Playing at War - Part 4 - Hexes & Heresies

This will be the last in this mini-series of posts on my protracted ramble through the jungle of wargames rules. I intend to do something soon on my use of computers in miniatures wargaming - which may well alienate anyone who has not already taken exception to my use of hexes! - and I'll try to blog my progress with the development of the grand-tactical version of my game, which is in something like a beta-test state at present.

Hexes. Over the years I have often been surprised at the amount of adverse reaction they have generated. Not by people taking part in the games, more as a point of principle. I guess hexes may seem a little inconsistent with the otherwise Old School appearance of my battles, but in fact they are not that big a deal - the underlying game is still recognisable, though there are two important aspects which come directly from the use of the big hexes, which I shall attempt to describe. Bear in mind throughout this that I am always looking to fight pretty large battles - much of what follows would not make sense for a skirmish or very detailed tactical game.

If you are interested and you can get hold of a copy, I recommend you have a good look at Doc Monaghan's The Big Battalions Napoleonic rule book, which came out of the Guernsey Wargames Group. The rules are out of print now, I think - I have the 2nd edition, dated 2000. In parts they are themselves recognisably related to the TooFatLardies' Le Feu Sacré, which is no bad thing, but one central innovation (to me, at least) is the use of "Bands" to measure all distances. Bands can be changed to suit the size of figures, and also to suit the scale of the action. A band on the tabletop represents 250 paces - for 6mm-10mm figures, this is 3 inches; for 12mm-15mm it is 4 inches; for 20mm-25mm it is 6 inches. These measurements are all halved for very big battles. The bands introduce a sort of granularity into all measurement in the game - everything is expressed in terms of bands, so ranges and moves are rounded to the nearer band. This is not really so revolutionary - your own tabletop games will have everything rounded to the centimetre or inch, so there is an implied granularity already. If you think about it, the further step of drawing formal hexagons around the band-sized spaces changes very little. Doc Monaghan's son, the historian Jason Monaghan, described Big Battalions to me as being "a hex game with invisible hexes".

One area in which boardgames score heavily is speed of play. I have seen too many tabletop games where the movement was so slow that the players could hardly remember where they were up to or what they had been intending to do. The time-and-motion realism nerds in the 1980s broke their games down into short turns (sometimes as little as 30-seconds of "clock" time), so 2cm moves were not unknown, and we had the slightly embarrassing conundrum that a complete evening of labouring away at Quatre Bras or similar might actually be found to have ground through a grand total of 10 minutes of real time. Now, apart from the fact that I find 2cm moves tedious in the extreme (and this is, you will recall, all just my personal view), most self-respecting wargamers of my acquaintance are likely to fudge the moves in their favour by a little, and this "scentific error" margin is likely to be of the order of 2cm anyway, so you'd better have an umpire and a team of checkers handy! My big hexes remove this problem immediately.

Next - in my game, the hexes are assumed to be 200 paces across. Since the maximum effective range of muskets was rather less than this (and since officers normally forbade long range fire as a wasteful and disruptive distraction), this means that infantry can only fire into the next hex, and not very far into it, either. In common with Big Battalions and Sam Mustafa's excellent Grande Armée (and its Fast Play Grande Armée variant), I have taken the heretical step of making volley fire part of the Close Combat phase of my game, so it does not appear as a separate element. Artillery can fire, as can skirmishers, but actual formed musket volleys are simply abstracted as one of the unpleasant things that formed bodies of troops could do to each other when they got close enough to fight (or run away, as they frequently did). Yes, this is boardgame-like, and does represent a total lack of respect for the traditional Move-Missiles-Melee framework that is central to the Old School approach, but it doesn't actually change the game very much, apart from speeding it up - oh, and also removing the problem of deciding exactly when and how often in a bound the troops can fire. The combat effectiveness of troop formations in my rules reflects the amount of fire they can bring to bear, so that, for example, a battalion in line gains an advantage in combat for its greater firepower (especially when it is defending) - an advantage which can be reduced dramatically in wet weather, by the way.

