amaThembu (No. 1 Company 1/3rd NNC)

Tonight I completed No. 1 Company 1/3rd NNC, this is a company made up of men from the amaThembu people in Natal. The shield colours are conjectural so I picked a set of colours for each of the different tribes that make up the battalion. The first 4 companies were all amaThembu, the 5th and 7th were made up of late comers so will have mixed shield colours, the 6th company is amaBele which will have black shields as will the final 3 companies that are made up of isiGqosa - I will vary the markings on the shields to make the companies look distictive. Incidentally the isiGqosa were Zulus that had left the Zulu kingdom some years before, they were probably the best troops in the battalion and were highly rated by the battalions commander Commandant G. Hamilton-Brown (his book A Lost Legionary in South Africa is available online - be warned that although of historical value it, along with other books written at the time, isn't very PC).

The full company including its command stand:

A close up of the NNC bases:

1st AZW NNC Company WIP

Some work in progress pictures of No. 1 Company 1/3rd NNC:

AZW NNC Company Command Bases

Here are the first set of command bases for the first 3 companies of the 1/3rd Regiment NNC, not the best of pictures I'm afraid:

These weren't too difficult to paint up really and I'm quite pleased with the way these (and the other figures) have come out. I've completed 26 bases now. All figures are from Baccus.

Roman Cohort

I rebased the first of my Romans this evening, they seem to look better now I've increased the number of figures from 16 to 24 per base. Overall I'm pleased with the way they've turned out:

Should I choose to model a full legion it will have 9 of these bases plus a "double sized" 1st cohort which will be modelled slightly understrength at 36 figures as that fits nicely on to the same width base as the other cohorts. Now it's a case of deciding whether to add a "barbarian" opponent or build forces for the Year of Four Emperors (69AD) which has been in the back of my mind for years as a potential project? All figures are Baccus.

First Anglo-Zulu War Companies Finished (well nearly anyway!)

The first 6 companies for my Anglo-Zulu War Project have now been flocked, heres some close ups:

Two Zulu Companies

Zulus, Natal Carbineers and Natal Mounted Police

These bases are complete now but the Mounted Infantry need a troop HQ each and mounted versions of each base (the troop HQ's will not need dismounted versions). 

6mm Ancient Thoughts

For a while now I have been thinking of a way to get back to using my 6mm Ancient Armies using Dr Phil Hendry's Avgvstvs to Avrelian. Finally this morning I cracked how I was going to base the figures up as I have struggled to find a satisfactory method of doing it that either looks right with a small number of figures or doesn't commit me to painting 1000's of Ancient Britons/Parthians/Ancient Germans because my Roman Cohorts are too big. Initially I based the Romans in Cohorts 64 figures strong but the amount of "barbarians" I'd have to do to make a decent opponent for the Romans would of been well beyond my abilities in painting irregularly dressed figures.

Having progressed with the Zulu Project I had realised that by separating the figures from the strips they are cast in made painting them far far easier. Its only necessary to do this with strips based in ranks, those in file have enough separation between them. However I would separate the strips in file if the figures will be painted with different clothing colours for each one. I would then paint batches of similarly clothed figures to speed things up then mix them in with the other figures when basing them up. Why I didn't think of doing this years ago I don't know especially as I use this method for larger scale figures.

I have three ideas for ancients, which are:

A project based around Pyrrhus' invasion of Italy in 280BC

A project continuing with with Early Imperial Romans (EIR) of which have in substantial numbers I would then need to add an appropriate opponent.

A project based around the Wars of the Roses - I might pick a particular battle or series of battles in the war and recreate the forces fielded there not necessarily with the intention of refighting a particular battle but just to give me some rough troop type ratios to work from. However details are rather sketchy around some of the battles so it may be a bit of a challenge to work out who was there and in what numbers.

