Paper Banners for Normans

I have been playing about with hand painted banners for my Normans.

All of my shields are hand painted as are the cast on banners for my cavalry.

I made these as outlines on the PC (using open Office), printed them and then painted with Vallejo paints. I have cut them out, tidied up with paint and attached them to figures. I will take some pictures of the figures once the varnish has dried and I have them based up.

Norman army is looking pretty good now. I bought 80 Crusader infantry at salute and these are just about painted. I will have 40 cavalry, 72 Foot and 24 skirmishers pretty soon, should be enough for Hail Caesar, WAB, Clash of Empires or whatever rule set I end up with. Hail Caesar looks pretty good.

Thoughts on Modelling 1809 Austrians for Black Powder

I am now fully committed to a lengthy relationship with the 1809 Franco-Austrian war. Figures are being painted and books avidly read.

One thing that I want to get right is the modelling of the Austrian army of 1809 for Black Powder (the chosen rule set). So here is some of my thinking.

Command
Austrian commanders seem to have a major trait of avoidance of risk. They will obey their orders, even when the orders are daft. This is because obeying orders, and failing exposed them to less personal risk then disobeying and succeeding.

Austrian commanders were unused to handling large bodies of troops. The corps system was totally new and there had been effectively no peacetime manoeuvres with formations of Divisional or Corps size prior to the Austrian invasion of Bavaria on April 10th. So bodies of troops moved slowly and commanders could not coordinate attacks by formations larger than regiments. Whilst the Austrians threw in individual cavalry regiments the French were handling them in coordinated divisions.

For Black Powder most Austrian commanders will rate as 6 or 7. Some (Hohenzollern, Lichtenstein, Nordmann) will get an 8, Karl and Radetzky get 9's. I am working on a comprehensive list of generals with Black Powder ratings.

But low ratings wont simulate the strict adherence to orders or the lack of ability in coordinating larger formations. To cover this I will use the Low Decisiveness and Low Independence rules from Page 95 of the rule book. These rules will apply to any 6 or 7 rated Austrian commanders. I will assume that the 8's and 9's are above this sort of behaviour.

Low Decisiveness means that the commander has to re-roll any triple moves (unlikely with a 6/7 but will happen) and abide by the re-roll. I am using this to reflect poor handling of large bodies of troops. I thought of applying a -1 dice penalty for brigade orders to more than two units, but felt that this might be too harsh. The Low decisiveness option should effectively eliminate triple moves for these commanders, which I hope will have the desired effect.

Low Independence means that if the commander issues his orders before the C-in-C he will suffer a minus one dice penalty. If he blunders he will take two blunder tests and choose which to take. If the C-in-C has this rating he drops one command level. I like the effect of this rule in modelling a strict adherence to hierarchy and orders. It will also have a nice side-effect. If the C-in-C is Karl and he blunders and the orders phase ends prior to subordinates giving orders, then it will simulate Karl having an epileptic fit.

Troops
Austrian Line infantry units appear to be fairly ordinary. They are brave, they try hard and they are a bit out of date. So I am rating them as bog-standard. They have the form square rule (probably Battalion Mass really). They cannot form up as skirmishers; I don't believe that they formed whole line battalions into skirmish formation. I am not allowing them to form "mixed" formation. If I allow French line and leger units to do this it will differentiate them in combat.

Some Austrian line units will be large. This will depend upon the unit and the order of battle. As I develop scenarios I will include large units as appropriate.

Austrian Grenadiers were Elite troops. I am going to give them "Elite" with the ability to negate disorder on a 4+, and "Reliable" which gives them a +1 when they are given an order.

Austrian Jagers were pretty good although I think rather poorly trained. I am making them Skirmishers (they will only fight as skirmishers). I am giving them "Sharpshooter" (re-roll one shooting dice) to reflect the rifles with which a proportion were armed. I am not, however, going to give them the range benefit of rifles.

Grenz were not what they had been in the Seven Years War. I may need to experiment with them a little. They need to be headstrong and a little fragile. The "Freshly-Raised" rule may reflect this. This rule requires the unit to test the first time it shoots or engages in hand-to-hand combat, with unpredictable results. Initially I will use this rule. I will allow the Grenz to form as skirmishers. I am going to make them Marauders (no negative effects for being distant from a commander) to reflect their independent nature.

