For the first time in two months, I picked up a paint brush. With the prep for the move, the move, unpacking from the move, getting into the new (hectic) job at work, and going on vacation, I just haven’t had time.
After the last play test of Look, Sarge, No Charts: Napoleonic Wars at a HAWKs club night, I wanted to make some changes to the base labels. So yesterday, I relabeled all my French and Austrian figures.

The rules worked pretty well that night — even with folks who don’t like Napoleonics. At Historicon, one of the players observed that for combat you wanted to roll high, but for morale you wanted to roll low. I share that frustration with rules design. The fact that sometimes you wanted high and sometimes low was a hold-over from an earlier morale and skirmisher concept for LSNC:NW. I was able to reverse the morale number so that the best kind of troops have a morale of “1” for “first class troops.” This made all aspects of LSNC:NW consistent — you always want to roll high.
(I just noticed that in the picture above, the are two “left side” bases and no “right side” base. A battalion consists of two bases (a left and a right to get a complete label). This allows Napoleonic battalions to be formed into column, line, and square.)
In the process of rebasing all these figures, I found that I have several battalions of Russian infantry. I have based them, but I haven’t labeled them yet.

This weekend I also had a chance to start on some 10mm Old Glory French legere. I am painting four battalions of them. The Old Glory 10mm figures come on the five-figure strips you see. Six strips makes a battalion of infantry for countries that fought three ranks deep. That’s 30 figures to a battalion. At this point in the painting, you can see the black priming, blue uniforms, white belts and turnbacks, flesh on faces and hands, and brown muskets. I hope to finish the shakos, including the yellow/green and red plumes before the end of the day.
I have been dreading painting 10mm Napoleonic figures, but in practice, it’s not as onerous as I thought it would be.
In rebasing, I discovered that I have just about two complete corps of French infantry, but I’m missing the light cavalry that would be in a corp. This uses the 1806 order of battle for Davout (III Corps) and Lannes (V Corps). I have a large corps of Austrians. I’ve ordered some Grenzers and Jaegers to get the Austrians to a good state. I have a bunch of unpainted Prussians to begin as well.