As you can see, I have 3 units of 8 figures each. Each unit has 6 riflemen, a standard bearer, and an officer. I plan to develop the hex-based rules such that 4 figures occupy 1 hex. That means that a unit will occupy 2 hexes, thereby nicely dividing a unit in 2 subunits. Whether these are Regiments/Battalions or another scale remains to be decided.
Each unit has a distinctive fez colour (red, straw, turquoise), with artillery crew in the back having a magenta fez. This of course is not historical at all, but is a nice way to visually distinguish units. Moreover, since these figures will be used in an imaginations setting, I do not feel any restrictions w.r.t. the historical colour of uniforms, although things must remain plausible. Note that the unit colour also is repeated in the flags.
I spend quite some time on deciding the flag pattern. Since this is an army in the late 19th, early 20th century, a somewhat modern look was ok. I also wanted something different than the traditional 3 vertical or horizontal bands, or cross patterns. I browsed many webpages listing historical flags, but finally took some inspiration from naval signaling flags.
The current design is rather simple to paint, and allows customization and addition later on - either when more units are added, or when these units have deserved their battle honours. As in some of my other campaigns, I don't mind repainting figures or flags to match their wargaming history.
The only thin that's left to do is to paint the bases, do some touchup work, and (gloss) varnish.
I also started working on the horses, and my efforts of indexing my wargaming magazines already proved it's usefulness. It pointed me directly to an article on painting horses in MWBG 374, which in turn had a reference to a colour plate in MWBG 366 (which I did not list in the index), but will be very useful. In less than 5 minutes I had the relevant reference material.
Splendid figures and great flag ideas. Can you tell us a little about the rules?
ReplyDeleteWhat size are the hexes?
Alan
Alan,
ReplyDeleteI use Kallistra hexes (10 cm side to side) for most of my games. They are the right size to allow a 1 unit = 1 hex rule for various scales, which is an advantage. Otherwise, you end up with multiple hexes per unit, or multiple units per hex, which always causes headaches in the rules.
As for the rules, I haven't started yet, but I am a big fan of developing one's own rules, bottom up. Play games, and add or drop rules as you go along.
Battlecry is a hex based game(ACW), that uses 4 figure units for infantry, 3 figures for cavalry. Our house rule "About Bonaparte" was inspired by that game.
ReplyDelete