Bavarian Infantry Regiment 1, 1st battalion

Painted earlier this month, photographed today, the Bavarian I/IR1:



As said, I'm going to be expanding this with an extra three stands to bring it to 36 figures from the 24 it has now.

Painting log: 12 Bavarians, and some musing on wargame unit structure

I finished 12 Bavarians last evening (well 11 Bavarians and one -- presumable -- Bavarian horse), which until about a week ago would have completed the 1st Battalion of the 1st Regiment, _König_ or _Leib_.

However, I decided that 24 figures is a bit meager for a single unit, and that at the 'classical' 1:20 ratio 36 figures better represent a battalion: the average Bavarian battalion that entered Russia in 1812 had about 750 men (they came back with a lot less, of course -- the Russian campaign was a disaster for the Bavarian army), which at 1:20 is 37,5 figures, close enough to 36 to not matter. So, both of my 'finished' battalions will be expanded with another three stands of 4 figures to bring them up to 36 figures each.

As to basing, I'm going to keep them as 4 figures to a base of 30x40mm (15mm frontage per figure). The rules I'm eyeing, [Republic to Empire](http://www.leagueofaugsburg.com), work with 'combat groups' of four figures, which fits perfectly with that basing, and it would also mean no rebasing of the figures (which I already did once for the first unit -- they were initially based on 20mm frontage but looked, in the words of a member of the [Steve Dean](http://www.steve-dean.co.uk) forum, looked like a skirmish line instead of a ranked unit).

Another advantage is that a number of formations in the rules actually look pretty good when executed with 4 figure stands. More on that later.

The disadvantage of staying with 4 figure bases is that this no longer reflects the theoretical company structure (6 companies, 4 of fusiliers, 1 of grenadiers and 1 of lights) of a Bavarian battalion -- 6 figure stands would reflect this perfectly. But as not all battalions would have adopted this company structure, and real life military units of course varied wildly from theoretical establishments, I don't feel that weighs heavily enough to abandon the 4 figure basing.

So, that's 12 points for January. Up next is another battalion of GNW Swedes, and probably the first GNW Russians after that (the Preobrazhenski Guard Grenadiers).

Yes! Warhol was right.

Everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame. Here's mine:



Sam Mustafa's [Lasalle rules](http://www.sammustafa.com/honour/modules-games/lasalle/) have a new Bavarian (or, as he correctly refers to them, 'sausage heads') supplement, featuring some [familiar people](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000359.html).

Schild en Vriend for world domination! :)

French 7th Cuirassiers, refurbished

Here are the [refurbished cuirassiers](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000358.html):



As said, these were block painted in a single colour as I bought them. I touched up some of the paint jobs, shaded them with Army Painter Strong tone and rebased them (though looking at the picture, they could also have used a wavy sword replacement - it's not so bad as it looks in reality).

2010: No, this is not a new decennium :)

In this time of 'highlights of the decennium' appearing left and right in the media, I would just like to point out that the current decennium (if we define that as the first ten years of the century) ends on 31st December 2010, not 2009. So there.

With that bit of pedantry out of the way, allow me to wish all visitors and readers of this blog a prosperous, productive and shiny 2010, a year wherein all your dice will roll high (or low, depending), your armies will grow and you finally get to complete that one project.

For me, here's my very high level plan for 2010 -- the 2010 project list as you might say:

* Great Northern War -- the idea is still to put on Poltava at Crisis in autumn. For the figures, an initial goal will be a playable game by early spring, and build from there. This is my primary project
* Napoleonic 28mm Bavarians -- I plan on steadily building up my (currently [one battalion](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000359.html) large) Bavarian army. Initial goal is a playable force by summer (although the single finished battalion has already seen its first game).
* Romani Plastici -- 28mm plastic Romans. I currently have 3 legionary and 1 auxilia unit finished. The idea is to build this to a full army, with the initial goal being a 1000 to 1500 point force by spring.
* Napoleonic 28mm French -- these will be the refurbished ones from the Crisis bring & buy, plus the results of various Foundry sales over the past few months. There is no initial goal with these, just building the occasional unit here and there
* 'Gimmick' projects -- all the rest. Things like the Orc Uncharted Seas fleet, the 6mm Future Wars stuff, ... No set goal with these, so they will probably be painted in preparation for specific games.

