Road to Nationals Part Six: Finalizing the List

Having come out the other side of the July Tunisia Firestorm campaign as the highest scoring allied player, I'm quite confident in my Rifle/Lee list. The one major change from that list is that I can take a flight of P-40 Warhawks. In our firestorm, we couldn't have aircraft since aircraft were one of the firestorm units and it wouldn't make sense if someone had ended up with 2 flights of planes. The Mortars have gotten the ax to make way for a second recon patrol and a second battery of T30 assault guns. I really fear 2 things from my opponents, heavy tanks and Marders. I wont have AT above 10 so FA 9 monstrosities could be a real problem. Marders can quickly and easily wipe out my armour and hinder my ability to maneuver much more than 88's and such given my artillery and smoke. luckily I doubt heavy tanks and Marders will be combined.

Despite these two threats the list I've built should be able to handle most comers. Most of my list is highly mobile and Lees have proven to be more than a match for comparable medium tanks and they have the shots to trade with light tank swarms along with my own little pack of Stuarts. M-10's were attractive given my lack of serious AT but in the end they were simply to expensive and too inflexible for my liking. For more infantry/gun focused lists, mine drops 4 templates; 2 competent, 2 single gun mortars. I can even get a 5th if my P-40s aren't too busy shooting up Marders.

Reserves are a bit of a pain for this list. The most obvious 40% to stick in reserves is the three Lees and 5 Stuarts for a total of 30 points. This leaves little offensive capability and only my lone HQ Lee to hold back any enemy armour. The other attractive option is to leave my 3 Lees, P-40's, and one of the T30 batteries in reserve. That way I'd have my Stuarts on the field to deal with a similar horde of little tanks or to make some early offensive gambit. I'm not too worried about deep reserves since my T30's don't meet the FA 3 threshold for being held off the table.

Due to the attacker/defender system used by the event runners I'll likely be attacking more often then not given the high amount of Tank, self propelled, and recon units in my list. There's even a good chance I'll be attacking pure tank lists which doesn't have that many platoons. This may be a problem but I can hope to attack multiple fronts simultaneously in such a way as to split their forces. Regardless, having two spearhead units will hopefully allow me to forward deploy in at least a few games.

My list will certainly have some trouble dealing with bigger tanks but I don't feel I'm missing anything vital. I've approached making this list by focusing on having redundancies instead of putting all my points in one basket.