Redux de reasonable

Or, reduction towards reasonableness.

Been working to reduce the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the French Foreign Legion figures and the 'enemies'.  Well, success on several fronts but the Anglo-Egyptian army has been stubborn - though some reduction.  Natives, except for the Emirs and the Sultan, reduced by a full third - though still need to sort out the casualty figures.  For the French, I need one figure per stand for the native side of things to effectively double my native force of Bedouin and Touareg.

For the Fuzzie-Wuzzie (Hadendowah?) and the Ansar (?) I may need two casualties per figure - thanks to that aforementioned stubbornness.

French worked out at 12 foot units and 8 cavalry units plus the heavy weapons and train and leadership.  Oh, and a band and heliograph unit.  The British worked out to 12 foot units and 6 cavalry and 2 camelry units and the other associated units, band and heliograph included.  And a good dose of leaders for both.  Doesn't sound so bad, right?  Hold up.  Then there is the Egyptian army, more or less, with 6 units of Egyptian foot, 3 units of Sudanese foot, and 3 units Indian troops.  Then the cavalry - two Egyptian plus Egyptian lancers (did they have?  don't know.  but mine do.)  A mounted gendarme unit (sort of trash in battle) and two more horse mounted units (Egyptian?  tired and late), and one Egyptian and one Sudanese camel mounted units.  For both sides, all mounted have dismounts.

Foot units are 18 figures, mounted are 12 figures.

The native forces have 6 24 figure infantry units, 4 15 figure cavalry units, and 2 12 figure cameleers units.  I have a total of six of those groupings with some associated other bits but two of them have been deemed excess for a swap meet one day.

All in all, probably reduced the painting load by well over 1,000 figures.

The "European" troops rate 2 casualties per unit for foot and mounted, all else (leaders, heavy weapons, train elements) 1 casualty per.

Progress.

Centrifugal Force?

I hope my progress this past week shows promise for this year.  I've made significant progress on the AWI, back working on the FIW, and doing a little bit with the zoologicals for the Scramble - or Steeplechase - for something sort of like Africa.  Check out those tabs above for more information.

Flavorings and Cavalry in Prime

Okay, I admit this is not going to be the most exciting post but I think you'll find some things of interest somewhere in the photos.  This first lot is a series of cliffs in development.  I had a bunch of left over pieces from other projects and rather than throw them away I realized I could use them to make a variety of cliffs.  Some might say a piece of 2x4 on top of a 1x6 might not be much of a cliff - unless you are a 15 mm figure!  So, they'll do - eventually.  Ended up with a LOT of them.  What I like most is the ability to create a box canyon effect.  There will also be at least one waterfall.  Many, many options as to how to use these once they are done, which they are far away from being at this time.

This next lone shot is of a piece of terrain originally created for my pirate games.  With a four foot wide table they reach nicely from one side to the other which means they can be used in a variety of hill formations.

Which leads to this group of in progress terrain pieces.  These are meant to be high passes but can be used in a variety of ways.  One really cool use will be to arrange them in such a way as to create 'famous' passes - think Apache Pass or Kyburz Pass.  This is all adding a lot of options to what I can put on my table.

Moving on we arrive at some images of my flavor pieces, some done some in progress.

Above is a set of 16 spring grass pieces, some finished, some in progress.

And here we have two sets of 12 pieces each of tall grass, the left being nice and green and the right hand batch being very dried out (used lots of browns, tans, a little green, and a finish with saffron cans of spray paint).

The background above, to the right, is the summer green grass, 16 pieces.

And here, on the left and into the background are the 16 "California blonde" grass (think autumn).

Here is a small group of six pieces used for underbrush - bit of an oops here because when I built these I couldn't find the couple dozen other pieces I was looking for so these might get re-done at some point in time - or maybe I just build some more crowded pieces of underbrush.

Here you'll want to focus on the lower front - those are some areas of just rough, really dry ground.  Not shown because of issues with posting pictures and an out-of-date Safari on my other lap top are 3 each of two types of plowed fields.  I think, all told, I know have about 90 flavor pieces with more planned to get to at least 120 pieces.  The new challenge is how to store these so the wood bases won't warp.  Flat, flat, flat!

And, now, something a bit more fun: 20 regiments of American Revolution Cavalry primed and ready for painting.  Not the greatest photos, I'm afraid, and because of that photo loading challenge I'm not sure if the photos show all 20 regiments but I think they do.  But they provide evidence of progress.  I realize it is hard to see in many of the photos but there are dismounts to 'match' to every regiment, 12 men mounted on 12 horses, 12 dismounted men, a group of householders, and one dead cavalryman per unit (40 pieces x 20 regiments = 800 pieces to paint!!!  Yikes-a-zowie!)

Four regiments above.

 The above photo came out with better lighting for an unknown reason but you can at least see things better - 3 regiments in there.

All those regiments sort out to 3 British (16th, 17th, and mounted Highlanders), 3 Loyalist, 2 German, 4 Continental, 2 Legionary, Militia, 3 other revolutionary units like Washington's Life Guard, North Carolina and von Heer's Corp, and 2 French regiments.  Not all were actually full regiments but I want lots of cavalry for those hypothetical games I will be running.

And now to switch gears, here is the 'newest' of my French and Indian War units, the second provincial regiment.  No, the paint jobs won't win any awards - but those guys fight across the table just fine.

That flag has NY on one side and NJ (I think) on the other.  And seeing these photos I think I'll go back and use a wash on the skin tones - maybe.

Now that I have access to the blog again and have an idea how to sort out loading photos in the future, hope to get more posts up.  Though no promises they'll be soon because I'm putting a lot of my effort into my model railroad.

Success - regained access to blog

A bit late to post tonight but I have photos of recent projects but have been having trouble accessing my blogs - finally got back in!  Yeah.

Over 23,000 views since inception which surprises me - though I do discount a couple thousand of those as spider trolls.  I guess just part of the internet reality.

More later now that I've gotten back in.

Breaking a barrier

I think I've cracked through the barrier to reduction - and it will start with the Vikings.  Not by getting rid of them but by choosing only a relatively small set of them to keep and paint.  And, bonus, while doing a sort I started settling closer on the type of Viking scenarios I want to run.  So, all is good.

Or is it?

There is a very real possibility that I might be closing down all blogs I've started - depends on the results of research into a certain area based on new knowledge relating to the web.  Hopefully it won't come to that, but it might.  So, if there are things here you like, take a look before it goes away.  If it goes away.  No time line.  Just a thought.

And an order for some more buildings on its way as well as a few figures, not many of the latter.

Ivan the Idiot

Well, not all Russians, the legitimate visitors are welcome and appreciated.  But 209 visits in one month from Russia - well, we all know what that means.  Dostva-prick-ya.

Otherwise, I'm still here and finally getting time to get moving on miniatures again.  Hope it stays that way for a while.

One Step Closer

Sent off today what is likely to be my last 'large' order for miniatures, an Irregular order.  Okay, a couple of smallish orders to do yet - and then, maybe, some commissioned figures.  But with the two anticipated smaller orders, one more likely one maybe-ish, I will have finished ordering figures.  Feels good.  And getting to this point, I find myself spending more time working on the various and sundry elements of the collection.  Hope the pace keeps up.

The recently acquired Stone Mountain Star Fort dries after getting cleaned up.  The mountain passes got 'cut down to size' yesterday - as in literally getting cut shorter almost three inches.  I think that will work better.

Enough for now.