Ok, so this year I may it out to HISTORICON for the first time since I moved out West. It was great to see it going strong and catching up with old friends, as well as finally meeting the Johns from Pico Armor, without whose patronage I wouldn't be sitting on top of a veritable mountain of 3mm "lead" (really an aluminum alloy or some sort, I think). I also got to meet a bunch more people, including the legendary Bruce Weigle, who's 1870s-ish stuff is the inspiration for my own 1809 project.
For this trip I wanted to do a very important...even central...experiment as regards my 3mm in 1809 project. The idea behind this was always that I'd paint up these figures- tens of thousands of them- and make all the terrain here in California, then transport it back East for HCON to put on a gigantic Battle of Wagram convention game one day, with every battalion represented, every squadron of cav and every artillery battery. All of this will be at correct ground scale and it'll use some rules designed specifically to work with such. Ok. Well, the first question was, how can I transport all of this?
As it turns out, 3mm transports very well indeed. My infantry are based on 20mm x 10mm strips, so I was able to just roll them up in some paper towels and then place them into sandwich bags. I was able to get 4000+ infantry, arty and cavalry to Virginia from California in my luggage without breaking even one single figure or losing one flag. 3mm are tough. That metal is almost indestructible, my flag technique (soak them with Extra-Tack glue and wrap around a bayonet) worked. My balsa houses and my forests transported nicely as well. Everything was very tough.
Here's what the end result looked like on the floor:
This picture is kind of lo-res but it does raise one interesting point for those who carefully read the above paragraph. Where did the mat come from??
Ok, so I went to Virginia without a mat but with a vague idea of how I could make one. I wanted to set my figs up somewhere that people could see them, just to gauge reaction, and also just for fun. But, obviously I needed a mat.
So, long story short, I ran to the nearby Walmart, bought two 6' x 4' pieces of grass green cloth, then went over to the Hobby Lobby next door and picked up a box of 24 different colors of chalk. I used to chalk to quickly draw out a road network and a river, then put down my foliage and housesat normal. I was really pleasantly surprised at how good the result was, and a lot of people stopped by to take a look at it. In fact, the response was so positive that I'll probably never make another mat again.
Yes, my longtime followers, you heard it. My long tortured, somewhat insane search for the perfect mat is over. I found it. It costs $12 and you can wash it and start over each time.
Honestly, as I was standing there in the middle of the gaming hall sketching a road network with chalk I was a bit worried I was going to look crazy, but it ended up coming together really nicely. So nicely that I'm going to do my final convention battle the same way.
Now back in California I had some time recently to do a how-to for chalk mats.
What you will need:
Cloth
Chalk
Step 1:
This is my cloth from Virginia. I bought it because it matches my bases pretty well. There are two pieces here overlapped because of table space constraints in my game room. This guy is about 6' x 3'. This is laid over top of some rubberized gym matting. The matting ended up imparting it's texture to the chalk roads later, so when I do this next I'll definitely put down an underlay, maybe of felt.
Step 2:
Add some tree-pins (see my previous post on these guys) to hold the mat in place.
Step 3
Here's the chalk. it cost about $2.99 at Hobby Lobby.
Step 4
Sketch out a road network.
The set I had contained the perfect off-white, tan color for roads. Nice and bright!
Step 5
Add some water effects.
Chalk rivers actually look better than any other technique I've tried to use. You really need to see it in person to believe it.
Use a light blue first, then go over it with streaks of darker blue. This doesn't look too real yet but it will as we build up the board.
Step 6
Take the chalk and flesh out the street network for your bigger BUAs. This is a very big town set alongside a river. It somewhat dominates the right side of the board (but more on that later)...
You can see the gym mat's texture pushing through- mind this if you try it! This is a pretty dense town on both sides of a stream/river. I don't have a bridge model ready-to-go at the moment but if I did one would definitely go here. A nice thing about the chalk is you can add little notes on the river to show were it's fordable (and by what troop types) if you want to go into that much detail (why not?)
Step 7
After the big one I added the other BUAs. I have a how-to on making these buildings in an earlier blog post. If you're going to do them I'd recommend doing about 100-200 all at once and just getting them out of the way. It will take about a day or two depending how fast you go. They're tough and light, and once painted up they're almost indestructible. At HCON I saw a guy who made a lego box mold to make houses with more detail than these guys- if I was going to make more I'd probably do the same: make a latex mold and then pour them from Water Putty.
Step 8
Here comes the fun part...
We start adding foliage. The big pieces first...
Step 9
And then the finer stuff! Now that looks like some European countryside!
Step 10
In this pic there are some figures down deployed at a tactically realistic range. The artillery is about 800m distant from each other.
The French artillery is on the right, the Austrian is on the left. The French aren't actually un-limbered at the moment. What I really wanted to point out is the Roman numerals on the left hand side- I wrote these down to identify reinforcement points. There are fourteen entry-points on the board total. Each army has 6. The Austrians are written in yellow and the French in black (the French ones aren't totally visible in this picture but maybe in the ones below). Along with this information you could write down all kinds of info on the terrain as well- since it's chalk you can just throw the entire mat into the washer afterwards and start over from scratch!
