Welcome to the first Flames of War Friday for 2014.

The start of the year is the perfect time to start thinking about a new army project, since you should be nice and refreshed from the holidays and hopefully were lucky enough to get some awesome tabletop gaming presents for Christmas.

My “Flames of War”::http://www.mightyape.com.au/…-Gaming/All/ for this year is an early war Japanese Army and this week I've been taking some time to plan out the project.

The Importance of Planning

From personal experience whenever you're starting a new army its always good to take the time to sit down and plan out the project. There's nothing worse than spending hours painting units and then realising that they don't actually make a cohesive army, or even worse to realise that the unit of tanks you've just finished isn't legal in the company you've chosen.

So, after a little bit of research I've written up a 1500 point Japanese Infantry List:

7th Division Hohei Chutai:

• Hohei Chutai HQ with Regimental Standard
• Hohei Platoon with 3 Rifle Squads and Banners
• Hohei Platoon with 2 Rifle Squads

Weapons Platoons:

• Hohei MG Platoon with 4 HMGs
• Hohei Battalion Gun Platoon with Oberservor Team

Support Platoons:

• Hohei Rapid Fire Platoon with 45mm anti-tank gun
• Light Sensha Platoon with 3 Type 95 Ha-Go Tanks
• Engineer Platoon with 2 Engineer Squads

The Hohei Chutai Box provides the core HQ and combat platoons for the list. I can then add each of the supporting platoons as the project progresses; the MG Platoon ; Rapid Fire Platoon; Battalian Gun Platoon; Light Sensha Platoon and finally some Nikuhaku Teams.

Setting some Goals:
Now that I've chosen my army and written my shopping list the next planning step is to set some goals for the painting project itself. Setting goals is important as it helps keep you motivated and on task, otherwise its easy to start heaps of painting projects but never finish any of them.

My overall goal is to complete my army in time for Flamescon 2014, which will be held on Labour Weekend. This gives me quite plenty of time to work on the project throughout the year, starting from mid February onwards as I'm currently painting two Kings of War armies.

So my schedule will be:

• Hohei Chutai Infantry Company
• Light Sensha Platoon
• Hohei MG Platoon
• Gun Platoons
• Nikuhaku Teams

This way I reward myself after completing each unit purchased with the next unit and this also adds more variety to the project. This is another great way to motivated, once you finish painting infantry take a break by painting some tanks.

Working on a Flames of War project yourself? Let us know in the comments below.