Hi all,
Well, I finally got around to painting up my Napoleonic this weekend. While doing that I ended up messing around with my ACW stuff again and figuring out a really neat way to base them up. As you may remember if you've been following my misadventures with these guys, my most recent plan with these guys was to do very large units at 2:1 for big convention games. But even further back, one of my older plans was to do games with about a 12:1 figure ratio, give or take. I was going to use Chickamauga as the test case, at 12:1 roughly, so that a ~300 man regiment was 24 figs, 30mm in frontage. This way you could play the entire battle on a decent sized table while having every regiment and gun-section/battery represented. I stopped doing it in some frustration because I couldn't get them to look right, especially when it came to the bases. I was using plastic card and for some reason it just didn't come together. Well, I abandoned the plan and went with the bigger units.
Now however, the project has gotten a sudden lease on life. I had a burst of energy over the weekend and found a way to do it better.
That's what I've got after a day of reorganizing some of my figs, rebasing and putting flags on.
The bases were what really helped me get the project going. I mentioned awhile back that I was using home-made sheets of latex caulk to make flags out of. This was actually a really bad idea, and the printed off flags I'm using now (from Warflag, sized down and laser-jet printed at Staples) are much better. But I had a few big sheets of thin brown latex laying around. I had thought about using as basing material several times but had never got around to it, in part because it was all wadded up, shoved to the bottom of my storage box/mini purgatory with all the over-sized figs that I'll never use again. As I worked on the Napoleonics I decided to try out the latex for small ACW bases, and it ended up working. I used some 3mm litko bases to make the lines, and basically cut all the bases by hand. When the base was a bit out of shape I fixed it by placing a liko base over top of the bayonets and setting my cell phone down on it until the glue dried. Result- perfectly flat, very thin bases with a uniform color and almost no ledge effect and almost no space past the base. In other words, the 12:1 Chickamauga project is back on like Donkey Kong… whatever that means.
The nice thing about being able to do my own bases is that I can cut arty bases to order. The confederates used a lot of 2 gun sections at Chickamauga. In some cases these had radical effects on the outcome of combat. So, since in this project 30mm is 100 yards, I can cut 10mm frontage 2 gun sections, or 20mm 4 gun batteries or 30mm 6 gun batteries. The arty ration is 2:1, and the bases look pretty good with the numbers mentioned above. Basically 10mm of frontage per gun.
So, I've got about 1 division worth of Union and Confederates finished up at this point, and another 30 regiments that I'll have based up tonight. Each army will be about 3500 figs, which is convenient because that's how many I have painted up and unbased. I have another 1000 based on 60mm x 40mm, but those will remain there until I do some soul searching on that particular project. Anyways, I'll post some of the arty batteries when I get a few more done, plus the other figs.
