Reinforcements Arrive

Those of you on the OSW group have taught me well that the thing to do when you don't have time to paint your figures is to buy new ones, right? ;)

So, this is just what I've done, but with a vaguely valid excuse behind it. To paint the figures one must settle them into units, so that one can provide the proper indicators of the unit to which they belong. And to settle them into units, one must do two things:

1) settle on a rule set, in order to know whether one is painting units of 12 figures or 48 figures.
2) Provide the proper mixture of figures to represent the units of the selected size.

I'm still struggling with the former, but I think I'm starting to sort things out a bit. In the process, however, I've identified some deficiencies in the figures I already have. There's some lacks among the poses that I needed to address, and a portion of my new purchases are sets chosen because of their proportions of certain figures. For instance, the Zvezda French infantry have 4 foot officers per box. If I limit myself to one officer figure pure unit, this should permit me to utilize some of the excess officers to command the officer-poor figures from other manufacturers.

The other portion of the new figures deal with balancing my army better. There were, before this purchase 498 French soldiers, compared to 183 British. And both armies had a lack of light or medium cavalry.

Therefore, I've purchased the following:

cavalry:
3 boxes Zvezda French Dragoons
4 boxes HaT King's German Legion Light Dragoons (British)

infantry:
3 boxes Zvezda French Infantry
2 boxes Italeri British/Scot Infantry
3 boxes HaT Prussian Landwehr

I wanted more Prussians, but just couldn't afford them right now. 3 boxes gives me a core for some good battalions, however, and I can try to scrape together money for more later.

The French infantry do further unbalance my raw numbers, but that should be compensated for by selling excess troops once I've settled on my desired regiments. My existing troops were bulk lots of mixed figures from varying manufacturers, and I believe are the excess from someone else's purchases, so I'll be continuing that tradition I think.

I endeavored to buy no less than 3 boxes of each type, credit for which concept goes to Donald Featherstone's little outlay of 5 "reasonable regiments" from 3 boxes of Airfix figures. This, combined with looking at examples from other wargaming blogs of their own unit compositions has swayed me towards the idea of battalions formed of 1 or at most 2 poses for the bulk of the figures, excluding officers and standard bearers and so forth. So I tried to select sets that could work towards that and provide several battalions of similar figures. The seeming exception to my rule of 3 is the Italeri British, which were chosen to match up to existing figures I already have and round out the numbers to 48 figures of each of the three main British poses.