Mission: Finish the damn brigades! Part 3.

Project get it done damnit has met its 3rd and 4th goal.

The Saxon Cavalry brigades are done, I felt it wouldn't be as impressive with just 1 cavalry brigade, so I did the brigaders for both at the same time. Two average-sized brigades of 4 BLB squadrons each. 

Brigade 1(left) Brigader Ludwig von Watzdorf 

With 

2 Squadrons of 

Steinau

Raw, bullet, Armor

2 points.

2 Squadrons of

Drottingen

Drilled, Bullet, Armor

3 points

Brigade 2(right)Now known as the black brigade as both regiments has black facings) Brigader Henrich Von Baden

2 Squadrons of 

Beust

Drilled, Bullet, Armor

3 points

2 Squadrons of

Goltz Dragoons

Raw, Dragoons, flintlock

2 points.

Given the performance of the Saxon cavalry against the swedes, I might have been too generous in their quality 

The next brigade will take a little longer to do, as I've decided to finish the Danish battalion of Fynske. I have 1 base done from long ago, so I'll finish the battalion before pictures are taken.

Mission: Finish the damn brigades! Part 2.

Project get it done damnit has met its second goal.  Another brigadier done which completes the brigade.

Brigadier Johann Wiilhelm von Jauch

With

Kursprinsen
Drilled, Flintlock
All musket
1.5 points.

Joyeuses Grenadier battalion
Drilled, Elite, Flintlock
All musket
2 points.

Steinau
Raw, Flintlock
All Musket
1 point

Field Gun
1 point. 

Glory to the great northern war.

Well, 5 years after I started I've collected all my GNW painted forces and put them on the table. 

No game, as I'm waiting for appropriate dice, and I need more generals. 

I put my flayed teddybear on top of my old not very nice terrain tiles. The tiles weren't properly taken care of, so the flocking has disappeared on most of them. But the road parts are still working and so are the rivers. I cut the fur where it was needed, Some places the terrain tiles were exchanged for styrofoam so I could put trees into them. the trees are woodland scenics. I drilled holes in the bottom and glued two cut-up wire spears into the holes. So I just shove them through the mat into the styrofoam. I think the rivers need to be dazzled up a little, so I'll pour some woodland scenics water on them at a later date. 

 With some cutting my 5x7 feet teddy mat, it covered my 4x8 table.

 The Swedish being Swedish has decided to charge 8 enemy squadrons, 4 battalions and a cannon with 10 squadrons of cavalry.

 The Saxons have hidden themself behind a river crossing. 3 battalions are supported by two squadrons of Goltz dragoons and a big 16pdr cannon.

 Grendiers and cannon ready for the Swedes. 

Danish will have the "honour" of dealing with most of the Swedish infantry. Unlike the Saxons with their river and the russians with their stonewall. The Danes only have some woods.

 Russians have backup of both Saxon and Danish cavalry. It's not easy standing up to 3000+ Swedish cavalry. 

 The Swedish look ready to Gå på!

 The Danish have put their Livgarden til fods and grenadier korpset in their front line. Hoping their best battalions will stand up to the Swedish onslaught. 

Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg looking confidant. 

 To take on the Saxons hiding behind their river. You got the elites. The Drabants, followed by the liv garden til hest, and the liv dragonerna as reserves. Liv dragonerne is by har the most powerful unit on the table. With 2 squadrons, being veteran, elite blade and Swedish they are worth 7 points in BLB3.

For reference, the danish 2nd Sjælandske is 50% larger and still only has 6 points.  7 points is also more than all 4 Russian battalions combined. But if the 3 guard cavalry units can't handle the Saxons, they might get support from the Björnborg battalion, which was placed there as a lynchpin between the right flank cavalry and the centre infantry. 

 The Standards blowing in the wind, drums and cronets blowing...

It's time to GÅ PÅ!

I plan on running this game, once my dice have come and I get like at least 10 generals done.(and Maybe a squadron of Russian dragoons)

Last unit of 2019

I did the last half of the last 6 on New Year's Eve.

This is the Joyeuses grenadier battalion, made up of french POWs yet did some of the hardest fighting at Fraustadt.

