"Don't Know Much About: Warlord Games Colonial Militia" Topic

Hi all, hope you can help get me up to speed on 18th century wargaming. In short, my 10 year old son has recently become obsessed with the AWI and I'm trying to quickly get some figures painted up so we can play some skirmishes. Unfortunately, this is a period I don't know well, and I could use a little advice.

I'm building Warlord Games Colonial Militia box.

- There are plenty of muskets, but a small number of very long barreled guns. Are these rifles? Should I mix a smattering of rifle armed troops in with the musket armed soldiers, or keep rifles in their own separate unit?
- I've built mostly ancient and medieval armies and stick to 16 figures per unit for those. I understand units for horse and musket may very in number of figures where each figure represents a specific number of men, but I was going to shoot for 16 man units since that's what I'm comfortable with. This box only has 30 figures so I'd like to supplement it with two individual figures (officers maybe?) . Do you have any suggestions of figures that mix well with these Warlord militia and wouldn't look out of place in a militia unit?

Thanks! Appreciate the help and hope these aren't newbie questions you are sick of answering!

Oh, and how do you base your Colonial militia? If you place multiple figures on a base do you do the same for militia, or do you always single base militia as "skirmishers"?

Thanks!

JSears:

Have you selected any rules systems to use?

You might individually mount all your troops, but organize them according to function, i.e. skirmish, open order, close order, etc.

There are unit movement trays available to allow you to put inits in different orders and still move them as units as well.

Yours is a very open ended question!

Regards, Jeff

Thanks Jeff, sorry for being so open ended!

I'll likely start with Rebels and Patriots from Osprey which should be released soon. I'm familiar with Dan Mersey's Lion and Dragon Rampant systems, so figure this should be similar.

I have British Grenadier and have started reading through it, but quite a bit I need to puzzle through since this is a new period for me.

I've played Hail Caesar and have the PDF of Black Powder, so might try that in the future.

Hope that helps narrow things down, but those are the only systems I'm currently aware of, having spent little time researching this period thus far.

Welcome to the AWI. Don't forget that Perry Miniatures has plastic 28mm Continentals and British Infantry. You can buy individual figures from Fife & Drum Miniatures – they are a little bit smaller but it doesn't bother me. Somewhere online I saw the unit sizes given for the upcoming R&P rules set, but I can't remember where that was. I would field the rifles as a separate skirmisher unit. Don't worry about any cav. as there wasn't much of it in this war and that can be done later on anyways. BG is one of the most complicated rules sets out there, so I wouldn't bother with that for the time being. Another good buy would be "One Hour Wargames" by Neil Thomas, simple rules but fun to play.

As to your question about the length of some of the weapons; "There are plenty of muskets, but a small number of very long barreled guns. Are these rifles? " They could be, but they may represent fowlers or earlier period muskets.

Kentucky/Pennsylvania long rifles, perhaps?

See the base and movement tray options at

warbases.co.uk

for examples of how you could put individual figures on a round or square base, then have movement trays of different configurations.

Others offer the same or similar options. The prices are fair and I've had good results ordering them delivered to the US.

Jeff

Old Glory has s large AWI range made tight here in the United States.
Regards.
Russ Dunaway

It's your first box, and perhaps the last, so it probably does not make sense to obsess too much on what you do. At this point my number one rule would be to make certain that figures with cartridge boxes are given muskets. I am sure there were rifle armed men who had cartridge boxes but the powder horns are a better representation. There is at least one arm with a sword so you could make an officer from the militia box.

Militia covers a broad range of troops in the AWI that would have been dressed, armed, organized and functioned differently, and would have been of different quality. My advice would be to use a basing method which allows for some flexibility, probably one or two figures per base, and don't mix rifles and muskets on the same base. If the army expanded this would also allow you to mix and match figures to better depict the type of militia you are representing.

If you are looking for skirmish rules to play with your son I would recommend "Muskets and Tomahawks". Small unit actions that are allot of fun. It is good for the FIW and AWI. The rules are easy to learn and play as complicated as you want to make them.