Having reached this topic of using a gridded terrain in a tabletop game, there is one important development which is coming soon and which I'd like to mention briefly. Part of the perceived resistance to hexagons in tabletop games comes, I think, because it blurs what has become a potentially emotive divide between boardgame players and miniatures enthusiasts. I don't see why there have to be camps, but camps there appear to be. GMT Games are very successful market leaders in board wargame publication, and one of their biggest selling games is Commands & Colors: Ancients, which has many enthusiastic fans. Because of the form of the game, quite a few people use miniatures instead of the supplied unit blocks. Now this is getting really blurred - so much so that one poor soul in one of the GMT fora said "blocks are elegant and miniatures are for children - if the game was sold with miniatures I wouldn't buy it". So there! - rather sweet, actually.

GMT have been threatening to launch Commands & Colors: Napoleonics for some time, against a background of considerable excitement - and quite rightly so - it will surely be a splendid game. I understand that they are now hoping to issue it in November. There will certainly be many who wish to use it with miniatures, and I believe that this could be a significant moment in the development of our hobby - invaluable cross-pollination between boardgames and tabletop games, and - maybe - the widespread adoption of a handsome, tick-tock, best-of-both-worlds game of exactly the type I have been promoting for years. There are a couple of nice recent postings on the forthcoming game in one of my favourite blogs, Joy and Forgetfulness, which set out what one miniatures wargamer expects it to be like.

So - before I end - don't be too fixed in your ideas about hexagon-gridded miniatures games - in a couple of months you may be the only kid on the block who doesn't have them!

Having reached this stage, I propose to slow down the rate of publishing of posts on this blog. In my enthusiasm to get the thing going, I have been keen to create a solid foundation of material for people to have a look at, and also to attempt to give an idea of the style and range of subjects I hope to cover. If you have read any or all of what I have done to date then I offer my best wishes - if you like any of it, or even if you disagree, please do drop me a comment - I am always delighted to get them. I will continue to introduce new posts, hopefully at a rate of one or two a week, rather than the faintly hysterical stream of consciousness which I've produced to date!

Playing at War - Part 3 - Pieces of Cardboard

I have always found it worthwhile to have an occasional sanity check. Not, you understand, because I have particular concerns about my sanity, but because it helps with understanding and prioritising things. If you take some everyday facet of your life from the shelf and have a look at it, and ask yourself "why do I do this?" then a couple of things may result - you may be comfortable with what you find, and you can gently dust it and put it back, or you may find something doesn't quite stack up, in which case you have learned something and you can decide what to do about it.

In the days when I was paid to work for someone else, there was a period when Time Management was the answer to everything. It didn't matter what the question was, the answer was probably Time Management. Like all panaceae exposed to too much light, it faded, once people realised that you can be as organised as you wish, but the rest of the world doesn't actually care what your priorities are - they expect you to answer the bloody phone when they choose to ring you. The theory is still sound, however.

One of the most interesting things that came out of the TM classes we used to run was the mismatch between what people spend their time and effort on and what they feel is important. Guys would regularly tell us that their families represented about 75% of everything that mattered to them, and yet they worked out that they spent less than 10% of their time on them. Without fail, attendees at the classes would be surprised at the analysis of their own lives, and would determine to do something about it - an intention which had normally been forgotten by the following week, by the way. Without any pretence at science or Great Wisdom, it can be instructive to use the same technique to look at (for example) what you get out of your hobby, whatever it might be, and try to attach some weights to the bits and pieces. The results will be very personal to you - a psychologist would have a field day with the results, no doubt, but that is not the point. You may then, if you wish, go on to make a list of things about the hobby which displease you, or which you would prefer not to have.

In my own pursuit of Napoleonic wargaming, I guess my personal breakdown is something like:

• Insight gained from tabletop battles, as an extension of my study of the period 26%
• Collecting, researching, painting & organising the armies 21%
• Writing & programming rules 12%
• The look of the thing - battles & collection 14%
• Setting up & running (experiencing?) the battles 17%
• The social side - battles & discussion 8%
• Winning & personal glory(!) 2%

The spurious accuracy in the numbers is just because I felt obliged to ratio them down so they added up to 100! Things which I could do without include:

• The guilt (yes, I think it is guilt) resulting from always being behind with figure painting schedules
• Battles which run out of time before reaching a conclusion
• Rules which are fiddly, or don't work, or waste time, or give me a headache
• Clutter on the tabletop - spurious equipment and SHEETS OF PAPER (aargh)

From which I guess a profile emerges of a fairly solitary wargamer with anal tendencies. Your own numbers will probably be very different, that's fine - in my heart, I know that your numbers will somehow be better than mine...

