2mm Romans and Barbarians for 'Strength & Honour' and 'To the Stongest'

Hi All!

Earlier this spring I picked up Mark Blackhouse's 'Strength & Honour' which has been recently released through the Too Fat Lardies' Reisswitz Press imprint. A few years ago I participated in a very early playtest session with Mark and really enjoyed many of the concepts he had developed for his rules. Well, I can say that the finished product is absolutely terrific, and a real credit to all his hard work.  

'Strength & Honour' is similar is scale to Simon Miller's excellent 'To the Strongest', but has a completely different approach to combat resolution and army morale - not necessarily better or worse, just different and innovative. While the rules are simple to learn, they provide a lot of depth, giving players a lot of nail-biting decisions and easily resolved combats. I think it's a great game, and a wonderful addition to the Ancients stable of rules. I highly recommend them to anyone who wants to play those large iconic battles of the period within a manageable space and a reasonable amount of time.

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Being a fan of the smaller scales, I was keen to try my hand at creating some 2mm units for use both Strength and Honour and To the Strongest, so with no further ado here are some of my recent efforts.

Barbarian Warbands

The basis for all these units is built around 3d models from the talented fella over at Project Wargaming. I played around with the designs in the slicer to create more irregular mobs/formations - it worked okay for the most part, especially when they are viewed at an arms length away.

Two Roman Legions in triple and double acies formation.

The majority of the units are based on 130mm x 60mm MDF provided by my good pal Byron over at Northern Lights Terrain. Due to the figures' tiny size, I kept the groundwork fairly minimalistic to help mitigate the figures being lost in the muddle. 

A couple units of formed cavalry.

Light Cavalry

I pretty much exclusively used Citadel Contrast Paints for this project as I find they provide an interesting tonal depth to the colours, which I kind of like. The other benefit was that they allowed me to bang-out most of these units (essentially two armies of 12 bases each) in around a month. 

Skirmishers

A base of British light chariots.

A Barbarian Camp

A Roman Camp

For the labels, I cut thin strips of magnetic paper along the back of the bases. This allows me to swap-in whatever I need for the scenario at hand. After a few years of hosting games, I find that if one can provide as much information on the units themselves then it saves both time and confusion for players when the game is underway.

Anyway, there you go, a neat little project that helped me while away my spring. Thanks for visiting and I hope you have a terrific day.

- Curt

Additions to the 2mm Napoleonic Collection

Here are a few more units to add to my 2mm Napoleonic collection. A project I started a few years ago.  

This madness stemmed from spending years reading battlefield accounts and looking at drawings describing the formations used during the Napoleonic wars. I've always been fascinated by the 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' aspect to Napoleonic tactics. How line defeated column, cavalry smashed lines, squares bested cavalry, etc. So I wanted 'gaming pieces' to reflect these formations on the tabletop, at a ground scale that was somewhat closer to reality. What you see here is essentially a wide-angle perspective of how armies may have looked in the field, which oddly appeals to my lizard brain.

Here we have a force of Austrian infantry arrayed in line, a regiment of French cavalry, a deployed battery of French artillery and a command stand. The 'smoke' markers are simply layered MDF I had designed, painted to suit.

In my collection I have each unit illustrated in the various formations in which it could have been deployed. So an infantry unit will have bases depicting it in line, column and square; cavalry are in lines and columns of squadrons and artillery are shown both limbered-up and deployed with their trail of caissons and wagons. Here are five battalions of Austrian line infantry arrayed in a 3-rank line formation.

A regiment of Imperial Dutch Lancers in a 2-rank line, ready for the charge. I love dudes in pink.

As you can see with the artillery battery below, I wanted to reflect the depth of these formations which can be quite striking. Often, we think of a Horse & Musket battery as being simply a line of big guns, whereas in fact a deployed artillery battery was a tremendously deep column, with successive lines of caissons and supply wagons servicing the guns. I find reflecting this on the tabletop to be really interesting as one quickly discovers that these formations need a lot of space to both deploy and maneuver.

A French upper level command stand.

In addition I put together a pair of Built-Up-Area (BUA) tiles to represent a quasi-Germanic aesthetic. Again, like the other figures here, these building models are from Forward March Figures. I tried to mimic the organic flow of an older city, with its streets and avenues sprouting from all over the compass. 

I had fun making the various parks and green spaces. Sarah says she wants to have coffee in the bistro next to the Cathedral. :)

I also made a few trees for the bases using my tried-and-true method of clipping figure foam packing into roughly spherical shapes and gluing brad nails into them to serve as trunks. I then coated them with Liquitex, give them a quick paint and drybrush and presto, 2mm scaled trees!

Next Up: Something inspired from Lord of the Rings!

- Curt

2mm Napoleonic Terrain and Units for Waterloo

Hi All!

