"1809 Cav brigade bases in 3mm for Blucher" Topic

1809in3mm.blogspot.com

Hey everyone! A few people commented on my last post asking about how the cavalry would look based up for Blucher. I wanted to find out for myself so I put some together last week. I think they were pretty successful- you can definitely tell them apart from one another! Bear in mind that I paint my figs fast, for big units, so a lot of the fancy detail is left out. I do the basic, big colors that ID the unit and leave out the more fiddly detail- i also tolerate some slop, because I think they look best viewed from afar. So, if slops not your thing you could definitely spend more time getting everything just so on these guys. I the figs I did for Pico Armor I went really slowly on, and tried to get everything right (I always paint other peoples figs better than I paint my own!).

That being said, I do think these figs tolerate a rush job better than any other scale out there.

You do do great work!

3mm … wow.

I like it. It looks fantastic.

I think your cavalry could be a little bit closer. Heavy cavalry tried to ride boot to boot. Your older style looks more authentic.

How big are your bases?

Thanks for the compliments! The cav definitely came out as a good compliment to the infantry. Marcin really hit the Napoleonic lines out of the park. I'm super excited to get my hands on some of the lancers, which will of course be in my 1809 army, if only just a few regiments. Those are some really awesome figs- I was curious about how he was going to pull them off. I'd love to do up an entire regiment of them and put them into an entire 1:1 cav division some day. In the far future…

Decabalus-
The bases are all 60mm squares, except for the big units at the bottom, which are 60x40mm.

I agree that the heavy cav should probably be closer together in my brigade bases. The thing is, by having more space between the figs you see a lot more detail as you look down the ranks. For the same reason I put a little more space between the infantry ranks when I can, because otherwise you're wasting a strip of figs that you can't see. It's a trade off- I'll probably do some more densely packed ones eventually, maybe twelve figs across. For the record, the big units are packed to the max, which means 18 figs across the 60mm bases, two rows, or 36 figs per base plus NCOs, officers, musicians if present, etc. Two bases is a squadron of 72 rankers plus NCOS, etc. Four squadrons is 288 figs plus officers, 3 x regiments is ~860 figures in the ranks plus the officers. These are supposed to be field strength regiments, not paper.

They look very nice!

Wow, I would never have thought 3mm Napoleonics would be viable, but you proved me wrong.

Thanks again for the compliments. Glad you guys like them. I just went and threw down some dirt on my new battle mat. I'm going to do it really simple this time and see how it comes out, basically by recreating the basing on my brigades directly onto the mat. I'm going to put the roads onto the mat but I don't know about water-ways. Roads you can really mess around with but water ways determine topographic potentials to some degree, and I'd like to keep the thing as limber as possible.

The cloth I'm working on is only about five foot squared, so not big enough for Wagram, but it'll be a good test case and will allow me to finally get some proper eye candy going. Building-wise I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I may sculpt and cast my own with water putty and latex glove molds (a trick I learned in my bad old days). I may also just do up some paper buildings. Unfortunately there's no good German 3mm buildings out there at the time. We'll see how creative I can get in that regard when I come to it…

One thing I've been thinking about with my figs, which I may have to contact Sam about, is using 20mm frontage for the artillery units. I'm guessing that he stuck with his traditional 2::1 frontage ration for artillery- 1.5 inches for an arty base compared to 3 inches for the brigades. To some degree that ratio is determined by the size of artillery models in the larger scales, but it's not accurate as far as I can tell. I realized this when working with ACW figs- you really need to be able to pack artillery units into the smallest spaces possible, because they would and did do so in historic battles. Look at Gettysburg, for instance. With 3mm figures I could easily fit a gun onto a 20mm frontage and not have it be too cluttered. This would allow me to place 3 batteries in the frontage of a single brigade, and if he's sticking with his traditional ground scale, that would mean 100m per battery. I think that's a much more realistic expression of the actual historical use of arty but I'm worried that it would really throw off the game, as artillery in Sam's other games is rather carefully calibrated in its effects (in FPGA certainly, the difference would be extreme, since two arty bases can't destroy an average brigade with canister, but three can).