When I first became aware of military boardgames, I guess I was faintly hostile, in an unspecific kind of way. There were Avalon Hill and SPI, and that was about it in those days. Here was I slaving away, tracking down unobtainable figures, painting them, and laboriously staging battles that didn't quite work, and there were people in the world who bought a complete game in a box - a game, moreover, with very little visual spectacle - and just played the thing without all the posturing and rigmarole which I was used to. What could possibly be the point of that? With my prejudices a little better focused, I avoided the whole subject. No way, thanks. Not for me. Maybe - at a pinch - a boardgame might allow a campaign to be managed, but the actual combat would have to be toy soldiers. Absolutely.

Eventually, someone invited me to his house to play an ACW board game he had obtained and wanted to try out. I think it was Chancellorsville, and I think it may have been issued with a copy of Avalon Hill's house magazine, "The General". Anyway, it was a game of relatively modest size and complexity and, a bit hesitantly, I went along to see how awful it was.

Well now. It did not offer the same visual pleasures as the miniatures stuff, and I wasn't too impressed with the badly punched counters or the rather flimsy paper map (for God's sake, don't sneeze), but the game itself was an eye-opener. The rules were straightforward and unambiguous, they used alternate moves, but you could see the movement and the strategic development right in front of your eyes, and all the things you had to remember to do had a little dedicated track on the board - the game ran like - like - like clockwork - yes, that was it. Like chess. The size and effect of terrain was obvious and intuitive. The game was capable of being completed in an hour, even if you were a novice.

I went home with my values shaken up and my mind whirling. If you could somehow develop the beautiful miniatures game so that it ran with the logic and the precision of the boardgame then you had the best of all worlds. Tick-tock, tick-tock. I think I have spent the subsequent 30 years or so with pretty much the same objective, and I still know that I am right. I looked at the gridded miniatures game of Joe Morschauser, which previously I had seen illustrated in Featherstone's books almost as an eccentricity, a fringe area. The game was interesting, but the appearance was too quirky, too chess-like, and in any case square cells are tricky. You can either ban diagonal movement, which seems a peculiar thing to do, or else you have to come to terms with old Pythagoras - diagonal distances are multiplied by the square root of two, which is not a handy thing to work around.


Boardgame style hexagonal cells seemed a much better way to go. Pythagoras was banished, and imposing a sort of crystalline structure on terrain did not seem to distort things very much - or at least the distortion introduced far more benefits than disadvantages. I painted hexes all over my tabletop (carefully preserving a plain side as a contingency!) and I was up and running. I chose 7-inches-across-the-flats, entirely because a based unit would fit comfortably into that. In fact 6 inches would have worked as well - sometime I may repaint the table with 6-inch cells (that's about 15cm), which will enable me to use commercially-produced scenic tiles and is generally more convenient. The disincentive is that I am stuck with a stock of hills and stuff to the current size, but they are probably due for renewal sometime anyway.


I was unaware of Jim Getz's "Napoleonique", which used hexes - if I had been aware of it, I would in any case have been put off by the clunkiest dice-rolling mechanism of all time. More recently, NapoleoN Miniatures produced their own rules, which use hexes, and which you can still download from their otherwise dormant website. Also, the little-known but interesting "Big Battalions" rules by Doc Monaghan, while there are no actual hexes, present all measurements in terms of "bands" (which vary according to your figure scale and the size of the battle), which is effectively the same thing as explicit hexes.

So that is why I use hexes. The implications for the game and its rules constitute a topic for another time.

Playing at War - Part 2 - The Ancient Game

Like everyone, I try to learn from my mistakes. My earliest attempts to fight miniature battles were, at best, well intentioned. They were fun, surely, but quite a lot of the interest was in trying to fix the bits of the game that didn't work - not unlike Stone Age man attempting to build a pocket watch. I found very early that the simpler games were often a lot more fun than more complex ones, that the more detail you tried to introduce the more you got bogged down in trying to cope with someone who wanted to do something you hadn't allowed for in the rules, or who had found some loophole you had accidentally left open.

This is a general problem, both in historical warfare and its tabletop simulation. The literature of war, especially its fiction, is full of cunning and the unexpected - bold strokes of improvisation which left a more traditional opponent floundering. If there had been a rule book, then a loophole would be just the thing. Wargames replicate this, and the position is made many times more complex in competition games, or in situations where the participants are determined to win.