Last summer I began a 2mm Napoleonic project using 3D designs sourced from Forward March Studios. During that initial burst of productivity I managed to create two decent sized forces, one for the French and another depicting the Anglo/Portuguese of the Peninsula.

As June 18th marked the anniversary of Waterloo I thought it would be fun to revisit this project and add a few more units and terrain specific to that campaign.

After snooping around, I picked up a batch of building sets from Brigade Models which depict several locations that are iconic to that battlefield. So what we have here is the chateau of Hougoumont, the walled farm of La Haie Sainte, the church at Plancenoit and the inn of La Belle Alliance. Everything except La Belle Alliance has been based on 4" MDF squares as I wanted each base to act as a 'sector' for gaming purposes.

For Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte I wanted to include their formal gardens and orchards as they played an important role in the battle. For the garden walls I used thin plastic sheeting and for the hedges I glued down trimmed figure packing foam (the stuff you find in blister packaging) which I thinly coated with Liquitex before painting.

La Haie Sainte with its attached Orchard

La Haie Sainte with French columns and a square nearby.

Hougoumont being attacked by a French battalion in line.

The village of Plancenoit became a critical battle within a battle. I have the first base done depicting the village churchyard. Historically the possession of the churchyard seesawed between the Prussians and French throughout the late afternoon - a real charnel house. I plan to add another two bases to better reflect the entire footprint of the village.

Plancenoit's churchyard mocked up with some extra buildings and plasticard bits.

Plancenoit's churchyard with two French columns approaching.

Finally, the inn La Belle Alliance. Napoleon used the inn as his headquarters the morning before the battle and it was nearby to this location that Blucher, the commander of the Prussian forces, met up with Wellington in the evening of the 18th upon their victory over the French.

La Belle Alliance with a penny to give a sense of scale.

And, dug up from the photo archives, here I am at La Belle Alliance, er, Le Caillou  when we visited the battlefield in 2008.

For La Haie Sainte's formal orchard, and for the odd individual tree here and there, I decided to create my own from bits found around the hobby desk. After a bit of experimenting, I used the same packing foam I used for the hedges and trimmed them into roundish shapes using small topiary scissors. 

I then pierced the foam with 1/2" brad nails dipped in hot glue to serve as the tree trunks. Once they were set up I coated the foam in Liquitex and then painted them up using craft paints. 

There you go, fast and easy microscale trees.

I also added a few more units to my British force, battalions in line, column and square.

Here's a unit of British infantry in column. It's interesting that the Brits had their colour party positioned in the center of their formation as opposed to the French, who had their's leading from the front.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of two differing column formations. See how the French formation is more compact due to the three-rank doctrine? Neat. To me this is one of the highlights of doing this in 2mm as one can convey, basically in 1:1 scale, the wide variety of formations that were used by the various powers. Pretty cool, eh!?

The same goes for the line formations. In this scale we can see the British two-rank doctrine creates a formation that is substantially longer than an equivalent sized French unit in three ranks. You can see that unit discipline and firepower is the focus here.

Here is a British battalion drawn up in square formation.

And finally, you may have noticed the smoke markers that I've used in some of the previous photos. I've discovered that in large games we often need a visual reminder of what units have fired from those who've not, so I had these MDF markers made up by Byron over at Northern Lights Terrain based on some sketches I bodged together. 

The markers are simply three irregular shaped layers of MDF glued together to give the impression of gun smoke. I find that they're easier (and less messy) to use than pillow ticking. 

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There you have it! Thanks for sticking it out to the end. These were a lot of fun to work on and I'm looking forward to using these when we can all get back together to game in-person. 

Remember, be excellent to each other.

Curt

2mm Napoleonics! (Or, 'What I did During my Summer Vacation, Part I')

We had a very nice, restful summer, with lots of lazy days and bright sunshine to sit back and recharge the batteries. While I did spend a lot of time outside puttering with some landscape projects, I did manage to get to grips with a couple hobby things as well. One of them, still ongoing, is building-up a Sisters of Battle force (I hate saying 'army' for something that's usually composed of 30-40 figures) for a friends-themed event being held later this autumn. Lots of nostalgia with that one as the Sisters were my first 40K army before I reluctantly sold them off to finance a trip to Europe - I'll get into describing that gambit in a future post.

So what's the other project that has occupied many of my summer evenings? Well, again, it's another old flame, but this time instead of boltguns and chainswords, its back to muskets and shakos.  Napoleonics - 'The Beautiful Game' - remains my first miniature wargames love and for me it's experienced a bit of a renaissance with the release of Dan Brown's excellent 'General d'Armee' (GdA). The rules are quite 'crunchy' and somewhat overwrought in some spots, but on the whole they're pretty darn good and, for me, they manage to hit most of the sweet spots for a battalion-level set of instructions. The most important result from this resurgent interest is that it's driven me to get more Napoleonic games on the tabletop.