The figure to man ratio would be about 1:20 for the 2nd two ideas and 1:30 for the armies in the 1st idea. Basing wise each period may well end up different as I do not like doing battles between unhistorical opponents (e.g. EIR vs Medieval Germans or New Kingdom Egyptian vs Vikings). Any figures for the ancient period would be taken from Baccus' ranges.

I think this weekend I will try out some basing ideas with my EIR figures and take things from there. I also have loads of Biblicals in 6mm (Baccus New Kingdom Egyptians and Hittites) though I haven't quite worked out exactly how to put the 6 part chariots together.

1/2 a BKCII Game

I managed to get in half of an 8 turn BKCII early Russian Front game this evening, unfortunately I lost about an hour setting the table up but I had to sort stuff out to make space for my small 4' x 3' table (which incidentally must be getting on a bit now as my Dad built it for me some 20+ years ago).

The game itself went well although it was probably a little on the slow side simply because I kept looking things up (it is only my 2nd game after all and playing solo doesn't help either but wargamers are few and far between in Lancashire). The Russians deployed a full tank regiment from the 2nd Tank Division, 3rd Mechanised Corps; the Germans deployed Panzer Regiment 1, 1st Panzer Division. The first two turns consisted of a burst of movement followed by an almost complete failure on my part to roll well and activate anything. On top of all that the Russian CO blundered on his 1st activation and promptly left the table!

During turns 3 and 4 both sides continued to advance and commenced firing at each other. Another blunder saw a BT-7 destroyed by the blunder outcome (it ended up taking 12 hits!). The Germans managed to take out a KV-2 but it was hard work as the KV tanks have a 4+ save and the Germans suffered losses in return. I halted the game at this point as I'd run out of time.

I jotted down a few things to learn from this game, these are:

1. It may well be better to have a HQ per company (it would only be able to command it's own company though) for the Germans just to give them the opportunity to out manoeuvre the Russians. This would obviously need to be balanced out by the number of Russian units fielded. A rough ratio of 1 German battalion to 1 Russian regiment might be right if the Germans have a lot of HQ's though at the end of the day things are rarely fair and balanced in war.
2. The Germans should be fielded with a mix of troops to get the combined arms effects that they were so skilled at - hitting the advancing Russians with artillery and airstrikes would of been very helpful to the Germans.
3. I really need to base my CO's/HQ's on either different sized or different shaped bases, there were times when I accidentally moved a HQ because I couldn't easily tell them apart from the normal stands.

Anglo-Zulu War WIP

Over the last two nights I managed to base up 23 stands for my AZW project - 15 stands of Zulus and 8 of dismounted "cavalrymen" (Natal Carbineers and Natal Mounted Police (NMP) both of which were more mounted infantry than true cavalry). I still have some work to do on the bases including flocking them but thought it was high time I posted some pictures (one of these days I'll figure out how to have clickable images):

Here are 5 companies of Zulus and the NMP, each unit of the NMP will have a horse holder stand representing the 1 in 4 men that would be left to hold the horses (this is why there are only 3 figures per dismounted base). The after the Imperial Mounted Infantry the NMP were the 2nd largest "cavalry" force available to No.3 Column until the Natal Native Mounted Contingent (NNMC) joined the column camp at iSandlwana.

Here's another view of the NMP also showing the Natal Carbineers who were a volunteer corps that had agreed to serve in Zululand. Painting the leg stripes on the Natal Carbineers was actually quite a challenge!

I'm actually quite pleased with how these Baccus figures have come out.

Anglo-Zulu War

Since trying out BKCII a few weeks back I've been thinking about how these rules could be used for the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War (AZW). I've managed to write down quite a few ideas as to how to do this and what rules to ignore as they aren't applicable to the AZW (such as aircraft). A few of my thoughts are as follows:

1. Activation is by "Battalion Group" of by troop and each company/troop will have a command stand (see CHQ and THQ notes below). A Battalion Group is something of an ad-hock formation consisting of a varying number of companies under a HQ - an example would be the British Infantry Companies left to guard the camp at iSandlwana which consisted of 5 companies of the 1/24th Foot and 1 from the 2/24th. This would he treated as a separate command to the other forces left at the camp. There is also nothing to stop this formation changing size as reserves are allocated to it by the CO, so for example the Battalion Group detailed above might initially only have a few companies assigned to it (as it did to begin with in reality) but grows in size as the game develops. I might use another term rather than Battalion Group but it will do for now.