I would be struggling to put a date on the evolution of Competition Rules. Probably around 1978 I bought a new Napoleonic rule book (Halsall & Roth, I think) which had been used for the British championships, and found it far too dense to actually play. We tried these rules a couple of times, and then ran crying back to the bosom of our Charlie Wesencraft games for comfort and reassurance - and aspirin.

At the time, wargames magazines were full of alarming stories of people turning up for games with armies consisting entirely of artillery, or camels (or whatever) - they had found a loophole, and had used their army points allowance (or whatever) to field an army which could not be defeated, but which gave a historically nonsensical game.

And good for them, I suppose. If Frederick the Great had one day turned up with an army consisting entirely of camels and swept his opponents off the field, this would be commemorated as a great victory and a stroke of genius. Frederick, however, was only interested in winning - he would not have cared that it would make a stupid game, or that Halsall & Roth would have to produce a new edition to specifically outlaw this latest horror.

So part of this, from the wargame point of view, depends on why we are playing. If we are mostly interested in winning, then either the game mechanism has to be dead simple, like chess, so that it runs like clockwork and gives no scope for working outside the rules, or else we have to have an umpire.

I am really quite a fan of Howard Whitehouse. His "Science vs Pluck" Colonial game (which I have never played, by the way) has simplified rule sets for the players, who also have only as much information as they need to know. There is a much larger rule set for the umpire. Now that is interesting. Kriegsspiel operates in a similar way - the umpire's word is all. If you try fielding only camels then the umpire says "No, don't be silly" and that's an end to the matter.

So this is certainly a viable approach, but the snag is getting hold of a suitable umpire, or even having the manpower available to nominate one. What about the clockwork rule set, then - can we move in that direction as an alternative?

I am not really a chess player. I can play, but I do not - like the definition of a gentleman accordionist. I realise chess is clearly not a miniatures game as we know them, but they are related somewhere along the line, and I believe there are some aspects of chess that wargamers can learn a great deal from.

Time for a short anecdote. Ho hum.

A long, long time ago, when I was at university, I shared lodgings with a guy whom I shall call Andy, who was an excellent chess player. By any normal standards he was extraordinary. As a schoolboy he had been a national champion, and he now played first board for the university team. I went with him a few times when he did exhibition games at local schools. I once saw him play two simultaneous games - blindfolded. I can't recall if he won the games, but I have to lie down for a bit when I think about that.

At the time I was an enthusiastic, if unaccomplished, player, and was excited by the possibility of improving my own game (by osmosis, maybe?). Forget it. Despite his commendable patience and his attempts to coach me, our games were just humiliating, and they stopped quite quickly. Indeed, I have played very little ever since.

For chess is a beautiful game, with an ancient dignity, and elegant, perfect rules, but it is brutal, and it affords no hiding place. No-one ever lost at chess because he was unlucky. If you are beaten in a series of games, your opponent is better than you. You are a plonker - live with it.

Simplicity is the key. Apart from the playing surface and the pieces, and a clock, there is no kit. There are no tape measures, no casualty tables or order sheets, no shellburst templates, no command chits, no dice. No-one argues about how the rules are to be interpreted, no-one is in any doubt about where any of the pieces are standing, or how far they can move. The rule set is simple enough to be carried in the players' heads - quick reference sheets would be regarded as a source of hilarity. No-one has ever cheated in a chess match - it can't be done. Actually, come to think of it, I think my dad used to cheat when I started beating him, but in general, at any level, it is played absolutely straight, without ambiguity.

The rules have been fixed for longer than anyone can remember - I have never heard of anyone complaining about them, or asking for changes. No-one has ever attempted to field a King and 15 Queens. Obviously it is very stylised, and whatever form of conflict inspired it has been abstracted beyond immediate recognition. It has a gridded playing area and alternate moves, and pieces which are considerate enough to move one at a time. Real warfare isn't like that, but these mechanisms work tidily and efficiently, and they deliver a crisp, watertight game which is robust enough to withstand even extreme, high-adrenaline competition. World championships, no less.

I am not – repeat, not – claiming that miniatures wargames should be like chess, or even that they should be more like chess; I am merely observing that chess is impressively free from many of the problems which beset wargames (so is table-tennis, I hear you mutter), and that there may be some aspects of it which we can usefully borrow.

More soon....

