I was searching for a ruleset that would let me play at a grand tactical scale, with few constraints. First I wanted to play solo, and replay historical battles. Second, I wanted to play in short time (ideally around 2 hours) . Third, I wanted to have a "nice looking" army.
Recently, I gave a try to Volley and Bayonet/ Road to Glory ruleset. I find it to match my objectives. When I played in club, I was playing the Newbury, Premier Empire, or other rules where you spend one hour of your time to make one turn, parsing rules, datasheets, never ending discussions about rules points, etc... This is one reason why I stopped playing, because it was totally wasting the pleasure of the game, in addition of people most oftenly playing the rules (or the clock) rather than the game.
So, after playing few "sample" engagements with simply half scale papers with unit type and name draw on them, I asked myself... Well... Will you play again those awfully boring games for which your napoleonics are based ? And the answer was : No.
Few days later, I decided to rebase all my napoleonics. As I wanted to have a nice looking, I found that 2/3 scale would be perfect, would not require too much space, and would let me to put a correct number of miniatures on it. For Infantry, I decided having 12 miniatures on 3 ranks. For Cavalry, 5 miniatures on 2 ranks, 2 for the first rank and 3 for the second rank.
Here is the big mess at the begining :
I just rebased a Russian regiment, and you can see some russians and prussians on the right. In the back, are some primed french light infantry, as I will need more than what I currently have.
From the fact I will only have 12 miniatures per regiment, I only put one flag in place of the 2 that are required. Reason is that I do not have enough standard bearers, I hesitate a lot before doing that to my russians and prussians, but I prefer to have one flag on most of my units, rather than a lot of them without any flag. Also, having 2 flags for a 12 miniatures regiment is too much I think. I prefer the look of having only one.
Here is a short view of the first Russians and Prussians regiments. Miniatures are 90% Old Glory 15's.I like the way those bases look. At that time, I was counting the commands and thinking on how I would spread them on each base. This is the reason why some bases have an incomplete first rank.
Obviously, no bases were finished yet, but since the time of those pictures I have made some progress.
So far, I have re-based :
- 25 French Infantry regiments
- 15 French Cavalry regiments
- 10 Russian Infantry regiments
- 14 Russians Cavlary regiments
- 10 Prussian Infantry regiments
- 1 Austrian Infantry regiments
About the only Austrian regiment, it is a brand new one. After some time of investigation, and despite some bad advices I could read, I ordered 13 OG 15's packs of Austrians in the US, directly to OG 15. I am really happy with those miniatures so far. I will post pictures as well, but this is another topic.
Bruno.
