Summer Slow Down

It has been a hot and humid week with all the usual side effects but the Mamlukes have crept along to completion.  Like the rest of the squadron, its a super basic job with some pretty shaky edges but they'll look just fine on the table top.

Yes, the smoke puff on the pistol is just a photo prop. Without it, you'd have to look verrry closely, and have a good imagination, to identify the stick in his hand as a pistol. Well, I say stick, it was originally a miscast sabre, now with a bit of cutting and filing, some  epoxy putty, and an application of forgiving imagination, its a pistol.

Now, having said that I wasn't going to talk about how I decided on the unit organization, a reader (Who will be anonymous unless you go back and read his comment on the previous post.)  has asked me to share my thoughts on it, so here we are, as short as I can make it. 

At Huzzah 2019, Rob Dean (Sharp End of the Brush blog) and I ran some 40mm homecast Not Quite the Seven Years War games using a new quick play version of With MacDuff To the Frontier but we also found some table space to play a couple of games of A Gentleman's War and decided that we should run some sort of AGW event at Huzzah 2020. 

With MacDuff at Sittangbad during the Not Quite The Seven Years War

After giving the details some thought after getting home, I managed to talk him into breaking out his 40mm Scarlet Pimpernal figures, promising to add enough figures to allow us to run a multiplayer AGW scenario using the AGW special characters, Spy, Mistress, Spycatcher etc. I set to work casting, converting and painting figures but then, alomg came COVID and Huzzah 2020 was cancelled. As a consolation, we did a 1 videochat AGW French Rev   to see how it might work.     . 

First outing for my nascent 40mm French Revolution 'armies'. 
40mm with A Gentleman's Wargame rules over the internet.
(Note the mistress who kept distracting my commander!) 

At this point, I was using the recommended basic units of 12 infantry or 6 cavalry or skirmishers. (Yes, finally, I am getting to the point.)  Now, I enjoy AGW as a 1 on 1 game, or even a 2 person team vs the same, but I find that the card activation and combat bonus mechanism which is in many ways the heart and soul of the system (my opinion only) pales or worse in solo games where there is no question of trying to figure out what cards your opponent might hold and when he might plan to use them, so that whole battle of minds and nerves aspect is lost and it become a bit like solo poker compelte with betting. In multi player games its even worse if trying to play a scenario because the options are basically to follow the suggestion of the game being designed for pairs of opponents fighting each other at their own pace with occasional overlap or having one player on each side being commander in charge of the activation while the rest handled their assigned units when the general activated them. So I fell back on old habits and started looking at options. 

The first option I considered was to use the current quick version of With MacDuff which we had used for the Sittingbad game but that brought me back to "same thing with different hats" .  It was hard to justify to myself building another set of 40mm horse and musket armies,just because I like the uniforms better! (I was hoping different rules and a different level of scenarios would give  me a viable excuse for the duplication.) 

After a few test games, I decided to expand the infantry to 16 figures. The plan was to eventually match this by increasing the cavalry to 8 figures to maintain the traditional scenario setup of cavalry being 1/2 the strength of infantry. 

The latest game with 8 man "companies" but allowing these to break in half for special missions or to occupy a small redoubt or building. The cavalry units, (not used here) are 6 strong for no reason other than that's what I have cast and painted up, and I'm lazy.

This worked fine for pitched battles but for small actions, raids and so on, it wasn't quite right. So I decided to organize the infantry into 8 figure "companies", leaving the cavalry at 6 figures because thats how they were painted and I didn't feel like doing more right away!  This looked promising but deploying outposts or occupying buildings was still problematic, so I started thinking about adding 2 more figures to each battalion so as to increase them from 2x8 figure companies to 3x6 figure companies. (6 figures fitting even my smaller buildings.)  

Then I slapped myself in the head and decided that there was no reason to make work for myself, just to conform to an artificial organization structure.  Allowing units to detach 4 figures for special jobs, like I did in the recent West Indies game, was easier and didn't require an over haul of all my units, and, I didn't really need my cavalry units to be exactly half the strength of a full infantry unit. Whatever the theory, what I had was working just fine in practice and I have better ways to waste time.