Thursday, January 2, 2020

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.

3 comments:

AJ (Allan) Wright said...

Crisp and clean and those reds really POP! Nice unit.

Gunfreak said...

Thanks.

Neil Scott said...

A great looking unit. I wouldn't worry about the Swedish cavalry being too strong. They were brilliant during the GNW regularly putting greater numbers of enemy horse to flight