Dipping my toes into Napoleonics
Snippathon '24
480 snipsTo create one unit of French line infantry, it takes a minimum of 480 snips, the way I’m doing it: 40 snips per line, times 3 per base times 4 bases is 480 snips for a unit, excluding those for the standard bearer, musician and commander. I’m not terribly interested in the Peninsular Campaign, but I do envy British players, who only have to make two lines per base… These half thousand snips did allow me to finish my second French unit!
Blue cossacks and light satellites
As promised previously I now went with the cossacks in blue. More or less in tandem, I worked on the third line unit for the French army: the so-called satellite infantry. By this the client states of the French are meant, e.g. the Duchy of Warsaw, Naples, various German states (not the Kingdom of Holland though; we were there, but by then annexed into France). I will discuss the army composition I’m going for in a future post, but for now it suffices that this is an obligatory choice in the French army for the 1812 invasion into Russia.
To differentiate these from the regular French line infantry, I chose the Light infantry, because Peter’s Paper Boys didn’t printout sheet for these specifically. In hindsight, I should perhaps have chosen the infantry in greatcoats, which may have been more historically accurate, but I’m going to cut myself some slack, since I’m just getting into this.
I think it is a bit of a pity that the background for the top half of the light infantry lines is white, rather than the green of the line infantry. This wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t cut corners (well, I cut fewer of those), but it does make them more recognisable on the table.
I did run into a previously encountered problem, however. Do you remember the cossacks on hills? The cardboard base started bending because of the wet wood glue. In case of the cossacks, it bent front to back, meaning that it had no effect on the cossacks. I hadn’t noticed this with the second unit of line infantry, but the bend was very obvious with the light/satellite infantry and goes from side to side!
This means that some of the men seem to be taking off!
While in civil service I learned that “most problems, if left long enough, will fix themselves”, and this has proven true once again. In fact, the aforementioned cossacks that were afflicted by the same problem came to stand on flat bases again in the end as well.
And here are some images of the cossacks being fine.
PS: I was asked why I didn't just do this. Wouldn't have been the same.
Great to see more progress being made. At a distance, the blue of the light infantry looks close enough for Duchy of Warsaw, and you can’t really tell if their wearing czapka or shakos, so I think it is a good choice. I was going to ask if you had an idea of how big a collection you’d be putting together, but you’ve answered that with the post it note in the last image.
Thanks! And also good to know that they look like infantry from the Duchy. That puts my mind at ease 🙂 So, the game specifies that each side has eight units. The units on the post-it are a bit outdated, but I’ll get into the lists I’m actually building in a (not too much in the) future post.