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Thursday, December 30, 2010

Highlanders


A couple stands of highlanders…

(Remember: click on the pictures for a bigger version)


This first one are old RAFM SYW/FIW figures.

I had painted a unit of them earlier this year (78th Regiment of Foot (Fraser’s Highlanders)). I had enough to do another stand because I seem to recall they had considerably more men than other regiments at Quebec. I finally finished up the remaining batch but rather than put them on one stand I’ve split the stand into two...

This is mostly because I wanted to experiment with a new way of basing stuff for Black Powder. There are four basic formation in Black Powder; Line, Assault Column, Marching Column and Square. While two of these (line and marching column) can be easily represented with the three stands I’ve been using for regiments, the other two (Assualt Column and Square)… not so much. I could just make a fourth stand of the same size… but then we have problems with the “command stand” being centered in line or assault column (these are the ridiculous things that keep me awake at night…). So instead I have devised a way of using two half-stands to keep everything all nice and uniform – and as the half stands are just that – exactly half a stand – I could put the two together and use them as a stand when using the DBA Extension for 1500 – 1900AD.

Here’s what the unit will thus look like in the various different formations:


Line


Assault Column


March Column


Square

Of course this means for Black Powder I’m suddenly needing 32 figures per regiment rather than the 24 I was using before…

I also happen to finish up a stand of highland rabble:


Some of these had previously been painted, but I repainted the tartan to bring them up to current standards. The stand is a mix of Old Glory, Dixon Miniatures, and Essex… (I think)…


Another shot of them from the rear (to see all the pretty tartans)

Coming soon on Tim’s Miniature Wargaming Blog:

Hopefully an after action report of tonight’s first crack at Black Powder.

Well this is probably it for painting this year... unless I get some painting done tomorrow afternoon between when the kids head to my folks for a sleepover and when we head out to teh new years party... 805 foot this year... not bad... Less than last year, but then I've been painting a lot of Other Stuff lately... My purchases have not diminished... have to do something about that this year...

5 comments:

  1. NIce job; your basing solution is ingenious! I like the newer tartans!

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  2. Oh god, the basing issue rears it's ugly head yet again...

    What about skirmishing screens out in front of regiments? Perhaps a solution is to have individual skirmisher minis (on std washer bases, of course) placed our front of the units.

    Or you could just base your units in such a way that you could just use individual minis to represent a set number of "men" and just lump them together to make a regiment. Say each mini equals 5.4 "men" in a given regiment. As an added bonus, you can then have "regiments" of varying size, and then represent incremental losses more "realistically" as well.

    Apparently there is a minis company called Games Workshop(tm), that does square bases that would be ideal for such a scheme.

    ReplyDelete
  3. As for skirmishing screens out in front of units, for most periods I have some individually mounted figures which I can use as skirmishers.

    I'm moving bask towards individual bases for later periods - colonial and later. We could potentially use these rules for said periods and there's no reason why we couldn't do it with figures individually mounted (just takes a bit more time to move units...).

    We'll see how the game goes tonight...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh god, no!

    I was totally kidding - please disregard the whole last post. I agree with Bob...

    Is your moving toward individual bases to do with your new ruleset?

    Have fun tonight!

    ReplyDelete
  5. No, it has more to do with wanting to use WW1 figures in Pulp Adventure skirmish games which is hard when they are on the bases they're on now. The Great War DBA we were playing wasn't so great so I'm going to re-base the lot of them. Same with any Colonial period stuff - could be used for Rippers or Space:1889 so it's all going on single bases.

    Horse and Musket stuff... mostly staying on multi-figure bases. but some, like skirmishers, will be on single bases as anyone skirmishing in the one game could also potentially be used for skirmishing in Savage Worlds...?

    ReplyDelete