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So that was the tutorial. Afterwards I convinced my girlfriend to play me in a quick (very quick) game using some rules that I've been kicking around for convention play. It ended up being quite interesting, and she quickly realized, with absolutely no prior knowledge of gaming or history or tactics (you know what I mean) the advantages of massed battery fire and moving troops in formations. She actually ended up beating me (I had bad dice rolls!). Among other things, she came up with the idea of arranging massed batteries facing the road into a town and essentially bottled up an entire brigade that I was trying to move up to dislodge her artillery from it's dominant position in the middle of the board.
Some pictures are below... (not all of these are strictly speaking historically/tactically correct but I didn't want to push my luck)
A good shot of my (her) Austrian artillery complete with limber teams. Each battery is three models, and 110m deep when deployed. About right I think (opinions welcome on that though.). You can see though that if you arranged some artillery facing that town (let alone bombarding it) you could definitely pen up troops from debouching through that one road. (the infantry to the left of the batteries are Austrian, and my brigade is on the center road through the town).
Here's another French brigade being annihilated by the Austrians as it leaves another village. The left front Austrian battalion has wheeled out to shoot my one battalion in the flank. Note that the Austrian units are almost twice as big. In my experimental rules I'm giving each base a single d6 to shoot with, and they hit on 6+, 5+ and 4+ depending on the range. I'm not even sure that I'll include formal melee rules, since it almost never happened as far as everything I've read. I'll just include an "assault" shooting value that'll reflect units trying to force a position. Anyway, it needs refinement, but it seemed to work well today. One thing I'm trying to do is keep the time scale very much in tune with the time scale and fire combat. So battalions can move 100m-200m on a turn while fire combat at 200m can go on for many turns while a short-range fire fight can be over with mass casualties in one turn. It needs tweaking but so far I'm pleased.
There were a few big take-aways for me from this short game. First, Napoleonics games are most fun when the game-play is most dynamic. Starting with only a unit or two on the board and then rolling for reinforcements is much more exciting than putting a bunch on the board to begin with. Also, with realistic ranges it's actually the only way to play, really. Having a fast, easy, unpredictable and holistic method for controlling reserves is critical. I think that a lot of the reserve rules I've seen are overly programmed, or else too random. I came up with the idea that, in a pip based command system, a player should just be able to use PIPs to move their reserves onto the board when they want by expending pips. After all, the space directly behind the players table edge is generally considered their rear area. In the context of a division, maybe even a corps sized battle I think this would solve a lot of issues, and lead to a more dynamic battlefield. This also avoids having to have schedules of arrivals (vomit), random dice rolls (ugh) and other such mechanisms for determining when and if reserves arrive. For a pick-up game I think that the players should just choose themselves when they release their troops. Now, the exception to that is if the reserves are considered as coming from outside the players own command. Say you're an Austrian Korps commander and you're waiting for Archduke Charles to release eight grenadier battalions to you...in that case then there should be some kind of uncertainty involved. But for battalions within the players own chain of command it's probably not needed.
Another observation is that with the absolute 60mm=100m ground scale you need to have a lot of open space. The table above barely contained the two divisions fighting, and artillery, shooting at realistic ranges, dominated the battle field. Maybe this was an indication that I'm doing something right so far, but it was certainly a factor in the game. Indeed, what happened seemed to be that the battalions would enter the board and deploy behind the artillery, then begin marching forward along the avenues of approach that the artillery wasn't firing into. I may have made the artillery too strong, and perhaps in a later iteration I'll tone it down a bit. We spent a lot of time doing counter-battery, although I kept it fragile, two hits and out (versus 3 hits for a French battalion and 5 hits for an Austrian one). Anyways, it certainly has a particular tactical power when playing at these ranges. Also, there isn't much difference on this board between round shot and canister ranger. You can get into the kill-zone very quickly if you don't pay attention (1 foot is 500m).
It'll be fun to experiment with it further. What I really need is a bigger table, something like 12x6. The full Wagram will be 6'-7' x 24', and packed with thirty thousand figures, so I definitely need to upsize my experiments at some point. Or another fold out table at least...
*****
Ok, and finally, here are some close-ups of my completed artillery units. I ordered hundreds of horse teams in order to be able to give each artillery pieces in my army a complete team to pull it. It's a bit of work (and a LOT of horse figures) but definitely worth it. Note that O8 doesn't have an Austrian limber team out yet, who wore bicornes. I improvised here and just used the regular shako teams for the riders. One could just as easily use the bicorne heavy cav, although you'd have to figure out something to do with the swords. Maybe one day Marcin will come out with the proper bicorne draft horses, but we'll see.
Anyways, Im happy. All I really wanted was a correct, unwieldy footprint for my artillery units, and now I have it. Those Austrian battalions next to them are probably too close to each other (they tried to space battalions out 200m or so to avoid rounds that missed the front battalion from hitting the supporting lines.).
And to close out this probably too-long mega-post, here are close ups of my French artillery as well. Just a few of them...
My next post will cover an alternative way to set up the board for playing large-scale games. This will go beyond the scope of what people general consider "grand tactical" to include an almost operational level of play. Think of it as a super Grande Armee. This is something I've wanted to try out with 3mm figures for a long time, and discussed with the guys from Pico Armor at HCON as well. I actually haven't done it before but we'll see if it works. And if it does, it'll be almost entirely owing to how versatile the chalk-mat is. Which means that it might not work, too. We'll have to see, so check back tomorrow night to find out!
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