What's everybody else's plan?

Bavarian Infantry Regiment 1, 2nd battalion

While painting their cousins of the first battalion I realised I had not yet posted any pretty pictures of the fully done Bavarians. Consider that oversight corrected:

"Painting" log: French 7th Cuirassiers

This isn't quite a 'painting' achievement, but I'm going to count them anyway -- I just finished 13 French cuirassiers.

They're a bit special, as I did not paint the figures myself. At the bring and buy at the Crisis convention earlier this year, I picked up a 28mm French Napoleonic army for a very cheap price. The figures are painted in a basic single colour style and have suffered a bit from use and transport. However, given the price, they were a bargain.

The idea with them is to touch up the paint jobs where necessary, give them a dip in [Army Painter Dip](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000347.html) and finally rebase them. I have done just that for the cuirassiers: touched up a few scuffed paint areas, painted in little '7's on their saddlebags (cognoscenti may now correct me with the correct Napoleonic term :) ) and dipped them.

Even though it is not a full paint job, there is still some time spent on these 'transformations', so I'm awarding myself half points for them. That means these bring me 13 points (out of a normal 26 for 13 cavalry figures), or a total of 44 this month. Painting is picking up again, it seems.

Photos to follow as their basing is finished.

Comment system approaching sanity

After another evening armed with a text editor and some mean Javascript, the commenting system seems to be behaving a bit better now. It now says whether you are logged in or not, and does so everywhere.

One last niggle remaining is the fact that the Name and other fields for anonymous commenting remain visible to logged in users, which might lead to confusion. Another dive into the evil bog that is Javascript will no doubt fix that.

For the cognoscenti: enabling the default Javascript from Movable Type solved most of the problems. The extra problem that created however, was that with the way I hide the comment form until needed, I hit some seriously weird Javascript scoping issues which took a while to track down and resolve. If any visitor loaded a page off of this blog earlier this evening and got a popup saying 'Canary!' - don't worry, that was me trying to debug this thing :).

So, feel free to use the commenting system. If you run into a problem, you can always send me an email (link behind my name up there) or, just for the fun of it, why not comment it :) ?

Merry Christmas

To celebrate Christmas, here's a little scene showing part of my toy soldier collection, along with my original copies of Little Wars and Floor Games, the books that started hobby wargaming in the early 20th century.

The soldiers of the Regiment are proud of their well-decorated Christmas tree. Meanwhile, father and grandfather are busily testing the new wargaming presents, much to the anxiety of junior.

Skaven Banners and Elephants

Time for some more pictures from my 'old' wargaming collection. Since I previously showed some figures from my Skaven army (look for the tag 'Phil's collection'), I decided to add some more of the illustrious ratmen to this blog.


The first picture shows two hand-made Skaven banners. The designs of both follow illustrations found in GW published material from the 80s. The banners are mounted on bigger bases (for stability), adding a General figure. This is not how it's done in Warhammer, of course, but since 1993 or so I have used my own house rules for fantasy battles, hence some more freedom in basing requirements. The figure in the middle is a Skaven wizard - all figures by Games Workshop, dated late 80s, early 90s.


The second picture shows my Skaven 'Hannibal' horde. I put these together for a wargaming tournament at EuroGencon 1993, organised by Martin Hackett (and using his rules). The army lists allowed for a large variety of freedom, so I came up with the idea of elephants being used as war animals in the Skaven army. The howdahs are scratch-built (nothing too exceptional), and can hold 4 figures based on 20x20mm bases. All figures (including the giant rats) by Games Workshop, except two of the rat-swarms (Ral Partha), and the elephants (models by Schleich).

Update (2014): for more of my Skaven in action, see the blogpost "Oldhammer: Bretonnia vs Skaven".