2. I will use of thin smoke stands for units firing repeatedly and rapidly with Martini-Henry Rifles and other black powder weapons - this will reduce the number of firing dice for the unit (and for those shooting at them) due to the reduced visibility caused by the clouds of smoke. This problem can be avoided by controlling the way a unit fires.

3. I will try and make the Zulus psychologically different to use as they had a rather different view of death to the British.

4. Figure to man ratio will be 1:5. Ground scale is roughly 1cm = 10 yards.

5. 1 base = 1 section of up to 20 men. Each section base has 3-4 figures on a 30mm square base. Mounted Infantry bases have 3 figures on foot and a separate horse holder stand, most foot bases will have 4 figures.

6. Company Headquarters (CHQ) - these are not normal command units, the usual rules for not targeting HQ's apply but CHQ's only have the following game effects: They add an extra dice to units firing (representing their direction of the fire); Loss of the CHQ adds a -1 to the CV when a higher HQ/CO tries to activate the company (representing the loss of command functions); If all of the companies stands are wiped out the CHQ is removed. For campaign games the CHQ stays on the table as it can still be overrun by the enemy and hence count for Victory Points for them.

7. Troop Headquarters (THQ) act as normal HQ's but may also add the 1 extra dice when the troop is firing (as can any command unit). The THQ's are different to the CHQ's because the Mounted Infantry often acted independently.

I based up my 1st company of Zulu's earlier (3 bases, 12 figures) and will have completed another 4 by the end of tomorrow then it's on to the Natal Native Contingent (a formation consisting of 3 regiments of African Infantry organised along British lines with European officers) and the Mounted Infantry (Natal Mounted Police and Natal Carbineers). All my figures are Baccus.

Romanian Cavalry MkIII - Decisions

I've made the decision to go with 1:4 rather than 1 stand = 1 platoon as I felt that was a better way to do organise things. So that now means the TO&E I posted last time is slightly different as each cavalry squadron now has 2 infantry stands rather than 3. I also decided to drop the battalion HQ's as because of the small size of the squadron the regiment really ought to be the manoeuvre unit, this now gives the Brigade 3 main manoeuvre units each of which can be strengthened by attaching out the brigade level support squadrons.

I have also completed BKCII lists for most of the rest of the units that made up the Romanian 3rd Army which has made for quite an interesting research project, I just have the Infantry Division list to do and that's everything for the 3rd Army. Unfortunately the Cavalry Corps had no Corps level support units so is rather a week formation really (and in reality is really only a division in size).

As for actual models I have completed 2 cavalry regiments (which admittedly were already painted) but would have to spend some hard earned cash with Heroics and Ros to enable me to complete the rest of the brigade. I suspect that if I do complete the brigade I would add 2 more cavalry regiments - 1 motorised, 1 as horsed cavalry - to enable me to field a semi-motorised or a horsed cavalry brigade. The only difference in the brigade support squadrons appears to be the number of "tanks" in the Mechanised Recon Squadron (4 real tanks for the horsed cavalry and 6 for the semi-motorised cavalry which I would do as 1 and 2 models respectively just to make the differences in the two units more apparent on the table top), other than that there are no other differences.

I have another solo BKCII game involving a June 1941 clash between the Russian 3rd Tank Regiment (2nd Tank Division, 12th Mechanised Corps) and Panzer Regiment 1 (1st Panzer Division) scheduled in for Wednesday evening. This is a semi-historical encounter as the Panzer Regiment was in reality the 11th equipped with Pzkpfw 35(t)'s rather than the 1st equipped with Pzkpfw IIIG's but it was in the same area at that time. How well the Germans will deal with the 4 KV-1's and 2 KV-2's the Russians will field I don't know, but they will definitely fare better than a unit equipped with Pzkpfw 35(t)'s! The 1st Panzer was one of the few units with 50mm armed Pzkpfw III's so is somewhat better off than the 37mm armed Pzkpfw 35(t)'s fielded by Panzer Regiment 11. Report to follow later in the week.