After a few recent games I came to the conclusion that I wanted to try playing this level of game in a figure scale smaller than 28mm. Don't get me wrong, I love all the colour and pageantry of 28mm Napoleonics, BUT the size of the units often constrains how much can be reasonably put on a normal tabletop. We typically game on an 8'x5' playing surface, and, allowing for room for flanks and a few bits of interesting terrain this means that we hit the limit at around 15 units per side. In Napoleonic terms that's around two to three brigades - a nice little game, but still fairly limited in scope. So, I really wanted the ability to do larger divisional-level games while still having room for the units to 'breathe'.

With all this in mind, I played around with the idea of expanding my recently repatriated 15mm collection (thanks Greg!). I even retouched/rebased a few units to see how they'd look - not bad, but I would need significantly more units, meaning lots of figures and heaps of painting. Definitely possible, but I needed to think on this more before pulling the trigger. Then, one afternoon I found myself looking through our display cabinets and came across my proof-of-concept 3mm ACW units that I did-up a few years back. I was reminded by how neat the 1:1 arrangement looked and wondered if I could 3D print something similar for Napoleonics, say in 2mm. I then remembered an online conversation I had with Zach, the talented creator of Forward March Studios about his 2mm range of figures. Well, it turns out that Zach is now offering his entire library of 3D print files for a very reasonable price. Inspired by this, I duly plunked down for the series of designs and began the process of test printing and plotting possible unit layouts.

Here is a selection of 2mm models from Forward March. From front to back, a 2-flag infantry stand, a squadron of cavalry a round command stand, a load of windmills and a row of German themed houses.

After playing around with the raw printed models I quickly came to the conclusion that due to the relative ease of printing, assembly and painting, I wanted to create units which were more like boardgame playing pieces, composed of one base highlighting a specific formation. For example, a unit in line formation would be a single base with the battalion arrayed in line, whereas if it changed into column, or square, it would be swapped-out for a base reflecting those particular formations. This would be quite different the common multi-base approach, where players switch around their component unit bases to mimic the formations they need. Ok, why do this? Well, the thing that really excited me about this scale was its ability to convey how these formations would really look in relation to one another.  

In this scale, the British 2-rank line looks realistically thin and elongated when compared to the bulkier 3-rank lines used by the French (and most continental armies). In looking at the British line, one can see how many French commanders would have thought that its apparent fragility would be susceptible to mass column attacks - not so much as it turned out.

Cavalry formations look great in this scale as well as the massed units really help emphasize the space that was required to properly maneuver these large groups of horsemen. 

Here are two British cavalry regiments with the one in the foreground in columns of squadrons and the other drawn up in line.

One formation that I especially enjoyed working on was the artillery batteries. Quite understandably due to cost and space considerations, artillery in most tabletop collections rarely illustrate the depth gun batteries would absorb, what with their limbers, ammunition caissons and support wagons. But doing this in 2mm it's an absolute doodle.  

Above is a French 8-gun battery deployed for action. The depth of the formation is to illustrate the space required to accommodate the supporting ammunition caissons and support wagons.

Note: for the artillery I broke my own rule by having them arrayed on multiple bases as I wanted to allow segments to be removed in order to allow other formations to park or move through it, something that was commonly done on the battlefield.



So, with a bit of head scratching and eraser nibbling I came up with a series of base shapes that could reflect the various formations commonly used during the period. I estimated I wanted around 30 battalions of infantry each for the French, Austrian, Prussian British and Russians, with a half dozen batteries and around 10 regiments of cavalry as supports. I reasoned that this 'recipe' would give me enough units to reflect a good sized corps per side and not overstress a modest sized table.

After I decided on my basing recipe, my good friend Byron over at Northern Lights Terrain cut me up a schwack of MDF bases to start the process.

Eagle-eyed readers with 15mm collections will see that that frontage of my units are probably not that far off from their own - it's really in the depth that the this scale really differentiates itself. 

Is this in true 1:1 scale? No, but its very close. I estimate that these formations are roughly at 1: 1.3 ratio. Not bad! 



The Process

The assembly and painting of these bases is a fairly straightforward affair - its definitely more of an assembly line  approach than working with larger scales.

I find one of the tricks to tackling small scale projects is getting the basing and colour pallet right. My colour choices I'll talk about below, as to the bases, personally, I like them fairly thick (3mm) as it gives something to grip onto. I also like my bases with rounded corners as it gives the finished stands an almost chit/playing piece look about them. Horses for courses though!

The 3D prints I used for this project makes it very easy to organize and glue down the formations onto the bases, you just mix and match figure strips to the formation you want to do. 

They don't look like much, but we'll see what we can make of them.

