Commands & Colors - Seven Years War

In the comments to the last post I was asked about how we played C&C with the 40mm semi flats.........

Over the years we have played most of the C&C games, my favourites being:

Napoleonic, We generally play the Epic Battles version with 15mm figures on an 8' x 6' table with 120mm hexes. These give very enjoyable games with reasonably historical outcomes.

Memoir 44 (WW2), with 1/300 figures on the same 120mm hexes, not such a well designed set of rules - but still fun.

Red Alert - yes space ships - a fun game with all the plastic spaceships and cloth in the box, so it is easy to transport and set up,

I also have 'Tricorn', the AWI version, however this is one of my least favourite versions, having more of the feel of a skirmish game - not in my opinion suitable for the large clashes of the SYW.

A gaming friend has made a very nice  12' x 6' gaming cloth marked out in 180mm hexes, which he uses to play C&C Napoleonic Epic with 28mm figures. He also has the hills and woods to match, so an easy option for me to borrow for a participation game. My 160mm frontage units sit nicely into the 180mm hexes (which are just annotated with lightly marked corners - one visible to front right of the artillery).

SYW Rules Changes

There was not really a lot of change needed, the main ones being:

Infantry v Cavalry

In this period the infantry was generally better trained, and able to repel frontal attacks from cavalry without the need to form square, so we modified the rules as follows:

• In the C&C system the facing of units is not relevant, everything fights all around, For SYW we decided that the facing of the infantry does matter, so at the end of the movement phase all infantry, even those which have not been activated, are adjusted to align with one of the sides or corners of hex. The unit then has 2 (facing corner) or 3 (facing side) vulnerable 'rear' hexes.
• When infantry is attacked from the front (not the rear), the infantry ALWAYS fights first, and the cavalry can NEVER ignore flags. Note that if the cavalry has sufficient movement it can ride around the infantry to attack the rear, so the ends of lines need to be supported.

Artillery

Artillery in this period was neither as mobile or capable of combined arms training as later (although the Austrians were getting there), so:

• Artillery may never fire overhead.
• Artillery may not combine in melee unless in support of an adjacent infantry unit.
• Other than Austrians, artillery may not  make additional moves such as those on the 'Bombard', 'Artillery Reposition' or 'Call forward the Reserves' cards.

Prussian Infantry

Prussian infantry was (at the start of the war) better trained than most others, so they have been given bonuses when firing on the move and entering melee with opposing infantry.

Prussian Cavalry

Prussian heavy cavalry (and cuirassiers) could charge for much greater distances than others, so they are allowed an additional hex movement when charging (not additive with the 'Cavalry Charge' card

I've pasted in the playsheets we used for the battle of Kolin - I don't think Blogger has a file upload facility? (For Lobositz we did not apply the advantages for the Prussians, as they were tired and hungry after a long night march.)

 

Battle of Lobositz & New Moulds

As I'm sure is obvious, I have not done much casting or gaming with the 40mm semi-flats so far this year.

Battle of Lobositz

I did however put on a participation game (back in June) using the Commands and Colors (American!) Napoleonics system to play the Battle of Lobositz. 

The table was 12' x 6', a scan of the battle layout is below. The Prussians are stacked up exiting the valley, and the Austrians partly hidden behind the village and in the sunken road, with Grenz on the hill. We played it twice and the Austrians won both times - as they should😀

The scale was roughly one unit on table equates to a cavalry regiment, two battalions or a 10 gun battery.

Below are some photos, many of which are copied from Aly's Toy Soldiers

https://alystoysoldiers.blogspot.com/2024/06/wild-geese-2024.html 

New Moulds

Prince August have also been very quiet with regards to the SYW range, Chris Tubb has been working on other projects, such as their 54mm Middle Earth ranges, however I understand that they may be sculpting for some new SYW moulds over the coming months. 

• Reprint/rescale the Austrian cuirassier to as the current moulds are way too big (3 moulds),
• Reprint the dragoon heads as they ware currently too small, just a reprint to scale (1 mould).
• Prussian cuirassier (3 moulds)
• British infantry (4 moulds) - see post January last year for suggested figures.
• British artillery crews in coats (2 moulds).

My personal preference would be to do them in the order above so that I can complete my Prussians & Austrians, however I suspect PA would sell more moulds if they did the British first.

Going Small????

Not much has been happening with respect to the SYW semi-flats either at Prince August - or in my wargames room (I have mostly been playing 28mm 30YW using Liber Militum 'Tercios' rules and 20mm WW2).

Staying within the Lace Wars period, I have however been considering 'going small', and have been 3D printing some 10mm 'Marlburian' figures. 

The intention is to use these for mass battles of some sort, so simple figures and paint jobs to be viewed at a distance😀 

These are from a very small range of figures from 'Incomp', which print and paint very easily - well worth a try if this is something you are considering.

