"New Oddzial Osmy 3mm Experiment" Topic

Hello all,

I know it's been awhile since I posted any new pics, and I'm sorry to say I don't have any new figures to show off tonight. I still need to do my big Napoleonic purchase. I've been spending my time figuring out new ways to use the figs, which as some of you guys know who've been keeping up with me on my adventures in 3mm, is what I spend most of my time doing.

Some of you might have seen some of my posts on the Ferraris maps, and know that I've been trying to find a way to use them for a year or so. I've always wanted to just print them off and use them as a playing surface, but I never got around to it… until today!

The Ferraris maps were commissioned by the Austrians in 1770, and are a set of ~250 1:11,520 scale "cabinet maps" that show the topology and infrastructure of all of Belgium. They were made for the military and were used by Napoleon during the Waterloo campaign. They are also, IMHO, beautiful works of art in and of themselves, and would look great on any wall. However, the only way you can view them is through a very clunk interface run by a University in Belgium, so if you want to, say, print them off for wargaming purposes, you have to scan through them, mess around with the zoom to get the right scale for your bases, print them off, cut them up, tape them together… and maybe put them beneath a sheet of plexiglass.

It's a bit of work, but if you do it this is what it'll look like:

Some of you button-counters will object that the Confederate and Union armies never clashed south of Babelom in central Belgium. Please just imagine that these are Napoleonics!

The Belgian countryside hasn't changed much since the 1770s, so you can match up roads in Google maps to figure out an exact scale. In the case of what you see above, a 20mm, 16 figure brigade covers almost exactly 300m of actual frontage. Given that, if you look at the 14 brigade, two ranked corps in the first two pics, that's Davout's Corps according to the Fast Play Grande Armee OOB Sam wrote up that's on DFHM.

The advantages here over traditional, 3D terrain are pretty obvious. This battle field is about 14" x11", and can be played with very small elements, but gives you enough information about terrain, down t the very tactical level, that you can do very large battles with as much detail as you might care to keep track of. I have a larger piece of plexiglass, which is 32" x 20", and which I'm going to make an even bigger map in this scale. I think that the Ferraris maps, printed out at the right zoom, will allow for a set of wargame rules that can really cross over the usual wall that separates operational and tactical level games. I mean, you could fit almost all of Borodino onto a map that's not too much bigger than the one you see here. Yet if you look at the last picture of the villages you can see tactical level details like elevated roads, tree lines, trails and the locations of buildings. Not to mention, the pics here are not zoomed in all the way on the Ferraris maps before printing, so if you wanted you could get even more detailed, crisper maps, and take it all the way down to the battalion or company level… which is my next project.

So, all that being typed, my next, immediate project is to put together two or three armies for Grande Armee that I can use in conjunction with the Ferraris maps. I also want to try cutting the maps up to recreate battlefields not in Flanders/Belgium, like Borodino, etc, etc.

After finally getting around to trying out the map/figures hybrid I'm really happy with the result and wish I'd tried it out sooner! I may have to make some changes to FPGA to get it to work though, since there is so much detail. Some overlays might be placed under the plexy glass to show fortifications, to delineate BUAs, and maybe define contour lines a bit better. But overall I think that the Ferraris maps would make for some really cool games with a very high level of tactical resolution, and not too big a lay-out in either figs or terrain.

After reviewing my post, I wanted to note that its the piece of plexiglas thats 14" x 11" or whatever it is. You can sort of see the edge of it in the pics. The map area itself is a bit larger. I think the plexiglass really adds to the presentation of the maps. I think it could make for a really memorable and unique convention game, if one were to zoom in a bit more and blow the maps up. Then you could really pack the figures in. Anyway, I hope to do some games as soon as I getbthe chance. I guess Ill be making my O8 purchase tomorrow. Its aboutntime I got around to that!

Wow – very clever idea. I'm impressed.

Marcin

Absolutely beautiful!

Fabrizio

Nice little figures, nice maps and idea.

You`re forgiven for the US invasion of Belgium… sure, everyone`s done it at sometime or other!

You`re forgiven for the US invasion of Belgium… sure, everyone`s done it at sometime or other!

Thanks for the laugh. Almost sprayed coffee on the screen. :)

re maps …you might also like:

link

…unfortunately most of the Austerlitz battlefield is in black and white but you can find other battlefields there.

Splendid … Yes I remember a WW3 NQM game very much like it (only much, much bigger) at COW many years ago …

Phil

Glad you guys liked the result! I've been trying to find a way to do terrain that could take advantage of the small size of O8 figs if one just wanted to do armies with smaller figure counts. If you try to make terrain where 20mm= 300m of actual terrain its almost impossible to do. But these maps allow you to see all the terrain you want. This way you can have, say, two complete Grande Armee armies and it'll be super portable while sacrificing nothing in the game play or presentation realms. You could fit two armies into a small travel box, roll up the map and carry the plexiglass. That's all you'll need!

