I've been giving more thought recently as to which set of rules I'd like to focus on for my Napoleonic games. To tell the truth, I've owned far more sets then I've ever played, or even got round to reading, and I often made snap purchases of this or that ruleset whilst building up my collection of minis last year. I was happy to browse the possibilities, always feeling sure that I'd settle on something eventually.
But I never really did, and not having a particular game in mind has, I think, allowed the project to lose a bit of steam.
Despite dabbling with various rulesets, popular or otherwise - and also (briefly) contemplating making my own rules cannibalised from all the bits I liked from other people's - there is really only one game that I have played consistently. As you can probably guess from the blog post title, that game is Commands and Colors.
I bought the Ancients version of C&C years ago and loved it so much I quickly acquired the Napoleonic version, which I also throughly enjoyed. I added several of the expansions and, for a while, was more than content to play the game out of the box using the pretty blocks and the terrain tiles.
Like many other gamers, however, I soon desired to convert the experience into one involving miniatures rather than the wooden blocks. I did manage this a few times, but only in a limited fashion. My relatively small figure collections meant that units were only thinly represented and the overall effect wasn't the superior experience to boardgame I hoped for.
Besides my 20mm French and Prussian armies, I have a some Austrians and French in 10mm, and experimented with both of these scales using Hexon terrain tiles from Kallistra.
For my own tastes, the 20mm figures are only a modestly good fit for Kallistra's 4-inch hexes. A comfortable number would be about 12 figures I reckon, which might satisfy some folk, but it doesn't really give the density of troops I'm looking for.
24 figures is better, but at this point things get awkward with regards to leaving space for trees and buildings.
The issue of space is as much a problem for 20mm cavalry figures. It just feels a bit cramped.
My 10mm mins on the other hand are much better suited to the 4-inch tiles, which is no great surprise since Hexon tiles go hand in hand with Kallistra's own 12mm figure ranges. If I wanted to do Commands and Colors using 10mm minis - and I do plan on doing this one day - then these 4-inch hexes will be my product of choice. But, at the moment my preference is for something a bit bigger.
So, back to the 20mm figures and I started experimenting with other sizes of hex, including 5, 6 an 7 inches. 5-inch hexes are an improvement (obviously), but still don't quite deliver the overall look I'm aiming for. 7 inches is luxurious and roomy - a bit like a super king size bed - but the resulting table size would be an issue for this house (as would a super king size bed, sadly). In the end, a 6-inch hex seemed like the best compromise all round.
I found that using this size will allow me to field a decent mass of troops on each hex, whether infantry or cavalry, whilst still leaving a reasonable amount of space for terrain. Crucially, the existing base sizes in my collection are well suited to it, so I won't need to consider any rebasing terribleness. For infantry, it will mean 36-figure units; for cavalry, I'm looking 12 figures in a unit. Light infantry will be something similar to line but with a few open order bases mixed in, while artillery units will probably consist of two bases. Leaders will be based separately as the game requires.
Being the tidy sort, I rather like my unit frontages to be roughly the same, and again this works out quite well. Infantry units are 105mm across, while cavalry is not far off this at 90mm.
The only problem with all this lovely massing of figures is the fact that I will need rather a lot more of them! But, Rome was built in a day as they say, and neither are most miniatures collections.
Rather than let this post ramble on too long, I'll sign off now and return in a day or two to share my thoughts on the many other details of this project and what I'll be doing next for it. Elsewhere, the modular terrain tiles I showed in previous posts will still be getting worked on occasionally, but might not see any meaningful battle action until some point further in the future.
In the meantime, I'm rather excited to be releasing the pause button on getting on with the 20mm Napoleonics again. Huzzah!
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