Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Progress report... and a dilemma.

No pictures today, but I thought I'd post a little bit of an update as to progress on the Alzheimer Army.

I've begun work on another 20 infantry, a Gunner, a foot Officer and a mounted Officer, having just finished a pair of cavalry to round out one of the regiments kindly donated a couple of months back. All scraped free of flash, undercoated, faces, hair, muskets, water-bottles and white small-clothes all painted.

Phew.

Pale blue coats next. I'm hoping to be finished by the weekend.

Most of these will go to finish off the LeibRegiment with a few leftovers going to the La Rosee Regiment which is slated next for completion. After this I have a difficult decision to make.

As you'll recall, I bought a large chunk of the Alzheim and Imperial armies from Phil Olley. One of the regiments would do extremely well as a Grenadier Garde Regiment and I am considering it for the Alzheim service as IR#1. It's pretty well perfect in every detail but for one... The coats are black.

You can see my dilemma.

What else? In other news, I've closed a deal with a gentleman on Bartertown that will yield me another sizeable job lot of SSMs of all arms - including some much-needed Hussars and Gunners - that will (I think) get me to about 8 Regiments of Infantry and 10 of Cavalry for the "SSM Project". I think that will do quite nicely; while I'm sure that although the Grants had about 20 regiments of Line Foot in their armies, that I never read of a battle they recreated that couldn't be fought with more than about 10 units of Foot and 6-8 or horse per side!

That being said, although I'll probably buy some Grenzers and Pandurs for Light Infantry in metal as we go on. And then, there are those Hungarian Infantry that SSM do in metal. Hm. OK, maybe we'll get to 10 units of Line Foot per side.

Then I'll stop. Honest.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why not make the black uniformed unit mercenaries? You can have them come from any Imagi-nation. I would be happy to second them to you from the Duchy of Han-gover....
Jerry

Bluebear Jeff said...

Why do all of the regiments need to be in the same coat color?

Grenadier Guard Regiment #1 should be special. Perhaps they continue to wear black "in mourning" for their original inhaber, an ealier Duke of Alzheim?

Besides, it would be one less unit you'd have to paint. If it were me, I'd leave them as Phil painted them . . . and just come up with a story to explain the reason for the difference . . . (it would be more fun that way).

But it is YOUR army, Greg, so do what YOU want to do.


-- Jeff

Gary said...

You should only stop raising new regiments when you have maxed out on your wargame table size. I should have stopped then....but I didn't.

justMike said...

As I recall, the Grants, at the time of the writing of "The War Game," could field armies numbering some 1000 infantry, 250 cavalry and a dozen guns. I'm also thinking that I read somewhere that Brig. Young's forces were silghtly smaller. Sounds as if you're right in line with their thinking. The troops really look great by the way. - Mike

Dave Wargamer said...

I've fielded a number of second-hand regiments over the years and, however good-looking, they always feel a bit anomalous.

My advice would be to impose your own colour scheme fairly ruthlessly and then you've got the satisfaction of it all being your own design.