The various volunteer units seem to be a mixed bunch. Freshly raised seems like a good option. Some will be treated as skirmish only units.

Landwehr: Most of them ran away before the battles, so not too many about. I am planning to be harsh with them. They will get "Unreliable" (No move on equal command roll) and "Wavering" (break test on taking a casualty). I could have used "Untested" instead but that works on randomising their Stamina (ability to absorb casualties) which could create a really good unit, and we don't want that to happen.

The Cavalry were pretty good when handled as squadrons and regiments. The problems came when they tried to operate in larger formations. I am going to treat all of the Austrian cavalry as standard Napoleonic troops as laid out on page 127 of the rule book. Light cavalry regiments could be large, so I will field them as such when required.

Cuirassiers only wore breastplates, not back-plates. Some accounts say that this was a disadvantage when facing French Cuirassiers. I am going to ignore this for now.

Position and field batteries are fairly standard. I will allocate a proportion of lighter guns to reflect the use of 3 pounders.

The cavalry artillery is a problem. They are sort of half way between foot artillery and horse artillery. I plan to give them horse artillery movement without the ability to limber, move and unlimber with a single order.

This covers commanders and the common troop types. I am starting to work on some scenarios and the best ways to play the battles as solo games. I will post what I come up with here.

Black Powder in 6mm

I now have a quorum of 6mm Austrians and Franco-Bavarians. I have been through all of my Adler figures and painted everything in sight.

This came about because I played a couple of games with some lovely 18mm AB figures. Really inspired by this but daunted by the lead time and expense of doing 18mm. Then I remembered the mass of painted and unpainted Adlers that I have. Quite a few French, some Austrians and lots of unpainted; French cavalry, Austrians of all sorts and a Bavarian "brigade".

So they are now painted and I am on my third solo game with Black Powder and have just ordered some more figures from Adler.

My next post will cover my thoughts on using Black powder for solo games.

Attached are some pictures. I am using two stands for standard size units at the moment. This works fine, I will go up to three stands when I get more painted. Three stands on a 40mm per stand frontage is about the same as 6x28mm stands of the same frontage at the scale I play. I play 6mm Black powder in CM instead of Inches.

Thanks for looking.







Some Austrian Grenadiers have just gone haring off towards the nearest French after a blunder.

Loving Black Powder

I dug out some 6mm Napoleonics last night and took them to the club for a Black Powder game.They are based for "Warmaster" on 40x20mm stands. We used them in 3 stand units (about 30-36 Infantry, 9-12 cavalry, single gun) with 4 stands for large Austrian units and 2 stands for small units (rifles and Austrian grenadiers). We converted distances to centimetres and played with 4-5 brigades/side (20-25 units) on a 6x4 foot table.

All worked perfectly and I am planning to paint and base the mass of 6mm Adler figures that I have had in a box for years so that we can play bigger games.

I am really getting into these rules now. I must say that as written they work very well for Napoleonics and the measurements were the only thing that we changed in last night's game. It looked right, played as I would expect a napoleonic battle to play out and was fast enough to for a club night.

We are even bringing around a couple of sceptics who initially didn't like the order system.

Having played two games with smaller figures (15mm on an 8X6 and the one described above) this week, both using centimetre measurements, I am liking the rules more than I have done when trying to cram 28mm figures onto a 6X4 and using half distances.

Conquest Normans - Pictures

I have finished two boxes of these. Here are some pictures.




These have spurred (pun intended) me on to get some Norman foot (Gripping Beast) and turn this lot into an army. I think that about 40-50 cavalry, 50 or so close order infantry and a couple of 12-16 figure missile/skirmish units should be OK for WAB or the forthcoming "Hail Caesar" from Warlord (or one of the other new sets planned for 2011).

Conquest Games Normans

I am currently painting up three boxes of Conquest Games Plastic Norman Knights.

They are brilliant. The Horses look better than any 28mm horses I have painted before. Well proportioned, nice poses.

The riders fit perfectly and have a good range of options.

