My Hundred Days Project - The Beginnings!

Almost two brigades, Belgian and British, step off past their guns.

It's going to be a bit of a picture intensive first update, this one. Recently I had the bright idea, what with it being the bicentennial and all, to put together forces for the Hundred Days Campaign. I also wanted a set of more 'simulation' rules that didn't require a hundred tables and a billion dice.

So I did a bit of research and went off and got myself a copy of Nigel Marsh's fantastically detailed Carnage & Glory II computer moderated rules. Sadly I'm yet to get a game in with them but I've fiddled around with the army list tools and started to put the Prince of Orange's I Corps together. From what I've read of the manual it looks like a nice slick system which, once we're used to the data input, will give some seriously detailed games and stop me from having to do any real maths.

For those interested, Nigel's rulesets can be found here: http://www.carnageandgloryii.com/

I decided I wanted to play my games in 6mm and use element basing with one battalion per base. I opted for Baccus 6mm figures and their 60mmx30mm basing style. This actually works out quite well; for 6mm in C&GII, 1" is equal to 100 yards/paces (which I'm using interchangeably, despite the slight difference between the two).

By my reckoning 60mm gives a battalion frontage of somewhere around 2 23/64 inches or 2.36", or 236 yards. Now, admittedly it's not perfect - battalions in three ranks should be slightly smaller in frontage and larger battalions should have a wider frontage but, overall, I'm happy with that representing your general Napoleonic battalion's 'Sphere of Influence' or whatever you want to call it. The same seems to work for a deployed battery and deployed cavalry regiments too, more or less.

That works for me. So, onto the miniatures...

The painting area in all its glory.

I wanted to begin with HRH William, Prince of Orange's I Corps for the Anglo-Allied forces and Gérard's IV Corps for the French. Collecting these two forces initially, and fiddling around with the OOBs means I can introduce my players who are pretty new to Napoleonics on the tabletop with the fictional Battle of Nivelles. I'll post a scenario description for this at some point in the near future.

A battalion of the KGL (the 5th in fact) begins its life.

I went ahead and bought myself a British 1812-1815 army pack by Baccus (https://www.baccus6mm.com/), along with some British infantry in stovepipe shakos to work as Belgians. Since doing so, I've taken another look at their website and noticed the Belgian troops available. They can go into another brigade when I get some...

Regarding my sources both for painting and an OOB, I'm using the excellent http://centjours.mont-saint-jean.com/ for uniform references and Wikipedia's bafflingly good article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_battle_of_the_Waterloo_Campaign. So far it seems to be working pretty well.

Just the colours left to add.

I've been painting fairly steadily over the last couple of weeks, averaging about a battalion per evening. But I said it would be picture heavy, so enough of the waffling on, enjoy some photos!

I'm pretty pleased with how the Napflags scale so well, even to 6mm.

Forward the brigade!

Halkett's 5th Brigade, formed into line.

The current force; British 5th Brigade (Halkett KCB), one Belgian and one RA battery, the 5th KGL of Ompteda's Brigade and the 1st Brigade, 3rd Netherlands Division (not quite complete).

Belgian Militia in all their glory.

I hope that gives you a taster of what's to come from this blog over the next few months. I'm hoping to put the first real scenario description for the fictitious Battle of Nivelles up sometime over the next week.

Until then, have fun with the hobby!