Lasalle optional Victory Point system

We’ve been using this down at the club in Toronto for about a year or so now. I originally came up with it because of a few peeves with the rules – it was difficult to get a decisive victory if your opponent had cavalry and you didn’t, which really made the Austrian Avant-Garde a hard army to bear. Also, it made victories for Guard armies almost impossible – if you are subject to Send in the Guards, you need to win by a decisive victory or your opponent claims a minor victory. If a Guard army doesn’t take lots of light cavalry, then it’s unlikely he’s going to be able to get enough pursuit points to enable him to claim a major victory, and against the Avant-Garde, that’s going to be really difficult if the player takes Hussars and especially if they attack – a large Uhlans and large Hussars on top of 4 Hussars is pretty much unbeatable. A really cheesy tactic for anyone facing Guard armies would be to use your light cavalry units to whip around the back of the table far from your opponent, while your infantry block any enemy cavalry from getting to them – just wait for the game to time out and you’ve won a minor victory. That was not what I would call fun, so I came up with these rules instead. After quite a bit of playtesting, I’ve modified them slightly so that in order to get a decisive victory, you need to either take objectives, inflict more casualties, or have a higher pursuit sscore, and two or more of these would be better. Guard armies are still penalised, and need to make sure they really steamroller their opponents, but they can get by with a minor victory now.

Second Infantry Unit Done (sort of): IR 60 Gyulai

As with my first Infantry unit, as you can see from the pic below, I’ve painted and glued the front rank of this unit. As a quick update, I’ve now completed the front rank of every infantry unit I’m painting up, and have started with the second ranks of each unit. This allows me to field painted troops rather than just bases, which is a better place to be in. Within the next few weeks I should be able to get all the second ranks painted too, and then I’ll be basing them. My next update should show some of my Grenzers for a change. This time, though, I’m focusing on IR 60 Gyulai, a Hungarian infantry unit:

 

IR 60 Gyulai

At long last, an update

Been a while since the last post, but a recent Lasalle game at the club (which I umpired) and the entrance of a new member who wants to play Lasalle has spurred me on to take some photos of completed (sort of) units. I’ve also been at work on painting up a few more units too, though not at MichaelD’s rate, which appears to be roughly a new army every week. At the moment, I have almost all my core forces completed (sort of) – cavalry are painted and based, infantry have first ranks painted and based, though proper basing (basing materials, flock etc have not been put on yet.  As soon as I have all units for my core + 1 support ‘completed’ to this standard, I’ll be able to play a few games while I get to work painting second ranks of infantry. As soon as I get all those done, I can work on the Hussar support and do a proper job of basing them to match my Jagers. I want to base them all at the same time so that they all look the same rather than run the risk of running out of flock and not having the same type for the rest of the army.

First Infantry Unit Done (sort of): IR 3 Erzherzog Karl

I’ve been busy with school (again), but I did manage to find time to do a bit of painting. As you can see from the pics below, I’ve decided to do the front rank of each unit first, so that I can get the figures painted up quicker – when I’ve gotten all the front rank done for each unit, I’ll then work my way through the second ranks for each unit.

IR 3 Erzherzog Karl

Jagers completed

That’s the first unit done, at any rate. I ended up with a few spare figures, so I based them on dimes to use as skirmisher bases. I think I’ll do this with the other units too. I have 4 skirmisher bases for the Jagers – it’s a SK2 unit, but if I decide to split it out into 4 skirmisher bases, I can do so. My skirmisher bases for all units are going to be a single figure mounted on a dime, I think.

Jagers

As far as painting goes, I used dark flesh then flesh for well, the fleshy parts, boots and other leather was black with a really faint highlight of very dark grey. The coats on the top of the packs were black, drybrushed dark grey. Uniforms were dark grey, with a heavy highlight of light grey, and a light drybrush in an even lighter grey. Guns were dark brown drybrushed lighter brown for the wood, and gunmetal drybrushed silver for the metal parts. Hats were lack, drybrushed with very dark grey, as were pouches etc. Powder horns were medium brown drybrushed light brown, and the packs were dark brown, drybrushed medium brown. Other decoration was gold (horn, commander’s sash etc), the ponpoms yellow and black, and the facings dark green.

Jagers 2

For the bases, I used air-drying clay and coarse gel, painted dark brown, then highlighted light brown, added flock, grass and some bushes here and there, as well as a couple of clay rocks.

Austrian Avant-Garde vs Russian Grenadiers

We had a bit of a bash to try out the Lasalle rules last night, pitting some Austrians against some Russians, both from the Empire theatre – just about all our club’s forces are going to be Empire theatre-based, I think. Since neither my opponent (Anthony) nor I have finished working on our armies, we just used the bases, without figures on them – sacrilege I know, and some of you will be shaking your heads with dismay, but it worked enough for us to try out the rules and get used to them. I’ve often found that the best spur to finishing off an army is to have a game or two using the rules to get used to them – now we can’t wait to get them finished so we can have a ‘proper’ game.

An update at last!