Playing at War - Part 1 - The Brethren

I am certainly not going to claim that “Old Trousers” is an accurate simulation of Napoleonic warfare, since the game offers very little chance of players being ripped apart by canister fire or drowning in swollen torrents. Those games that do make this kind of claim don't seem to feature these opportunities either.

Howard Whitehouse


The sniper in the tower of the ruined church tried to ignore the discomfort from his cramped legs, as he took precise aim, watching for his moment. Two hundred yards away, a German officer walked into the village square, close to the fountain, a pistol in his gloved hand.

I was an eye-witness to this actual event.

As you will have guessed, it was a WW2 skirmish game. It was one of the featured demos at a pay-at-the-door public exhibition put on by my local wargames club, on a damp Saturday sometime in the early 1970s. I was a new and very enthusiastic wargamer, and this was the first skirmish I had seen. I was really quite excited. There were about 2 dozen guests in the hall, and the game looked spectacular – like a movie. 54mm figures, and a complete French village in perfect detail.

The four club members who were running the demonstration game now proceeded to measure things and leaf through a hefty, typed sheaf of rules, and to argue animatedly about which of the many possible adjustments to the dice throw were needed, to determine whether the sniper hit his man. This required a lot of sarcastic banter, a lot of rather nervous giggling, a lot of comments that started with “I think you’ll find that...” – the guys were having a whale of a time. Because I was intrigued, I kept a note of the elapsed time. After seven minutes of this they had finally agreed that the dice throw needed to be 5 or higher. It was a 2. There was a roar of contempt from the “German” player, and the surprising amount of echo drew my attention to the fact that by this time I was the only spectator left in the room. Everyone else had moved off to watch the medieval battle in the next hall, or possibly to try to arrange a quick dental appointment, or just anything, really, to get out of there.

Because I was the last to leave, I was spotted by the team.

“You got a problem?” I was asked by a stout fellow in a black tee-shirt, camo trousers and Doc Martens.

I mumbled something fairly lame about being surprised that something as commonplace as a single rifle shot required this amount of debate. The expert sneered.

“If you are going to do this, you have to do it right. I don’t imagine you know much about wargaming, then?”

And, of course, I didn’t. I saw this with absolute clarity. What’s more, I wasn’t sure that I ever wanted to.

Figure Manufacturers

A mixed bag - the picture shows examples of the typical hotch-potch which makes up my armies. Here we have the Regiment de Francfort, with 2 battalions of the Hesse Darmstadt Regiment Gross und Erbprinz, plus 2 regiments of (French) Chasseurs a Cheval.

The infantry here are mostly Falcata - diorama-style figures which give usefully scruffy campaign-dress units, as you see - with Kennington command castings. The skirmishers are a mixture of Falcata and NapoleoN, and the cavalry units are NapoleoN, with a sprinkling of Kennington horses.

I thought it would be useful to set out a rough listing of the manufacturers whose products I use, and which will therefore feature in this blog. It may take a while to get through them all!

(1) Thus far I have looked at Les Higgins, Hinton Hunt, Garrison and Ros.

(2) I still intend to do (in no particular order) Minifigs, Kennington, Lamming, Falcata, NapoleoN, Art Miniaturen, Der Kriegspieler, Warrior, Hinchliffe and Scruby. In almost all cases, you will find a proper history and some catalogue listings on VINTAGE20MIL and on some of the blogs listed in my Favourites panel - my posts will simply give my view on them.

Hooptedoodle #2 - Bananas - what's the story?

As it happens, I live in Scotland - a beautiful country, to be sure, but not noted for growing bananas. I like bananas very much - I eat a lot of them, they are good for you, contain a lot of useful minerals and all that, and come with an ingenious built-in hygienic packaging which makes them ideal for snacks and lunch-boxes. And - proverbially - they have no bones.

Recently I was on holiday in Italy, which was terrific for a lot of reasons, but one day we bought some bananas from a market stall.

Hey.

Fantastic. I was suddenly reminded how bananas used to taste when I was a kid. That banana flavour that you get in sweets and banana ice-cream, you know? Banana. It's been so long that I'd forgotten.

Now the thing that puzzles me is that they don't grow bananas in Italy, either, so presumably their market stalls are supplied by the same sort of refrigerated articulated wagons that we use in Britain. And - presumably - their bananas are also grown in the same parts of the world as ours.