The figures are Warfare Prussians.

 Except for the mitres, I'm very happy with them. Even just painting a yellow rectangle is beyond my freehand skills.

These are actually a gift from a good friend. I got 10 last Christmas and the rest this Christmas.
I had painted the first 6 a couple of months back. So I only had 12 to paint over Christmas.

Besides the grenadiers, I also got With Talons and Claws the much anticipated GNW/eastern Wars supplement for Beneath the Lilly Banners.  A great book very good inspiration.
The book comes with a simple point system, partly to just balance and partly to help to make the game feel like it should.
If you are playing the western wars, most units will be quite similar. But what makes the GNW so unique is the asymmetrical gameplay. And this point system makes it much easier just to keep track of how effective you force is.

I have been painting on my GNW project since late 2015, I had a plan and kinda just worked towards it.
But now I've gone through all my GNW forces and given the units points, based historic precedence and recommendation/balance in the book.

The results are


Danish 8 points for the infantry. 8 Points for the Cavalry, for a total of 16 points
Saxon 4.5 infantry 10 cavalry, 1 artillery, total 15.5 Points.  
Russian 5.5 infantry, 4 cavalry  0.5 artillery. 10 points.

The Danes have the best average score, as they are basically a well-drilled well supplied western-style army. Their Liv garden til fods are their best unit with 3 points.

The Saxons are in theory the same as the Danes but they had like 6 years of defeat after defeat.
But given the infantry, just fine stats and these grenadiers are drilled elite, same grading I gave the danish grenadiers. The Saxons are let down by the cavalry I've given one regiment raw grading to make the whole of the cavalry more brittle. But most of the cavalry too are drilled.

The Russians have one drilled elite infantry unit, this is Ingermanlandski which was kinda halfway a guard unit, they have a regular drilled battalion too and two raw infantry.
The cavalry are grenadiers, so is one of the better cavalry units the Russians can have.

Then came the swedes, Now I don't feel I've over rated them, The Swedish infantry even have a raw battalion, so in fact 1/5 of the Swedish force is raw, The Danes doesn't have any Raw units at all.
The Västerbotten battalion is rated veteran, elite, and with the bonuses for Swedish etc. It's 3.5 points. It will be very powerful.

Even so, the Swedish infantry is only 11.5 points. not that much more than the Danes and the Swedes have a battalion more than the Danes.

But then comes the cavalry, I might have gone overboard. A total of 30.5 points. 
Not only have I more Swedish cavalry than all the enemy cavalry combined, but I have 2 squadrons of liv garden til hest, and 1 squadron of liv dragoons(almost finished and I added them to the list) These are very powerful units. But I also have like 54 more regular Swedish cavalry, all quite good.
 So The Swedish are actually half a point stronger than all 3 others combined, now this is a good thing, as I always planned on having 3 vs 1. But my Swedish cavalry alone is almost twice as strong as the Danish or Saxon armies and is over 3 times as strong as the Russian army.


So yeah powerful Swedes.

I hope to do more than 2 units this year. I have like 4 or 5 unpainted Russian battalions. A Russian gun somewhere. I have a half-painted Danish battalion. I have 12 Danish cavalry somewhere to paint. and 6 Saxon Dragoons. I've now primed the first 3 of 12 Russian dragoons.

But I'm itching to do some 30YW stuff again, and my Barons' War figures are at the post office begging to be picked up and painted.

Queens Regiment(and lots of cavarly.

So I finished another 12 Saxon cavalry, this time from Queens Regiment.

 I decided to do them with red hat tape, as one source says the had it, just because it's almost always white, yellow or black. So red makes them unique.

This means the Saxon cavalry force is now 48 strong,  and Anti-Swedish cavalry force is 78.

To fight them I got 54 Swedish cavalry.

And here it is, 132 Warfare miniature cavalry. 

Soo it will be expanded with 24 new Swedish and probably 12 or 18 more Danes too, and probably some Russians.

I did an army commander

Come meet Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg.

He is my favourite "looser"! He might not have been one of the great "Captains of his age"
It's kinda hard to be when your contemporaries are Eugene of Savoy, Duke of Marlborough and Duke of Berwick.


