due to how they work in Bolt Action; a single sniper shot can, in some circumstances, take the entire team off the table as though the MG had been destroyed and made useless. Personally, I like them. They’re historically accurate to the amount of firepower a US platoon could call on, and I just don’t line them up across the table from any pesky snipers! So let’s take two MG teams and a medium mortar, which is a great all-round anti-infantry weapon. A spotter lets the mortar fire from his line of sight, so you can keep your mortar team tucked away out of danger and let him spot targets – pretty handy! In the anti-tank slot, we’ll take a bazooka. Some armies will have access to anti-tank rifles, PIATs, suicide anti-tank teams or dog mines – it was a long, desperate conflict for some of the forces involved – but the US have just one man-portable choice in the form of the bazooka. Luckily, it’s an excellent weapon, and since you get them in the plastic infantry boxed set, including a bazooka is a fine choice.