As it stands, I'm tempted to put the guns on square 20mm bases and match them up with a 40mm x 20mm base with the limbers and horse teams (which have recently come out). The only problem here is that when you place the figs on a smaller base they tend to appear trapped there, so that a larger, say, 30mm x 60mm base would probably actually look better, although not be as accurate as far as representation goes. Also, the smaller, two part bases, could be much better combined with the brigades, avoiding the oddness of a deep, narrow arty base jutting out towards the enemy from a brigade base. I'll throw some pics up when I get around to experimenting with it a bit.

The artillery units in Blucher are way over spec in frontage but that's mainly due to Sam's ideas on not having fixed man/figure ratios, not to mention how many guns the massed artillery is supposed to represent.

As soon as you adopt that sliding scale approach accuracy goes missing.

I think the only thing to do is to decide a frontage per invidiual battery and mount your artillery in a series of small units if you want anything like a true representation of course that does mean working out some form of ground scale so good luck with that. Particularly as the Brigades themselves are an area rather than a true frontage.

Personally, I'm going to have a different problem as that as I'm a Penninsular fan the artillery unit is going to be a bit of a unseen item for the most part and if sticking to historical OBs the Allies are just going have to live with attached artillery that won't cover much more than two thirds of their infantry Brigades if that!

"Massed artillery" is the operatve term here – individual batteries attached to brigades or divisions are factored into fire resolution, but not represented on the tabletop (although I suppose you could create single-gun markers for them if you wanted to).

I think I'm going to put one gun in the middle of each brigade for appearances. At least for those brigades that had an arty battery as part of the "standard" or "typical" brigade. Gotta find my copy of Legacy of Glory again.

I'd assume FMS understood that and was referring to actual Artillery Units which represent "massed batteries".

Hi again all.

Trajanus- I knew that was part of the idea in his new rules but I wasn't completely sure on how arty would work. In FPGA it seems like each arty base is supposed to represent a battery, or at least that's how it looks in the scenario OOBS at DeepFriedHappyMice.

I found an old picture of a Confederate brigade I did back when I had just got into 3mm, before the Napoleonics were even around. These are 20mm squares for the arty and 40mm x 20mm rectangles for the limbers. This is what I was thinking of doing for Blucher, so that 3 guns could front each brigade and the wagons could go behind the infantry brigades. I think that would just look better.

You can also see what I mean about there being too much noise on the bases. If I were to redo those guys today I'd base them exactly like my Napoleonic project is.

The Blucher idea goes along the lines of artillery with the Brigades being for immediate fire support and the artillery unit or massed battery being there to smash things.

These being pretty much the historic way of using it.

The only problem I have is that a unit is supposed to three batteries (18 – 24 guns, ignoring Russians) so if you get to fight a really large battle (Wagram for example) with the possibility of a 80 – 100 gun battery you will need three or four of these units which at the standard game scale will give a 9 – 12 inch front.

What I'm not sure about is how this stacks up against the real world. Obviously 100 guns take up a heck of a lot of land but does it actually equate to four Brigades? Or put another way a Division with its Brigades in a single Line.

When it comes to models I personally would go for something that allowed you to have a single battery in the front line of a brigade stand where required and a gap where not. Then do three models with limbers for each artillery unit. There have been some good looking 15mm examples posted on TMP like this.

BTW: Don't forget in game terms you can't attach artillery to cavalry brigades so you don't need to leave space where they are concerned.

A good rule of thumb is 15 yards per gun, with 10 yards per gun being pretty close deployment.

And thanks for posting the cavalry pic's – I was one of the ones who asked to see the difference between them and the infantry "on table". I'm edging closer to doing a custom Waterloo project with these.

G'Day Christopher

For the French:

The regles are quite clear for the interval for the bouche a feu:

En batterie: the average distance between each bouche a feu is 25 pas. Anything less than 25 pas and the battery is a good target for the enemy artillery, and harder to work within the confined spaces of each bouche a feu.

Marcher en bataille: the average distance between each bouche a feu is 6 pas , 12 pas, 25 pas, 50 pas, or even 100 pas.

These different distances are known as au quart, demi-distances, distances entieres, double distance, quadruples distances.

Best Regards
Art

Those look awesome. Any time you can hold an entire battalion in the palm of your hand, thats fun:)

Art,

Je ne comprends pas – le pas! :o)

Follow up question! How many cavalry figures can you fit on the same 20mm frontage as an infantry strip? About 6?

Six is it, yep. It seems like they were specifically designed to go six-abreast.