Next step is to make terrain swatches from which I can cut out shapes to make custom set-ups. I especially want to do this for the ACW stuff I have so I can do regimental level games.

The other thing I want to do is find a way to do image stitching on the Ferraris map pics. Getting the pics of the maps off the website and onto the table is a bit of work, even for small sections. Getting teh zoom just right is a bit of work. What you see above is at 23.something percent zoom with a full screen and a screen capture to a file (using a mac). This was then printed out at Staples at 59 cents a copy. What I really want to do is take a whole map sheet and print it to cloth or to vinyl. So much easier…
Also, if I had a more zoomed in map I could use larger bases, or even get to the battalion level, which would be really cool.

Forwardmarch, what ground scale did you find works best with real terrain for your O8's, as opposed to the map terrain above?

HistoryPhD-
I spent about a year or two trying to figure that out, and it's a hard one to call. The thing is, if you stick them all onto, say, a 3" square VnB/GA base, you might as well just use a bunch of smaller battalions to show the actual footprint of the brigade. You can get so many figs onto the base that it sort of defeats the purpose of having brigade bases. I was messing around with doing the big, multi-unit square bases, but its not really worth the bother.

I'd sooner use a super-small base like the ones in my pics and have it be portable, or else have each battalion/regiment represented and actually moving around independently. That way you don't have to deal with the abstraction of the big square bases- but you could still play something like FPGA, if you do some tweaking you can make some special rules for brigade formations but still use the basic idea of the rules. For all of this I'm going to use the maps.

If you want to do 3D terrain with 3mm the only way worth doing it is to make big latex-caulk mats with the roads modeled into the canvas mat and do the units at 2:1 scale. Remember that with the ACW figs you can only do 2:1 figure ratios tops because there a gap modeled between the figs, but because the "missing fig" is in between the files, that means that if you have 150 figures representing 300 actual men the 150 figures will still take up the exact same amount of ground on the table top as if all 300 men were there. What this means is this:

A 2:1 300 man ACW regiment will have ~150 O8 figs in two ranks, conveniently modeled on 3 x 60mm wide strips. Or 18 strips of 8 figs each (ok, not quite 150, but close enough). It looks pretty good. Problem is, because the ground scale is 1:1 WYSIWYG on the table top. So you need 1:1 trees, 1:1 farms, 1:1 weapon ranges, etc, etc. So 18cm would equal roughly 100m. You'd need to do a whole table that looks like this:

Which is a lot of work!

That means that rifle musket range, let alone cannon range, is going to be pretty big. A 400 meters wide field is going to be several feet across. So if you want enough room to maneuver more than a division per side you'll need quite a big table. A 500m wide regiment, which would be about average, is going to be about 4 feet across! Here's a brigade at 2:1 jumbled up:

You can adjust the troop ratio and ground scale down from there. I actually liked this as an entire corps of nearly 40 regiments:

I'm probably just going to use these guys with maps for awhile. The biggest issue I have with 3D terrain with the smaller units is not trees or buildings, but rather elevation and terrain contours. At 2:1 it's not to hard to make a little rise on the battlefield. But trying to model the terrain 1st Corps fought over on the 2d day at Gettysburg in such a way that I could use those little regiments ate up weeks of what little brain power I have left after 8 hours at the office and my commute. Then again, if you have a decent game room and proper materials, it would not be hard at all to model some very beautiful, highly detailed terrain at any scale you like. My issue has always been that I live in apartments for now and everything has to be portable. If you can swing getting some reinforced modular terrain made out of styrofoam, of even better out of plaster of paris, then you get down there and create really beautiful terrain layouts with every bit as much detail as is in the Ferraris maps. I just don't have it like that at the moment!

You could also do what I'm doing: flock foamie squares and painte and flock terrain on artist's canvases. Cut the canvas terain out and pin it to the foamie squares as necessary.

Portable, flexible and nice looking.

Here's an example:

Ahh, that does look good! Youd mentioned the foam/canvas thing before, but I hadnt visualized it correctly. That really does look very good.

It occured to me that i could probably take glue and caulk and use that to flock the plexiglass I have while having the map beneath it as a model. That might make it easier to get all the detail.

I just made a decent sized O8 order tonight to take advantage of the final pre-increase price. Man o man, I knew the price of O8s was too good to last. A quarter increase isnt bad, but I hope its awhile until the next one. At any rate, I ordered up enough figs or about $60 USD to have two complete medium sized Grande Armee armies, one French and one Austrian, including cavalry, arty and crew for both. I alreay had 6 bags of Shako infantry from Christmas, so I just has to order stuff for the Austrians. Ill be doing the micro armies for use with the Ferraris maps as shown above, 25 30 figure brigades per side, arty on 10mm frontage. This is just a little novelty set thatll be portable and so I can do operational-to-tactical games and mess around with ideas for games like that. I think theres a bunch of cool oppurtunities using those maps, and the best thing about using such small units as brigades is you actually have room to manuever and even to pick the battlefield you want, as opposed to just setting one up randomly or copying the same old historical one.