So what is going on? This is not a trivial matter - bananas may never be the same again for me, and moving to Italy is probably not a possibility - I just need to understand why...

Basing

I was asked about bases, and it is a subject I was going to look at anyway. Bear in mind that my approach to basing is deliberately minimalist, so you are not going to find much of a discussion of techniques here!

Foy's Fourth Law is:

Rebasing your wargame armies is a miserable experience, so try very hard not to do it very often.

Some wargamers do not base their troops at all. The classic Old School picture is a black and white photo of Seven Years War Spencer Smiths, arms shouldered, with no movement trays or collective basing of any sort. It looks good, but I have attempted some of that in the past, and, for me, the sheer physical labour of making moves and keeping the lines straight, not to mention making the little beggars stand up, was almost as much of a pain as the paint-and-bayonet handling damage to the figures.

The rest of us end up with a basing organisation which is mainly a legacy of some rule set we no longer use. In my own case, my starting point was probably the system in Charlie Wesencraft's first book (now available again, I am delighted to say), but I rationalised it to suit the Wargames Research Group's 1685-1845 rules. This first change was dead easy, since originally I used the simple but unpleasant double-sided Selotape approach. Increasing elegance, more permanent and more expensive basing systems make changes much more of a trauma.

A couple of quick digressions, as they occur to me...

(1) does anyone still use double-sided Selotape? - for anything? It is nasty to use, and the real irritation is that very soon the sticky stuff turns yellow and non-sticky. Yet I remember it was everywhere once (well, not exactly everywhere - that would be silly), and we always had rolls and rolls of it in the house. They must have had good marketing people.

(2) why the WRG rules? I did use these rules for a while, but found them over-fussy and tedious - though they were much less so than the previous WRG set, I really can't be doing with casualty tables or sheets of paper on the battlefield, and the flinch rules never seemed very natural to me. I think I stuck (literally) with their base sizes because it was too much of a hassle to change them, because sticking with them might slightly increase my chances of meeting someone else who used a compatible system, because it seemed likely that the authors had worked out frontages with relentless accuracy, and - I admit it - because the WRG always managed to express themselves in such a way that it was obvious that only a complete idiot would do it any other way. [Faint paradox alert: if the WRG had changed their minds about the rules, did that mean that they themselves had previously been complete idiots? - and, if so, why should we trust their latest rules? - I used to worry a bit about this stuff...]

(3) still on the 1685-1845 rules - the cover picture is a strange sketch of a cannonball apparently shattering - I think that is the word - a flag. Two points here. Intuitively, I would have expected the flag to wrap around the cannonball and tear - all in an instant. I'm not sure what it would look like, but the picture provided seems unlikely. Secondly, it reminds me very strongly that this was a period when all wargames rules were adorned with the sort of artwork which you now only see on boxes of Odemars plastic soldiers. I have no idea why - presumably everyone had a strong-minded mate who thought he could draw, or maybe they were the results of a little-known project by Miss Bentham's class at Beaconsfield Primary School. Another of the great mysteries. You might argue that now we have swung the other way - easy access to desktop publishing means that we now have glossy booklets with a famous painting on the cover - Detaille or David or Lady Butler are popular - though the rules themselves may be written by budgerigars.

Back to the plot. Times change. In what I believe is a gradual acceptance of Foy's Fourth Law, modern rule writers usually start off with assurances to the reader that they will be able to use their existing basing system, whatever it is, with the new rules. I guess this increases the chances of someone actually using the things. This is definitely more sensible than the old style, in which the author would go on at some length about how he was very sorry, but you were going to have to rebase everything if you wanted to fight proper tabletop battles.

In passing, it would be interesting to know what proportion of sets of rules which are purchased actually get used - I estimate I have bought (or nicked) upwards of 50 Napoleonic rule sets over the years. I have borrowed bits of, or been influenced by, many of them, but how many have I given a fair trial to, in their unaltered state? - maybe three. How many am I still using? - erm - none. Another marketing success, then.

Then there was the dreaded Our Wargames Are More Realistic Than Yours period, when we got into National Characteristics in a big way. Yes, there was a point to it, but it all went way over the top. If you have your units of French organised and based differently from your Russians then you have my respect and admiration. Personally I use a common vanilla organisation for all nations, though they do behave a little differently in action. This probably has something to do with my preference for large battles - I do not believe that Corps commanders cared an awful lot whether their lines were 2 or 3 deep, as long as they were still there and still fighting. I managed to get through National Characteristics without a rebase, though my vanilla organisation did mean that many of the WRG-sized bases were now stuck on top of little card sabots to ease the handling of the battalions and keep them tidy.

