Forged in Battle French EW HMG Review

This is a guest post by Anatoli- make sure to check him out at Anatoli's Game Room!

Now you may wonder why I'm bothering to review the French HMG teams when all I play is the Poles in Early War. Well, the French look very close to Polish cavalry units save for the leg wrappings. Polish cavalry wore boots and cavalry pants, however the Adrian helmet, greatcoat and other details are almost spot on. So I bought two blisters of French Early War HMG's to use as Polish
HMG's for a cavalry list since Forged in Battle has not announced any cavalry HMG teams for the Poles yet.

The cosmetic difference of the infantry can be overlooked (or covered with clever basing to hide the leg wrappings), however the biggest difference between the French and the Poles is the machine gun itself. The Poles used a bulky Browning machine gun as you can see on the comparison picture. I do think it is easy enough to fix this by adding greenstuff to make the cooler on the Browning. At this scale and tabletop distance, no one will notice.

With all that explained, the Forged in Battle models are once again crisp and very high quality castings. The blister contains 4 HMG teams, but no command team. With the very imminent release of Polish dismounted cavalry (and 10th motorized cavalry brigade) I think you will be able to scavenge a command team or two if need be for this blister. Of course you could also attach the HMG teams to the cavalry companies in which case you won't need a specific HMG platoon commander.

It's a good buy in any case, quality miniatures at a good price. Just remember the Forged in Battle stuff does not come with any bases so you will need to purchase that elsewhere. Either Battlefront original bases or laser cut MDF bases from Warbases.co.uk

The comparison pictures show the FiB French HMG team with my FiB Polish HMG team and Battlefront Polish HMG team, as well as with some FiB mounted cavalry.