Konflikt ’47 – A Tale of Five Gamers: Steff’s Imperial Japanese

It’s been a little quiet on the Konflikt ’47 Tale of Five Gamers front lately – anyone would think our gamers have been hard at work getting Festung Europa pre-orders ready to go live – but the eyes of the Green Vault see all. Today, their gaze has fallen on Steff, and her Empire of Japan force. Let’s se what she’s been up to!

After the excitement of putting together and painting the new starter army, I was full of hobby beans and wanting to add more to the collection. We had planned for every force to expand from a starter army to 1,500 points, but we quickly realised the US starter was already 1,500 points, meaning poor old Conor would be left behind. Our new plan was a bit easier…ignore the points!

Each of us would add four units to our army, with the rule of cool being the only limitation – we could sort the points out afterwards! I started with what I think is the coolest unit in the Empire of Japan list: Shibito. Shibito squads look great next to the heavily armoured infantry and Ghosts, and it was a bit of a palette cleanser to paint organic forms instead of armour.

I went for a semi-historical paint scheme with these, trying to match the greens, khakis and greys to historical uniforms. However, I could have painted them any colour! Konflikt ‘47’s divergence from WWII really expands painting options for uniforms and allows for all sorts of weird and wonderful schemes, so if I do paint another squad, maybe they’ll be in Hawaiian shirts! (They won’t be. -ed.)

I started thinking about transport shortly after finishing the Shibito squad, and I went for the Opel Blitz – while it’s a German vehicle, I can easily see the Axis providing some examples to their Japanese allies – at least earlier in the war! This is a really fun plastic kit to put together, needing very few instructions to understand where everything goes. I jazzed it up with pieces taken from the Konflikt ’47 terrain set, adding a light to the roof, and some ‘gubbins’ to the sides.

In my army’s backstory, this is a ‘corpse collection’ truck. The various add-ons are there to suck the juice out of all the fresh corpses the driver collects, and get them ready for the en-zombification process, with the siren and lights on the roof telling people to bring out their dead! (It’s important to note that this is very definitely considered ‘head-canon’ only! -ed.)

After adding these extras I painted the truck in the army’s yellow scheme, but it felt a bit empty. What’s a corpse wagon without corpses?

I rummaged through my bits box and found a few Eighth Army and German Veteran bodies, and a bunch of skeletons – perfect for kitbashing into the dead. I gave them a very quick paintjob in the same scheme as the rest of my Shibito, and glued them into the truck bed. This wasn’t nearly disgusting enough, so I mixed some AK Water Effect with some brown and red Speedpaint and literally poured that all over them!

I was on a bit of a vehicle high so my next unit was again…another Opel Blitz!  This would transport my assault troops, and so I wanted to try and match the high-tech, armoured look of those models and establish a visual connection between the two. The corpse wagon was immediately identifiable as belonging to the Shibito as it was full of dead stuff, so this truck had to match as well.

This was a big conversion. I was very lucky and managed to get hold of a Type 7 Sasori walker body, and it is almost exactly the same width as the cab of the truck. I sawed the Sasori body in half, squared off the bottom and cut out a few millimetres of wheel well on the plastic kit. This fit really nicely, and gave a completely different look to the front of the truck. As the cab was now significantly shorter, I also cut out a section of the truck bed, and moved the back wheels slightly to keep a similar overall length. Cue one really interesting armoured truck!

This got the same paint scheme as the rest of the vehicles and both trucks got an oval base, with plans to add some drivers standing outside having a cigarette break. This is something I’ll do later down the line, as it’s very much for display rather than gaming, and I wanted to get this force ready for battle as soon as possible.

Finally, I wanted to use the older metal Ghosts, so I grabbed a set of them, painted them up in yellow with red visors, and based them to match the rest of the army.

With that, I was done! The army box and the new additions only brought me to around 1,250 points, but that didn’t really matter. I had a really great few weeks converting, building and painting, and I ended up with a pretty large army to start playing Konflikt ‘47 – which was the whole aim of this project.

As I’ve almost filled out the Assault Platoon, the next step is expanding the Armoured Platoon. I sense a lot of Type 7s in my future… and some battles against our other gamers. I’m claiming being finished first as a crucial moral victory, and hopefully that will be recognised in the form of extra points in the final standings! (Optimism is an admirable trait… -ed.)