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.
I’ll be posting new posts sometime in the next few days with pics and info on the units I’ve completed, when I have enough time and the desire to take a break from completing my thesis. Coming soon are my Hungarian infantry unit (IR 60 Gyulai), two Grenz units (the 6th, Broder or Brooder, and the 7th, St Georger), Uhlans (2nd Schwarzenberg), Hussars (10th Stipsicz), and Cuirassiers (1st Kaiser). Next up for painting are the third (and last) of my infantry units (Germans, in the new shako, IR 50 Stain), my second unit of Cuirassiers (6th, Liechtenstein, two sets of horse artillery and my command bases. This will give me a playable army (in attack or defence) with a Cuirassier reserve support option. As soon as these are done, the second infantry ranks will be next up, followed by my Hussar support – the 3rd (Erzherzog Ferdinand), 6th (Blankenstein), 7th (Liechtenstein) and 8th (Kienmayer).
After they are all complete, I might do a few more support options – Grenadiers perhaps, which would be easy to expand to a core Grenadier army, or Infantry so I can get a few units of Landwehr or Militia units thrown in there for good measure (I’d like to do some Vienna Volunteers and a few others), as well as a few more Hungarian and German units. Failing that, I might go for another army completely – at the moment Duchy of Warsaw sound compelling – but that will probably be after I complete my thesis and start earning money again.
It was fun umpiring a Lasalle game, and I’d be up for doing so again. One of the players (Prussians, MarkE) has played a few times, so has a decent grasp of the rules, but the other (French, MichaelD) was playing for the first time, so we did away with all optional rules other than “I’m with Stupid” which limits the commander to a shorter command radius for direct command, and which is a must if you want to avoid the cheesy my-crap-subcommander-is-staying-all-the-way-over-here business that some players seem to have adopted elsewhere. Luckily the players at our club are relatively immune to that cheesy crap. We also played the straight Lasalle endgame rather than use my variant VP system – given that it was Michael’s first game, I wanted it to be as straight as possible to avoid confusion. We timed out at turn 16 (due to the shop shutting), with even casualties at that time, so I called it as a draw. Michael’s cuirrassier reserve had only just entered play but with some good manouevring (and a little luck) he might have been able to force his way to Mark’s objective. Having said that, Mark is a canny player, and might just as easily have stopped them from getting to their destination through judicial use of infantry squares and counter-charging Hussars.
All in all, it was a fun game, and I’m now hoping to complete my Austrian Avant-Garde army by the end of the month so I can get some more games in myself. I’m under a self-imposed ban on playing any game without painted miniatures, so this gives me the impetus to get finished as soon as I can. Talking of which, I’m also working on completing my English Hundred Years War army for Impetus, so that will be the next project I take up after I get this army completed. And I really should get that FoW Irish Guards army finished up too…