The horses need something to eliminate the seam between the head and body. My usual glue for plastics is Revell Contacta with a paint brush. This is accurate and fast, but it doesn't fill gaps. After a few attempts with fillers I went back to the way I used to construct airfix kits 35 years ago. I bought some old-fashioned polystyrene cement in a tube. I used this to cover the surface on the body where the head is attached and then squashed the head on, letting the glue ooze out of the gap. I then left this to try for 24 hours. I then chipped off the excess glue with a modelling blade. The gap no longer existed.

I have painted the figures using a mix of techniques. All were sprayed with black primer.

The "brown" horses have been base coated with Cote-d'arms Horse Tones, then washed with Citadel washes (Devlan Mun or Gryphon Sepia), then highlighted with the base colour.

White horses have been painted with a triad of Valejo Sky Grey, Silver Grey and Off-White.

Black Horses with Valejo Black-Gray highlight over the black primer.

The knights were dry-brushed with Valejo natural steel, then washed with GW Badab-Black. Then I gave them a lighter drybrush with the natural steel.

Flesh (not much to actually paint here) was base-coated with Valejo cavalry-brown, then painted with Valejo flesh-base. I then gave it a wash of GW Ogryn-flesh and highlighted with the flesh-base.

For the small areas of cloth I used a two-colour (diad?) technique of a base coat and highlight. The exception to this was red. I do my reds by base coating with VJ Cavalry-brown, then VJ Red and finally VJ Scarlet.

Leather was done with VJ Flat-Brown, GW Devlan Mud wash and then high-light with the Flat-Brown.

I varied the leather by doing some areas in VJ German Camouflage Orange Ochre (my favourite Valejo light brown) or VJ Buff with GW washes and a highlight in the base colour.

For the sheilds I went for hand-painting. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there are no transfers in the Conquest boxes. Secondly, I couldn't be bothered to try and find transfres that would fit, Third, I love the look of the painted crusaders on the Perry web-site, with hand painted sheilds. Finally, I like the idea of the shields looking like the ones on the Bayeux Tapestry (styalised and simple). I assume that real shield designs were more sophisticated than those rendered on the tapestry, but as my painting skills are on a par with the art on the tapestry (on a good day) this level would suite.

So I used triads to paint the shields. My triad painting is usually rather subtle and doesn't stand out much. For these shields I went rather more extreme than my usual style (greater variation between shades and larger areas of shade). It seems to have worked.

Basing was a challenge. I have not decided on rules for these yet (or even if they will become an army). The box includes a set of Renadra cavalry bases. These or 25mmx50mm and 50mmx50mm. I based all of the figures individually on 25x50's. I have found that these bases will glue together using Contacta so I can make them into 50x50 or 75x50 later.

The basing will work for Warhammer Ancient Battles and the Crusader rules. I think it will be OK for the planned Warlord Games Ancient Rules. With a movement tray I can get four figures onto an Impetus base (120x80). I don't expect to use these figures for DBA/M/MM.

Conclusion: Great figures, will mix with Perry Crusades. Good value. I am really enjoying painting them.

Pictures: Just realised my camera isn't available. I will try and do some soon.

Rank and File C2 Playtest

We tried out some command and control rules with Rank and File last Monday evening.

The scenario had 9 regiments of Rebs attacking 6 of federals in a hasty defensive position.

The nature of the game meant that units did not need to make many order changes. When they did the system worked as we expected it to. The range of order types got a good response from the players.

In our game a very strong rebel left slammed into the federal line in successive wave attacks. These drove the defenders back and this flank belonged to johnny reb. In the centre the attacking waves were held by the union troops. On the rebel right it was a different story. Some great shooting from the federal artillery had removed two rebel batteries and a charge by two union regiments drove off a unit of confederate cavalry and was about to slam into the flank of the rebel right centre regiments when we had to call time.

The game was finely balanced when we had to stop. It looked likely that the Rebs would have been able to exit 3 units from the union table edge if they had time for two moreover. This would have fulfilled the victory conditions of the scenario. But by that time Billy yank might have rolled up their centre!

Next week I will put together a more challenging scenario with plenty of opportunity to make order changes.

I am posting this from my iPod as an experiment. When I get back to my pc I will post the latest version of the C2 rules and the scenario that we played this week.