Christopher Duffy Books

 Best wishes for the New Year.

Just in case there are any of you out there looking for some books to spend your Christmas pennies on I just came across these:

I assume all respectable SYW gamers have these - but just in case?

Christmas Greetings

Firstly - I hope Santa and his helpers bring you all the toys on your wish list, and that during the coming year you have the time to paint and play with them.

Secondly - sorry for the lack of posts on the blog over recent months, my wargaming interests have been elsewhere, and also PA seem to have gone quiet with regards to future releases in the SYW range. My intention is to keep this blog dedicated to the 40mm toys, however just to fill a bit of space I will give bit of an update on what I have been doing instead..............

28mm Thirty Years War

I've spent much of the last 6 months painting and playing with my new 28mm Thirty Years War armies. When I retired (a couple of years ago), I received a pile of lead as a leaving gift, which I have  finally got around to painting. 

The figures are mostly from the Old Glory's excellent renaissance ranges, well worth considering if you are planning that building armies in that period, Many of the figures are from their ECW range as dress was pretty similar both in Britain and in Central Europe, the only real issue is that a lot of the ECW cavalry castings have triple bar lobster helmets, these were not common on the continent, so I have replaced them with continental types, using separately purchased  heads from Redoubt Miniatures. Note that the Old Glory figures are towards the smaller end of the 28mm offerings, they probably fit with Foundry and First Corps.

For rules we have been using the Liber Militum 'Tercios' rules, which give a fun game - again worth considering if you want to play that period.

3D Printing

The other distraction is that I now have a resin printer to add to the filament printer I've had for some time. My main reason for originally going for a 3D printers is, that many of my figure collections are of older rangers, which are often smaller than more modern offerings which simply do not fit in with them.

For example, I have a large collection of 20mm WW2 tanks and AFVs, some of which I have had for over 40 years. At the time I started the collection the only vehicles readily available were from Airfix and Matchbox, which are 1/76 scale, these I later supplemented with Fujimi/Nitto again 1/76. There are now lots more vehicles available from the likes of PSC, Armourfast, Zvezda etc, however these are mostly 1/72, and I simply cannot live with the size difference. 1/76 vehicles are available in resin, but often at a very high price.

With the ability print my own vehicles I can now print pretty much any vehicle I like, and scale it to 1/76 to fit in with my old collection. The filament printer produced some nice models, but simply cannot handle shallow sloping surfaces which come out very distinctly stepped. The resin printer does a much better job of it, I initially put off buying a resin printer due to the need to wash prints in alcohol, however there are now some better water washable resins on the market so I have taken the plunge.

Prince August have now gone over to digital sculpting, the first digital figures in the SYW range being with the French. Their business model is selling moulds, however I do wonder if they could release the files to some of the parts which are difficult to cast??????????

Anyway, enough rambling - have a good Christmas and best wishes for the New Year,

Prince August Catalogue & Progress

Prince August have recently released their updated catalogue, with the 40mm SYW range being featured on the front cover.. The pdf can be downloaded from their website, but be warned it is a hefty 318MB.

For those of you collecting the SYW range there are a couple of useful pages showing the full range of figures in the moulds - I think after all these years PA are getting there - still a few gaps but full armies can now be collected - with a little help from the Karoliner and Rossbach ranges.

It can be seen that there is now a pretty extensive range, however in my opinion it contains a few scaling issues, which I deal with as follows:

• I feel the Austrian cuirassiers are way too large, so I don't use them, instead I use converted Karoliner figures.
• The dragoon heads are small, so again I avoid using them - they are easily replaced by 'officer' heads from the infantry, the Russian officer being one of the best (that is what is on catalogue front cover).
• The French figures are just a bit on the large size (particularly the heads) - I think they look better when used with Russian heads which have similar hair and tricorne.
• Similarly the artillery crews are a bit large, so again I use the appropriate infantry heads where possible.

All of the 'offending' figures were sculpted digitally, the French and gunners are probably just me being picky so not an issue and easily solved with a head swap, However the cuirassiers and some of the dragoon heads are unique, so could perhaps PA could be persuaded to reprint if enough people commented?

There are a few gaps in the range, which hopefully PA will address, the most obvious ones being:

• British infantry - the highlander are sculpted (see above), and hopefully the 'hatmen' will follow in the not too distant future?
• Prussian cuirassier (I have used converted Rossbach figures).
• Gunners in coats (it was my idea to have the in shirtsleeves)
• Russian cavalry (belts outside coat) - not sure if there would be market for these, Karoliners with head swaps do the job fine????

Miniature Wargames - Issue 486

Just in case any of you are interested - I have an article (8 pages) in Miniature Wargames Issue 486.