But a rebase was coming. The final argument which clinched it came from an unexpected direction. I had always really liked the Grand Manner style pictures of infantry with mounted colonels - especially the colour plates in Charles Grant's "Napoleonic Wargames". I started putting colonels with a few infantry units when 20mm figures became available again (around 2005), and was so pleased with the results that I decided to make it a general standard. Since the card sabots had been working well for a while, I decided a proper re-org was due and set about rebasing all the infantry and artillery.

To flock or not to flock? Current state of the art, I guess, is shaded, highlighted figures on textured, flocked bases, and I regularly see examples which look absolutely fabulous. Humbling. I gave this much thought, and eventually decided to persevere with plain bases. Partly this was to avoid re-doing the cavalry, partly because it made the job a lot easier. Also, I have never been convinced about troops travelling around with their own portable hearthrug of cat-litter and green sand - it is especially hilarious when they are marching along roads. If you like them then, great, they certainly don't look any sillier than my rows of toy soldiers on exposed bases. The Old School view might be that the individual rectangular bases are just part of the fact that they are, in fact, toy soldiers, while flock is an add-on, an attempt to conceal their toysoldierness.

It is just a personal choice, obviously. I think that my final decision had a lot to do with the many disgusting nights I had spent scraping henhouse-green Tetrion off eBay-sourced vintage figures. In many cases the figures themselves had been excellently painted, but a subsequent re-base had resulted in them having this gloop applied with a large brush, sometimes up to their knees. The lesson was learned - Foy 4 in action. It might just be that one day I may change my mind about my basing rules, or - and let's suddenly introduce a chill draught here - some future owner may wish to re-base them (jeez - I wish I hadn't thought of that). The job will be ever so much less heartbreaking if they are not flocked.

So I use plain bases. Sometimes, especially for stuff with a big footprint like crewed artillery, I use 3mm MDF. Otherwise I use 2mm plywood. Since I needed a whole load of bases, I got the nice people at Litko Aerosystems to laser-cut me a load of custom size ones - this has been a terrific boon - well worth the money. A word of caution - if you are in the UK and you purchase from Litko, make sure you buy small amounts at any one time - Litko put a full invoice on the outside of the package, and the jobsworths at Royal Mail will hit you for customs duty plus an outrageous handling charge if your bill is over $18. I think I paid £11 extra charge for 20-something dollars worth of kit last year. I guess the people at Royal Mail who handle international packages don't like their job very much, and wish to punish anyone who has the temerity to buy something from the US, even if no equivalent product is available here.

I stick the troops on with PVA (which will come unstuck again cleanly and without damage if you need it to), and I use a constant brand and shade of green emulsion to match the main battle board. I started off using Robbialac's "Tapestry Green", which is long defunct, but a close match is provided by Dulux's current "Crested Moss #1" - that is the pea-soup shade you see in the photos. It shows up the uniforms nicely, and I'm stuck with it now anyway!

Sizes? In my rules, infantry are mounted 6 to a 50mm x 45mm base (with one base having a mounted colonel and 4 foot figures). Four of these bases make a battalion in my standard game (for which the ground scale works out at 1mm = 1 pace, or 25 paces to the inch). 6 figures represent 200 men (for infantry, anyway). The 4 bases can be positioned to denote line, column by divisions, march column or square, and can be placed higgledy-piggledy to denote "unformed".

My skirmishers are mounted in 3s on 80mm x 30mm bases. My cavalry are based 45mm deep with a 25mm frontage per figure for heavies, and a 30mm frontage for lights - don't ask me why - this is handed down straight from the WRG, so it must be right. The cavalry are mostly based in pairs (which is a cop-out - I probably need to think about this). Artillery are on 60mm wide x 80mm deep bases for each gun - I use 2 gun models for a battery, so the figures-to-men scale is clearly very different from the infantry. But it looks OK, which is an important point.

This post has gone on far longer than I expected. It is not a particularly novel topic, but it is kind of fundamental to the organisation of an army, and there are lots of different approaches. I'd be very pleased to get views on this - I would almost certainly learn something, though I run the risk of having to consider a re-base if your argument is particularly persuasive!