Napoleonic WIP

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Napoleonic WIP

24 May

I know I have been unreasonably quiet in recent days, so to break that situation… here are a few more pictures.

First up… I finally got to play a game this Friday. If I am not mistaken, this was only the second one I played this year, making it an incredibly poor start to a year. Anyway… we wanted to give the R2E rules another test. Since you have seen virtually all the Nappy minis I have painted so far, it is obvious, that these are not enough to play a proper game (yet). Good luck has it though that one of my friends Dirk, has a vast collection of 15mm Napoleonic minis, so we are using those for playtesting.

R2E playtest

So what did we do? I got the French and Dirk played Russians. He had a distinct advantage in infantry and a bigger battery of guns, while I had the only cavalry on the table. During the game we had to find, that we had chosen too small a table, with too much terrain. So I had huge problems using my cavalry properly (actually to the point where I failed to do so at all) and that the plans for my infantry had been too ambitious. I lacked the necessary maneuver points to have them perform as wanted in a critical moment and got pretty much beaten up as a result. But the nice thing about it is… we got a lot of close combat and were able to get an in-depth look at that and we found those rules quite satisfactory.

Anyway… what else happened in the past almost two weeks? I am in the process of painting a few minis for a vignette. Minis come from a variety of Perry sets and are meant to depict a French “command centre” (please forgive the use of this very modern term). In general terms it is staff writing orders and handing them out, a messenger arriving on the scene, while Napoleon and his high-ranking officers are planning the next moves at a map table. Now this vignette has a very mixed history. At first I had planned to use it as a table top base showing Napoleons HQ. Then I bought the Perry´s mounted Napoleon set and decided that this would make for a much nicer command base. So I bought a plinth and decided to just do this arrangement for my showcase. But there is still the option to use it without Napoleon, making it a generic army level command base. But right now I am undecided what to do. So I will just paint them up whenever I feel I need a slight break from painting units, see what I like best and decide then. But here are the shots of the first finished pieces.

Map table

Mounted messenger

Writing the orders

Now I have to say… the faces looked good in real life, but I do not like them at all on these pictures, so I am probably going back to them.

So this is what I did the other weekend. What did I do this last weekend? Prussian Feldjäger. The R2E rules have a nice mechanic, that only allows the changing of Brigade orders if a divisional officer (or above) is within command distance or if he sends a messenger. These need not be represented by actual minis on the tabletop, but what is the use in playing a miniatures game, if you choose not to use minis. So painted these up. Minis are from Calpe and a lot still needs to be done on their bases.

Prussian Feldjäger on jumping horse

Two Feldjäger

And last are two French minis that are meant to complete a command and a messenger base. These are Victrix minis converted to fit the bases they are intended for.