It is a potted history of how I got into playing with the 40mm semi-flats and then working with Prince August on the SYW range; really just a summary of what has been written on this blog over the last 9 years. There are a few typos and wrongly labelled photos, but other than that I think MW have done a good job of showing the range to the wider wargaming readership.

Battle of Kolin - Commands and Colors

Last month I attended the annual Wild Geese War Games meeting, and put on a participation game using my 40mm semi-flats.

Austrian centre deployed on the ridge - Photo by Robbie Roddis

As often happens, when I am running games I got engrossed in the game, and forgot to take many photos; fortunately some of the other players took some, and also posted them on their own blogs, below are links where you will see more pictures:

https://alystoysoldiers.blogspot.com/2023/06/wild-geese-2023.html

https://scotiaalbion.blogspot.com/2023/06/wild-geese-weeken.html

https://independentwargamesgroup.blogspot.com/2023/06/wild-geese-weekend-2023.html

In addition to my own photos I have pinched some from those blogs.

The Wild Geese weekend is generally 18th century based, and was held on the weekend of 17th & 18th June, 18th June was the date of one of the great battles in history, the Battle of Kolin in 1757 (there might have been another less interesting clash on that date some years later), so nice to play it on the anniversary. For the game I decided to use the Commands and Colors (it's American) board game system, something I often do for my 15mm Napoleonic games. Although the American War of Independence variant 'Tricorne' is available, and would be expected to be suitable for the SYW battles, I find those rules have the feel of large skirmishes rather than major confrontations; so I decided to use the Napoleonic set, with a few amendments I will discuss later. 

The Table

First of all I need to make both a thank you and apology to Martyn Cartledge who kindly let me use his terrain for the weekend, even though not attending himself:

• A big thank you for letting me use his 12' x 6' hand made cloth marked out in 180mm (across flats) hexes, and matching MDF hills & woods. Clearly I could not have staged the game without the hex terrain to play on.
• An apology for using the cloth the wrong way up, both sides are green and marked in hexes, however not realising that at the time I opened the cloth, I saw the hexes on green and laid it out. Only on packing away did I realise that the other side was a much better colour match for the hills - and the hexes were more neatly drawn, so the lack of fit visible on the photos would not have occurred. I later discovered I was playing on an early test run! 

One of the 40mm test games with the cloth the right way up -  a much nicer green!

The available playing area was 19 hexes wide and 11 deep, and the the terrain was stylised as the sketch below (sorry, no fancy graphics from me). At the top (2nd row down), across the width of the board is the Kaiserstrasse, along which the Prussians were marching, and towards the bottom (3rd to 6th rows up) the line of hills and woods over which the Austrians were deployed.

The Armies

With the board sketched out (it took a few test games using my 15mm armies to arrive at the one shown) it came to deciding on the armies - when playing C&C only one unit can occupy a hex, so this set the scale of the game.

The majority of the Prussian infantry was strung out in column of march along the Kaiserstrasse, with a few battalions of grenadiers (3?) marching in parallel, and cavalry in advance and behind; the game scale was therefore determined by the 18 hex length of the Kaiserstrasse. For playability I decided to allocate 4 hexes at the front to give Zieten's hussars space to manoeuvre, and two hexes at the rear for Penavaire's cuirassiers, leaving 12 hexes for the infantry.

According to Kronoskaff there were 33 Prussian battalions present, and after allowing for say 3 battalions off road that left 30 on the road, so each game 'regiment' would represent about 2.5 battalions, so in the game there were 13 infantry 'regiments'; 12 on the road and one off. According to Duffy there were 19,500 Prussian infantry present, so each regiment on the table represented about 1500 men. Based on the order of battle, the Prussian infantry was represented as follows:

• 1 Regiment of Guards (Gd)
• 6 Regiments of Musketeers (M)
• 3 Regiments of Fusiliers (F)
• 3 'Regiments' of Grenadiers (G) - I know they did not have regiments!

Using the same process for the information I had available I came up with opposing armies as follows:

Prussian

• 1 Regiment of Guards (Gd)
• 3 'Regiments' of Grenadiers (G)
• 6 Regiments of Musketeers (M)
• 3 Regiments of Fusiliers (F)
• 5 Regiments of Cuirassiers (C)
• 3 Regiments of Dragoons (D)
• 4 Regiments of Hussars (H)
• 2 Batteries of Artillery (I ignored the masses of battalion guns)

Prussians marching along the Kaiserstrasse, they would have looked better in column of march but it takes time to deploy them  - photo by Aly Morrison

Austrian

• 1 'Regiment' of Grenadiers (G)
• 18 Regiments of Fusiliers (-)
• 2 Regiments of Grenz (Gz)
• 4 Regiments of Cuirassiers (C)
• 1 Regiment of Horse Grenadiers (HG)
• 4 Regiments of Dragoons (D)
• 5 Regiments of Hussars (H)
• 4 Batteries of Artillery

Austrians lining the ridge, with reserves marching to meet the Prussian outflanking move - photo by Aly Morrison

The Rules

For the game we used Commands and Colors Napoleonics, including the 'Generals Marshals and Tacticians', and 'Epic' expansions; with a few changes to cover the SYW:

• Infantry facing matters - at the end of movement the infantry unit must face one of the sides or points of the hex.

