Beginner friendly guide to assembling infantry

[Marcus]

Hi all, new here and very excited to finally have bought into Bolt Action! Ive purchased the German Grenadier starter and US Army starter as well as the rulebook and some dice etc so I have everything I need to build a small two-player collection 🙂

I was initially planning to build them as recommended on the box but have read that many seem to build otherwise, to increase their options and so on. For example, the US starter is based around 12 man squads but many seem to run their squads with 8-10, which would leave a bunch of models to make snipers etc.
Any tips, thoughts or guides to how to best use my starter sets is welcome! Im not looking for competitive effectiveness but for narrative and somewhat historically fitting lists, but if the sets can be made to offer variety and options then all the better!

So TL:DR, for a casual gamer who enjoys narrative over cmopetition, whats the best usage of these starter boxes?

Thanks in advance!

[Marcus]

And I forgot to mention, Im looking to build the armies as right after the landing in normandy.

[Zedeyejoe]

For the starter sets, I built them just as the book says. There are just enough figures to do the job.
I posted a thread about how to build various figures for the US Marines force (what arms suit what weapons).
Build now thats the nice thing about BA, you build squads as you like between limits and thats historical. Only units straight out of training are going to have ‘by the book’ organisations, so designing your own is fine.
I go for ‘fire support’ squads that max out on long range weapons and ‘close combat’ squads that are heavy on the SMGs. I plan to have 8 to 10 figures in a squad.

[Marcus]

As I was too impatient 😀 to wait for an answer I went ahead and built them pretty basic, not exactly as the box says as I wanted a few supporting options too.

I did three basic full squads for both the US and Germans and added some sniper teams and bazookas too.

I have a few models left over for both sides so when I eventually decide what I want to change/add I can start with them 🙂

[Author]

Posts