Painting progress and winter doldrums

Lack of blog activity is mainly due to the Black Dog caused by grey winter skies, increasing work frustration and not being able to afford to retire as well as recurring aches and pains....

The last few weekends have slipped by without a lot of progress, only managing to clean up and undercoat some more Spencer Smith cavalry for the Soldier King project. As I indicated, completing Dupanen was something of a milestone on the road of progress. Sadly, it's not the end of the work or painting.

Originally, I had intended to use the GDW game Soldier King as is to create armies. The game works on recruitment points. Each province has a value and so to do some cities. To get the value of the province, you must own all the cities. The four kingdoms each have two provinces with a combined value of 12 points.

My initial army recruitment and painting followed this, so each army would have 12 units. The game pieces which relate to the recruitment are infantry, heavy cavalry and light cavalry. Martin SC attempted a conversion to Volley & Bayonet whereby each playing piece became a "column", roughly a brigade of 4 units plus attached artillery. The problem became that the armies were huge, leading to titanic battles.

I realised my armies were too small but Martin's solution too huge - the thought of endless painting was simply not viable. My solution was to double the 12 unit armies to 24 with 4 artillery pieces which seemed about right and much more manageable. Thus, Bravance and Hrvatska had 12 additional units added and Argozia and Arcadia 24 units from the start. Other states (when this idea was incorporated) had been planned on the original 1 recruitment point = 1 unit. This necessitated a lot of tweaking, which I was never entirely satisfied with.

I also realised that light units whether foot or horse were half the size of infantry or cavalry so attempted to work on a half value for them. Again this was not quite right, so in the end I crunched the numbers to get something workable.

The current system is that it requires 1 resource point from the game to recruit a brigade of heavy cavalry or regiment of infantry and 1/2 a resource point to maintain them. Light troops are 1/2 a resource point to raise and 1/4 to maintain, so need to be raised / maintained in pairs. I had thought about keeping the cost as they were specialists, but this seemed to work better. 

I decided that the four kingdoms and some other states are on a war footing from the start - so all 12 resource points are being used to maintain existing units. The only way to increase is by gaining extra resource points, ether via war or diplomacy.....

It means the Estavian Empire and Electoral states are below full war footing - this I justify as due to neglect and ramshackle institutions. There are plans to paint reinforcements for both, but this will still not bring them to a full war footing. States nearer to the kingdoms, being under greater threat, are at full war footing....

The result for the kingdoms was some quick recalculations and a realisation that Arcadia was in effect stronger than the others...

Hence, Bravance, Hrvatska and Argozia will each receive an extra cavalry brigade. This has meant some ad-hoc uniform planning and extra painting. Flags exist only in my head, much like the uniforms.

This weekend saw new units for Bravance and Hrvatska muster out.

Bravance Emigre Cuirassiers

Hrvatska - working title Royal Carabiniers