Editing Flames of War (section)

===Sample Army===

Let's say you want to build a force representing the American forces in North Africa. This list will be set in the Mid War period, which means you can only use it against other Mid War lists. The appropriate book for this will either be the standalone book Fighting First or the section for said book in the North Africa compendium. In this case the compendium will be used to allow access to more units such as paratroopers. As mentioned above, you'll need at least one formation. Optionally, you can take command cards. They're by no means necessary but can open up different avenues of play and give you some thematic options for your army such as famous commanding officers. Worth at least getting a deck of to have all of your options available.

Next, you pick the units for your formation, starting with the required ones represented by the black boxes of the formation chart. Generally speaking, this will be an HQ unit and 2 Combat units, but this isn't always the case. Most formations will also have optional units indicated by grey boxes in the formation chart. In cases where there are two concentric/overlapping boxes in a section, this allows for the player to choose. You can take one of those options or the other, but not both. 

An average game of Flames of War is about 100 points, so this is what we will aim for in this demonstration. NOTE: The list below isn't necessarily competitive or even good, but is simply for the purpose of demonstrating how to build an army. The first formation we'll pick will be is an Armored Rifle Company - Infantry riding in half-tracks. The HQ unit for this consists of 2 M1 Carbine Teams in either a half-track or a jeep. They both cost 2 points, so in this case it doesn't make a difference, but some formation HQ units allow for different configurations, numbers or upgrades listed in their section of the rulebook, so your mileage may vary.

Once you've got your HQ we need the compulsory combat units. The Armored Rifle Company requires two platoons of mechanized infantry. The platoons themselves will be a mix of M1 Garand rifle teams, Bazooka teams, M1919 LMG teams, 60mm mortar teams, and half-tracks with a single .50 cal Mg and a number of .30 cal MGs. You have the choice for each platoon of either 6 rifle teams, 5 bazooka teams and 5 total half-tracks for 15 points each or 4 each of rifle teams and bazooka teams (the other weapons will be of the same quantity in either case) and 4 total half-tracks for 12 points each. Infantry are really good at holding objectives and are generally better in numbers, especially when they're cheap as in the case of the good ol' US of A, so we're going to go with the maximum strength for both rifle platoons.

Optional units for the Armored Rifle Company are M1917 HMG platoons, 37mm AT gun platoons, T-30 75mm assault gun platoons and M4 81mm mortar platoons. For this formation we'll do an assault gun platoon for some added punch and the ability to use smoke bombardments. They're 1 point each and come in units of 2 or 3. To maximize on the firepower (and to make the math easier for this lazy bastard) we'll go with 3 of the fuckers.

Not all of your units have to be in formations or from the support section - You can field compulsory combat units from a formation as support units. This is great because you can have, say, a powerful and expensive unit like Tigers or Commandos without a formation of them eating your points budget for breakfast. Tanks are good for mobility and bringing the big guns to the field, so we'll take a platoon of 5 M4 Shermans at 8 points for a subtotal of 40.

Finally let's talk support units. For our list we'll go with a unit of 2 P-40 Warhawks for aerial support, 4 105mm howitzers for blowing shit up, 4 T28E1 AAA platoons for dealing with enemy planes and an M3 Stuart Observation Post to spot for your artillery when your other units can't. So our army is going to look a little something like this:

Formations
*Armored Rifle Company 35 points
 -Formation HQ 2 points
 -Full-strength armored rifle platoon x2 30 points total
 -75mm assault gun 3 points
Support
*Sherman armored platoon (5x tanks, formation support) 40 points
*P-40 Warhawk Flight 6 points
*105mm Field Artillery Battery x4 10 points
*M3 Stuart Observation Post 1 point
*T28E1 AAA platoon 6 points
Command Cards
*(Placeholder, my deck is on the way from Amazon) 3 points

Grand total: 100 points