• Infantry attacked frontally (not rear 2/3 hexes) by cavalry always melee first (including cavalry  breakthrough moves), and the cavalry can NEVER ignore flags.

• Cuirassiers do not get additional resistance against musketry.

• Artillery - no firing overhead or combined arms unless gun is supporting an adjacent infantry unit.

And specifically for this battle to represent the Prussian attempt to move around the Austrian right flank, and the Austrian response:

• Epic March Move (3 stars on card), can be used in any sector to move troops which spend their entire move in the back two rows of the table - to allow lateral movement. 
• Troops which spend their entire move on the road may increase their normal move an additional hex.

I also messed around with the stats on the units, essentially making the Prussian infantry and Cavalry much more effective when attacking - I have included the sheets below:

How did it Play?

I would suggest looking at the blogs I have listed to see how the game was received. We played the game 3 times, and set a target of 15 Victory Points (VPs). We finished all 3 games in about 3 hours, and the final tally was 2 wins to the Austrians, and one to the Prussians, all ending within a couple of VPs - the final game ended with Frederick being killed by a musket ball!

Cavalry engaged on Austrian right - photo by Aly Morrison

British Highlanders - Update

Just to show I am still here - a quick update on the release of the Highlanders; according to Prince August these moulds will be released late-July/early-August.

There will be 3 moulds containing what has now become the 'standard' mix of 6 figures, that is:

• Officer
• Standard Bearer
• NCO
• Musician (bagpipes)
• Rank and file at march attack and advancing.

Heads will be provided to make figures with either bonnet or bearskin, and the officer and NCO with the option to change weapons.

The illustrations below are not the latest designs, but give a good idea of what is on the way, there have been couple of changes since these were taken:

• The officers now have a sash over the shoulder
• The march attack figures left arm has been revised to reposition the hand to hold the musket at the base of the butt.

In view of comments about the kilt; I have added a couple more views showing the belted plaid - it is just not very visible on the images above.

British Highlanders

I understand that PA are planning to go ahead with the British, which will be a useful addition to armies in both the European and North American theatres. The intention is to start with the Highlanders, as these are something a little different.

Do we know if during the SYW, the highlanders operated in close order similar to the rest of the line infantry, or were they sometimes used in more open formations - I ask as it will influence what poses to produce? 

I am not sure if the plan is for 3 or 4 moulds, for now assuming only 3 then I would suggest the 6 figures should be:

1. Officer
2. Standard Bearer
3. Musician
4. Private advancing

Then another two chosen from:

• NCO
• Private at march attack
• Private standing firing
• Private kneeling firing
• Private loading
• Any other ideas?

Musicians

According to Kronoskaf the highlanders had drummers and pipers - presumably for character a piper would be preferred?

Marching Pose

Is this the correct hand position for British to hold the musket when marching -  it is different to what has been used for the figures in the past?

I have to confess I am not too well read on the British, so more than ever, input from this group would be useful.

Grenz - advancing.

Back in August (post 22/08/22) I cast some of the advancing Grenz figures - I have finally got around to painting up a unit.

The figures are individually based so they can be used either as a close order unit as shown or singularly as skirmishers.

The rank and file and drummer are from the new mould, and the officer and standard bearer from the Hungarian moulds, which are close enough - I gave the officer a musket as it looks better when skirmishing (I think it is from the Russian officer).

I also painted up a couple of spare figures to replace the standard bearer and drummer when used as skirmishers. One of these was an NCO using the Hungarian NCO, again with a musket; however the coat tails are way too long, so he will probably stay in the box.

On the 40mm semi-flats figures I generally stick with block painting and don't use any washes or highlighting. The exception to this is a localised wash of Winsor and Newton 'Peat Brown' ink on the hands and faces to bring out the detail, I do this after a first coat of spray gloss varnish so that it does not stain, then tidy up with flesh prior to a final brushed gloss coat of Tamiya clear gloss.

On these I also dry brushed the hats a little to bring out the texture. Initially I dry brushed white which looked way to harsh, so I went over it with a dry brush in black - so I suppose it is like doing it in grey. On the subject of heads, I struggled getting decent castings in my 'scrap metal', so these are mostly cast in model metal (the bodies are about 50/50).