Romanian Cavalry MkII

I've done quite a bit more research on the Romanian cavalry formations and have amended the organisation of my BKCII Romanians as follows:


Romanian 1st, 7th and 9th Cavalry Brigades June-July 1941

Brigade Headquarters:
HQ: 1x CO (CV8) (Mounted)

3 Horse Cavalry Regiments, each with:
Regimental HQ:
1x HQ (CV7) (Mounted)
1 Cavalry Battalion:
Battalion HQ:
1x HQ (CV7) (Mounted)
2 Mounted Squadrons, each with:
3x Infantry Units (Regulars*), 3x Transport Units (Horses, Cavalry)
1 Cavalry Battalion:
Battalion HQ:
1x HQ (CV7) (Mounted)
1 Mounted Squadron:
3x Infantry Units (Regulars*), 3x Transport Units (Horses, Cavalry)
1 Mounted LMG Squadron:
3x Infantry Units (Regulars), 3x Transport Units (Horses, Cavalry)

1 Horse Artillery Regiment:
2 Horse Artillery Battalions, each with:
2 Batteries, each with:
1x Artillery Unit (75-76mm)

1 Mortar Squadron:
2x Support Units (Mortar, 81mm), 2x Transport Units (Trucks)

1 Anti-Tank/AA Squadron:
3x Support Units (ATG, 37mm), 3x Air Defence Units (13.2mm), 6x Transport Units (Trucks)

1 MMG Squadron:
4x Support Units (MG, ZB-53), 4x Transport Units (Trucks)

1 Pioneer Squadron:
3x Engineer Units (Pioneers), 3x Transport Units (Trucks)

1 Mechanised Recon Squadron:
1x Recce Unit (R-1), 1x Recce Unit (Infantry), 1x Transport Unit (Truck), 1x Recce Unit (Infantry), 1x Transport Unit (Motorcycles)

Notes:

1. One of the cavalry regiments was to have been motorised but the outbreak of war in 1941 prevented this.
2. Infantry Units (Regulars*) - these infantry units have half the number of LMG's per squadron (12 instead of 24), reduce AP attacks to 2/30.
3. Horse artillery guns are 75mm Krupp Model 1904/1912 Field Guns. Guns are available as scheduled assets only.
4. Brigade support squadrons are to be attached out to the cavalry battalions.

To field one of the Semi-Motorised Brigades (5th, 6th and 8th Brigades) I would need to swap one of the cavalry regiments for:


1 Motorised Cavalry Regiment:
Regimental HQ:
1x HQ (CV7) (in truck)
1 Motorised Cavalry Battalion:
Battalion HQ:
1x HQ (CV7) (in truck)
2 Motorised Squadrons, each with:
3x Infantry Units (Regulars), 3x Transport Units (Trucks)
1 Motorised Cavalry Battalion:
Battalion HQ:
1x HQ (CV7) (in truck)
1 Motorised Squadron:
3x Infantry Units (Regulars), 3x Transport Units (Trucks)
1 Motorised Heavy Weapons Squadron:
2x Support Units (MG, ZB-53), 1x Air Defence Unit (13.2mm), 1x Support Unit (ATG, 37mm), 4x Transport Units (Trucks)

An extra Recce Unit (R-1) should be added to the Mechanised Recon Squadron as the Motorised Brigades had more of these "tanks" than the normal Cavalry Brigades.

I'm still debating whether to keep to 1 stand = 1 platoon or to scale the vehicles at 1:4 and the infantry/cavalry at 1:40. This would create smaller units but I could have more off them.