But he was a lot better this his failures against the Swedes. While he lost battles like Fraustadt, he did do a good job, he knew his business, and did surprise the Swedes earlier by his aggressive tactics. He also served in the Low countries from 1708 and fought well under Eugene at Malplaquet.


The figure is actually the new Shermetev figure from Warfare's GNW range, but give him a red coat and you have Schulenburg.

On his left, he has a trooper and cornet from the Saxon Chevaliergarde, I thought it appropriate he had some bodyguards from that regiment.
This involved creating a "feather rim" on the tricorne of the trooper, way too big because I can't model if my life depended on it. The Chevaliergarde are also warfare figures.

While we are on the topic of can't model, same goes for that well, apparently making a good looking well is "well" above my pay grade.

At least the cannonballs I made look roundish.

Schulenburg will lead my Saxons, but also lead my not very historic Dano-Russo-Saxon coalition army.

Saxons keep marching on

So another week another Unit,

This time a battalion of from Kurprinsen regiment.
A regiment that took part in all the major battles in the 1700-1706 period against the Swedes.

I now have two battalions one of this regiment and one of Steinau.
I think I'll try and finish each of these regiments. I'm bad at doing actual regiments, I often just do single battalions. But I think I'll try and finish the regiments.

Anyway, a little photoshoot seems appropriate.

It was bad taking picture weather today, silly light, 

 Kurprisnsen with yellow facings.

 Nice firing line going on there.

 Total so far, 2 battalions, 4 cuirassier squadrons, 2 dragoon squadrons and a gun.

In miniatures that's 36 cavalry, 40 infantry and 5 crew with a gun. 

Deploy the Wasp-Cammoflage

So after almost 200 Napoleonic figures and a record-breaking 9 blog posts in a row about the same period. It's time to get back to GNW.

I got plenty to paint, two Swedish, one Russian, one Saxon battalion, as well as one squadron of Saxon dragoons, I also got some Polish Hussars in the work. Warfare is hopefully close to the release of Swedish and Russian cavalry.

I decided to start with a Saxon cannon. I had finished the cannon before I jumped over to Napoleonics, but I did get a few hints and tricks doing the French artillery, I wanted to use those on the Saxon gun, So the gun got a short dip in acetone and got repainted.
So managed to do the gun and crew yesterday and finished the base today.

 The cannon is massive, I think it's a 12pdr, it's front rank and I bought it in like 2012 or something. So I don't remember if it was the 12 or 24pdr I bought, I think it's the 12. 

 But Front Rank are kinda over scale, and so a 12pdr front rank next to Warfare crew turns the 12pdr into a 16pdr. 

So this Wasp got at a minimum a 12pdr sting. 

Say hallo to my medium sized friend

Well it's one day shy of a month since my last post. I've been lost, I started a new Napoleonic project. I thought I had about a 20% chance of actually getting into it. As it turns out the 80% won. After painting 12 French infantry and 3 French dragoons I was bored with it.  Just can't seem to get into it. 

Before I started on the Napoleonic project. I had done half a Russian GNW battalion. The first base was done and almost done with the pikemen. When I started on those evil Napoleoincs. But I got back and managed to finsih the unit. It is the Narvaska regiment.  I really like the Warfre Russians, Especially the officers with their Russian sashes and all that gold. Proper Dandies!

My Russians now have a Brigade, The two battalions behind are Musketeer/Footsore which I don't like. so they don't get any closeups.

And Sinc I've been gone for almost a month, I now give you my Allied army.
7 battalions, 9 squadrons. 185 figures(131 infantry 54 cavalry)
3 Danish, 3 Russian and 1 Saxon battalion, 3 Danish, 4 Saxon Cavalry squadrons, and 2 Saxon dragoon squadrons.

I'm now working on a Swedish battalion, After that, I'll start work on my two remaining Saxon squadrons(1 cuirassier and 1 dragoon) I also have 1 Saxon battalion and 1 Russian battalion to do, And a Second Swedish battalion. By the time those are done I hope the new Swedish and Russian cavalry from Warfare are out. I got 9 more squadrons of Swedish cavalry to paint.