Out of Popsicle Sticks

Weird title I know but it fits. And if you tried to hazard a guess as to what I am talking about you would be correct in assuming that I have been busy preparing a lot of 6mm Napoleonics for painting. It has taken me a couple of days to get the massive number of figures I am preparing ready for actual painting. Fist finding all that I wanted to make, organizing them into regiments, washing them all, cleaning off flash, repairing any damage, gluing them to Popsicle sticks, and finally giving them a good base coat. Quite the involved process, especially when you are preparing close to a thousand figures. That, however, is not the main reason why I have not posted an update yet. I have also been in the process of getting ready to move again( Seems like I do this once a year now. Joys of college.) and because of that I have actually spent some time getting all these figures ready. Why? You may ask. Simple some of my roommates have been kind enough to leave already and as we know paint has some pretty nasty fumes. And considering that fumigating my room was not high on my list of things to do this summer, I decided to make use on one of the empty rooms at my place to let the fumes wear off.

As to the title of the post, I really am out of  Popsicle sticks. I somehow managed to have just enough Popsicle sticks available to be able to glue all the figures I base coated to. I could not have planned it better if I had tried. Here are the results so far.

Most of the infantry and some Artillery.

The Guard infantry and the Cavalry

Ready to paint

With all that said I have also managed to finishing painting some more troops for the French II Corps. I completed the French 5th Infantry Division right after the end of the semester. The 5th Division is comprised of the 3rd, 61st, 72nd, and 108th regiments of the Line. Next up is going to be the 6th Infantry Division. Which will be comprised of two light infantry regiments and two line regiments.

The French 5th Infantry Division

On a side note. I recently invested in Histwar: Les Grognards. It is a Real Time Strategy(RTS) game set entirely during the Napoleonic wars. I had tried out the demo about 4 years ago and for some reason I did not like it. Recently I have been looking more and more at battles from the command perspective of controlling an entire army on the field and off the field(meaning strategic or tactical command). And as such I took another look at the game and I have to say that I am really impressed with it so far. Now I have not had much of a chance to go into playing the game other than completing the Tutorials and reading the manual. But what I have seen so far is a good sign of a worthy game. The game allows a player to focus on the different aspects of controlling an army in the field. You can either just sit back and give each of your Corps a command and watch the AI hash it out. Or you can get into the nitty gritty up front command aspect of a Napoleonic battle. Considering that this game was made by a non-mainstream company it has been very well thought out. It also lacks the arcade style of games that I have seen with most RTS games of late, which makes me really happy. I may talk more about the game later. I have just not decided on that yet.

A teaser of what the game looks like.

 I will have quite a few new posts over this next week. I have just finished moving and only recently got the internet working at my new place. Needless to say, work on my miniature projects has not stopped and I have several new things to show you all.