I’ve been busy marking papers and exams for the last few weeks, but in the meantime, my copy of Lasalle arrived, and very nice it is too. My AB command figures and flags also arrived, though because of the papers and exams, I haven’t had chance to do any more painting. To make up for my absence, however, I’ve done a review of the game:

The latest in a series of recent releases for Napoleonic wargaming in a ‘glossy’ format (Napoleon, Black Powder, etc), Lasalle, from the author of Grand Armée, Sam Mustafa, is a petit-tactical game that covers roughly a division or so, plus supporting units. The time period covered is from around 1805 through till the Hundred Days campaign in 1815 (thus omitting the Revolutionary period). The game should be able to be played in about 2-3 hours, and thus is an excellent candidate for playing a game in an evening at the club, rather than some previous Napoleonic rules which encouraged you to set aside a month or so to finish off a game. As far as presentation goes, this book is a beauty – filled with photos of 6mm, 10mm, 15mm, 25mm and 40mm figures painted to an excellent standard, as well as copious diagrams to aid in understanding the various situations described in the rules. The writing is clear and eminently understandable, does not degenerate (like some wargames rules do) into jargon-filled paragraphs, and offers many examples of play (with the aforementioned diagrams).

The Jagers are underway

Well, sort of. I’ve undercoated the Jagers (with a few spares) and mounted them on painting bases. I superglued them to plastic bases (they simply snap off when I’m done, since the glue is pretty brittle), then painted them using black artist’s gesso. I prefer black undercoat, as I can then give a thick drybrush over with the base uniform colour and keep some of the deep shadow in places where it’s meant to be. I use gesso for two reasons – firstly, we live in a basement, and spraying with an aerosol isn’t a great idea, and secondly, by painting it on, I find that I get much, much better coverage – there’s nothing to touch up afterwards, and no part of the figure gets overly sprayed. Gesso goes on quite thick, but tightens as it dries, so at first it looks like you’re obscuring a lot of detail, but after a few hours to dry, it really picks out the detail for later painting. I use Tri-Art black gesso; I bought a 250ml jar of it about 3 years ago, have used it to paint 3 armies so far, and I’ve still got about 95% of it left, in the same condition as when I first opened it.

Undercoated Jagers, waiting to dry.

As you can see from the pic, it looks really gloopy and thick, and glossy at the moment, but it will tighten and become a nice matte black after a few hours.

 

Close up of freshly undercoated Jagers

Bases

Since the majority of my figures have now arrived, I’ve turned my attention to bases. Previously, I’m mostly made do with thick card which I’ve cut up. Unfortunately, since the nearest thing to precision instruments I’ve used are scissors and a ruler and pencil, my bases haven’t been perfect up till now. When I was looking for a local-ish supplier of bases for my Field of Glory HYW English army, however, I came across www.50paces.com who are Canadian (which means I won’t run the risk of getting dinged on international postage / customs fees), and who do great bases, of some kind of plastic material stuff with either metal or magnet bottoms. Bryan, the owner, is a great bloke too, really friendly and helpful, so I like to use his bases whenever possible. They’re all precision cut, which means that unlike my previous  efforts, all my units take up the same space. For storage and transport, I tend to use plastic arts supplies containers with steel paper stuck to the bottom, and magnet bottoms on my bases. There’s still some movement, but not much. Since for Lasalle we’re using 40mm x 30mm bases for Infantry and Cavalry, and 40mm square bases for artillery, I ordered a load more bases from Bryan at 50 Paces, and they’re now winging their way to me. For officers, I’ve gone for 30mm square bases – smaller (and so easily identifiable as being different to normal bases)  but large enough to fit 2 mounted commanders on each. To denote casualties / unit cohesion dropping, I’ve decided to use dead / wounded figures on hexagonal bases, which I’ll mark up with 1-6 around the outside edges – whichever edge is touching the unit will show how many (0-5) factors are in play for each unit. 50 Paces doesn’t do the latter two sized bases, so I’ve had to order from www.Litkoaero.com, who do nice wooden bases (amongst others) with magnets you can stick on the bottom yourself. The height of the bases should be pretty much the same as my 50 Paces ones, but since the Litko ones are being used only for command figures and casualties, any difference shouldn’t matter.

Warmodelling have arrived!

My Warmodelling / Fantassin figures have arrived; There was a minor error with the order (my Uhlans apparently have dismounted, since they have no horsies with them). One quick email to Warmodelling, and a swift reply came back apologising and promising to have the missing figures in the post immediately.

The figures themselves are beautiful – very little flash or mould lines, a decent assortment of good poses, no anatomical weirdness, and from what I can tell (I’m a medievalist, not a Napoleonic expert, and I specialise in monasticism, not military history), their gear is also correct. It took me about 2 hours to clean them up – remove what little flash was there (mostly on the horses) and level off the bases, which wasn’t bad considering there are 6 cannon, 86 horses and about 400 little blokes. Despite the large number of figures, not a single bayonet was broken off, and no-one has had their legs break off from their base, even where figures are charging and only affixed by one leg. Pretty impressive.

Here’s a quick pic of them, sorted into bags for units and after having been cleaned up:

Austrian Avant Garde (15mm Warmodelling)