That being said, after I get these timey armies together Ill be starting on the big 2:1 projects, and the sky will be the limit with those!

Dude, I just ordered 250 USD of figs from Pico Armor. A big French army and a big Austrian army. Needed to get that order in before the price increase! Also bought some Strykers and some Cougars for my rebel army.

I already have a huge 2mm collection based to Grande Armee / Volley and Bayonet, so even though the temptation is to do 3mm brigades, I'll be strong and not cave in.

You can see the 2mm stuff here:

Macunaima, I must say, I really like your blog. Great western desert stuff!! But quite a while since you posted on it

$250 USD bucks? What's that, like 10,000 figs or so?
Not a bad start… a good start on two small 2:1 corps!

3mm gamers should band together into an organization that plots to put on 2:1 battles of all the largest battles there were. Everyone would just have to base the same, or have figs based in such a way that they could all be sabot based.

BTW Macunaima that looks really nice. The only problem with my current idea of "base-less" FPGA brigades is that I can't put labels on them. But you also illustrate my point somewhat, which is that, since you're showing all the brigades anyway, why not just have them all be independent so you can get the right dimensions… for instance what if your Guard regiments want to deploy with all the battalions side by side? If they were independently based you could show that, but with the figs based the way they are you'll have to use Sam's abstraction methodology (which I think is great in many situations, btw).Of course there are formations to take into account, but you could maybe say that the frontage of the battalions equals the footprint of the battalion, a much easier abstraction to stomach that the abstraction of a brigade… IMHO.

Actually, what I want to do with my set up is combine the tactical mechanism of FPGA with some sort of board game/operational level rules, which will allow the player not to only play the game hours out, like with FPGA or basically any other ruleset out there, but days out from the battle. I think that, if one makes two versions of one of the Ferraris maps, for instance by picking one map panel and having one zoomed out version for operational movement and another at the zoom I show in my first picture, I think you could incorporate a much more realistic "large picture" and put the tactical level stuff into a better frame of reference, plus it could make for much more interesting meeting engagements, as the game will be as much about moving the armies to the battlefield as it is fighting the tactical game. Just reading over memoirs and histories of battles, its obvious that the real skill in warfare is getting the armies where they need to be, and any great tactical strokes that appear the day of were often the result of foresight and planning days out, and sometimes even longer.

FMS, I based those 2mm figs for V&B and I'm pretty cool with Chadwick's rationalization regarding the abstract frontages. I'm a design-for-effect guy anyway, so…

Ilike your idea of the Ferraris map campaign, though. It strikes me that you could also use the Kriegspiel maps sold by Too Fat Lardies.

HistoryPhD, I'm an anthropology PhD myself. You'll notice I put up about six posts over the Christmas break but school has kicked my ass since then: three articles, two new research projects and the end of our overlong semester (stretched out due to last year's strike).

The 3mm armies I'm building will have:

8 regular French infantry battalions
4 crack French Infantry battalions
4 Old Guard Infantry battalions (although they could be converged grenadiers if one wanted to be more realistic. Still: Old Guard because OLD GUARD!!!)
2 Large Heavy Cavalry Regiments
3 Light Cavalry Regiments
5 Artillery batteries

The Austrians will have…
6 large Infantry battalions
3 Grenzer Battalions
1 Jaeger Battalion
4 Converged Grenadier Battalions
3 Heavy Cavalry Regiments
2 Large Hussar Regiments
5 Artillery batteries

A normal battalion will have 4 20x15mm stands with 30 figures per stand, so scale will nominally be about 5 or 6 to 1 and each mm on the board will equal about two meters.

What is the website link to that map??

link

Pick the square you want, plenty of actual battlefields in there. Then zoom in as much as you want. You'll have to experiment with the zoom a bit, and maybe use Adobe or Powerpoint even to be able to get everything to the scale you want. It makes for a beautiful gaming surface when you put it beneath some plexiglas. The best thing is that you get to maneuver your troops on an accurate presentation of European terrain during the period. These are from the 1770s, but they're not too old to be used for Napoleonic games. In fact, the best way to figure out the scale your looking at is to match up a country road with google maps and use that scale to figure out what size your bases will need to be to cover, say, a 300 meter or so frontage. Depsite being 200+ years old these maps are incredibly accurate. The only thing that's sort of iffy is using the weird, pre-modern topographic lines in it. They work, but you may want to make your own overlays on clear transperancies, or haev them printed at Staples and put them over the map and under the plexiglas. The same goes for streams.

Also, you can zoom in far enough to show companies if you want.