This unit will be a standard-sized French battalion, in line formation, five companies wide (the sixth company is assumed to be detached on skirmishing duties).

After the component pieces have been glued down, I apply a layer of fine sand over thinned down PVA on the base. I leave out a small corner section for the unit label and I glue down a steel shim for magnetized markers (more on that later).

Once the sand dries, I prime the base dark brown, and then apply an overspray of grey to help 'lift' lighter colours used later in the process. The groundwork is then painted a chocolate brown, drybrushed up with a mid and light browns and finally ending in a light khaki dusting. I just use cheap craft paint for all this work. 

Yes, the base looks a bit wierd at this point, but the next step will set things to right. The base is given several coats of green emulsion from Woodland Scenics. A great product as I find it gives a very nice semi-opaque green effect to the groundwork. 

Next is painting the figures themselves. Because of the extremely small scale, I typically use very bright (and very unhistorical) colours so they're easier to see on the tabletop. I simply paint the top half in the 'national' tunic colour - in this case a fairly vibrant blue for the French. I then paint an off-white strip along the bottom and highlight to indicate their trousers. 

The light blue is then inked (or washed) with a darker shade. This will sink into the recesses and temporarily darken the overall tone. For the French I use Liquitex Prussian Blue ink (yeah, go figure).

I then highlight with the original colour (light blue in this case) with a few additional spots further lifted with some white mixed in. This gives the figures a bit more depth and aids in their overall visibility. 

In order to make the figures better stand out on the base, I outline the formation with a dark brown mixed with a touch of black to create a shadow effect.

Usually the flags are the most fiddly part of the process, but I think the extra time invested really finishes off the base nicely. The French tricolour is fairly easy to do, whereas the British Union Jack can be a bit of a bear!

Aaand that's it for painting the figures. Yes, its very, VERY basic, but I've found that less is more when working with these smaller scales - if you try to paint too much detail it can often muddy the overall effect.

Now, we're almost done: The bases are given a very light scatter of fine flock over thinned PVA. Not too much though, just an impression, going heavy on the flock can often overwhelm the figures.

Finally I touch up the base edge with dark brown, affix a unit label at the bottom corner and magnetize the bottom for safe transport. Done!

The crescent shaped bases are skirmishers.

An early test game using the figures (no highlighting or flocking yet - slacker). You can see some of the magnetic casualty status markers on a few of the French units.

I can usually get around 4-6 bases done during an evening's sitting, so roughly a brigade. In preparations for our first game I managed to get 20 battalions of infantry, 4 cavalry regiments and 2 artillery batteries done in around 2 weeks of work - I certainly couldn't have done that in 28mm! 

Two regiments of French cavalry in line supporting a brigade of infantry.

Status Markers

I like using roster sheets to keep tabletop clutter to a minimum and for this project I wanted to take it further by having that ability to denote status right on top of the unit. For example, in GDA units can endure around 8-15 points of damage before breaking. I equated this to three levels/stages of attrition which a unit can be marked: blue for light damage, yellow for medium and red for critical. This way opposing players don't have perfect intelligence on precisely how knocked about an enemy unit is. 

So to do this I purchased a pack of magnetic map 'pins' and then spray painted them in the three status colours. I keep them affixed to a thin steel sheet handy for the players to pull from. 

During games we simply pick off the markers we need from the steel sheet and place them on the steel square located on the bottom left of each unit. This provides a relatively minimalist approach to marking unit status without having to use dice, counters, etc.

This French brigade is a bit of a bad way. The lovely tree bases are by the very talented Mr. Miles Reidy.

Storage

Storage is frequently a struggle for many miniature gamers as there just doesn't seem to be enough room to squirrel away all the shiny things we acquire. A great aspect of collecting microscale armies is that their storage and transport is SOOOO much easier than dealing with larger scales. 

For this project I found that I could use inexpensive photo scrapbooking containers sourced from one of our local big box craft stores. 

The larger containers can carry two of the thinner cases. I've estimated that each nationality could fit in four of the smaller cases, all nestled in two of the larger containers. Since they were available in multiple colours I snagged a pair for most of the nations' livery, red for British, light blue for French, white for Austrians/Spanish, and dark blue for Prussians. I just need to find a set of green cases for the Russians...

This entire project, encompassing five national armies, will fit in 10 cases. This makes it not only very compact to store, but is also fairly straightforward to select, transport and use during games. 

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Okay, <phew> there you have it. A VERY long post (sorry about that!) of me describing how I spent a good portion of my summer evenings. A bit mental, but good fun.

I plan to do a few more updates on this project in order to cover terrain and a few oddball formations/units. Also, keep an eye out for a Peninsular War scenario that we've developed using these figures; that will be coming up soon as well.

Thanks for dropping in folks. Have a great week!

Next up: Sisters of Battle!