Thursday 16 April 2015

Horse Grenadier update 2

For one reason or another (unrelated to wargaming) progress on the Horse Grenadiers has been painfully slow. This is particularly embarrassing for me as Roy’s contribution towards Vintage Waterloo is continuing to snowball. Every few days I’m receiving emails from him that say things like “Hi Ian can you update me to 6 battalions of French line and two battalions of French legere” and “I found 24 painted Old Guard Today, with officer, drummer, standard bearer and sergeant which means that I can have them on card tomorrow!”. Only Roy (and possibly Clive) could find 24 painted Old Guard figures in a drawer that he didn’t know he had!


However my 6 figure squadron of French Guard Grenadier-a-Cheval troopers is now complete; they just need varnishing and basing. I paint the riders and horses separately so I only get to see the full effect when I glue the troopers to their saddles at the end. This is always a bit of a delicate process as they do like to slip about but by gently squeezing the legs to grip the horse they can be made to stay upright long enough for the Araldite to set.


Next I’m hoping to add some more French Carabineers to the 6 that I already have to make up a full 12 figure regiment. As I’ve already mentioned, Roy and I have decided to field 12 figure cavalry units for Vintage Waterloo rather than the 18 figure units we were using before. This is chiefly because its hard work finding 18 Hinton Hunt cavalry figures of the same type but also because smaller units are a bit easier to manoeuvre around the table. I’ve made some amendments to my Muskets & Marshals rules to accommodate the smaller sized units and I’ll make these available for download once I’ve edited them.


On the subject of rules I’m also looking at the idea of using unit information markers that will sit on the table next to each unit to help us keep track of things. There will be quite a few units on the table and I think we need a way to identify them without resorting to roster sheets. The current idea is to display the “Troop Type” (a letter denoting combat/morale score), the parent unit formation (orders will be issued at divisional level) and a leader icon that can be crossed through if the unit’s Colonel becomes a casualty. Variations of a prototype idea are shown above but this is still a work in progress.

8 comments:

Conrad Kinch said...

Lovely work there old son. They are a credit to you.

Stryker said...

Sir, I take that as a great compliment coming from you!

Wellington Man said...

Very nice indeed.

Anonymous said...

Very nice work, look forward to seeing the squadron all lined up

Paul

lewisgunner said...

You raise another question there Ian. There are a few large collections around that we know about, but these must represent a small proportion of the HH figures that are out there or at least were once out there. If HH were selling 500 figures a week for ten years (65-75) that would indicate that there were 250,000 figures somewhere. aeven if it was only half that rate then there should have been large collections that were accumulated.mI am prepared to believe that there were less, but then there were whole armies of pirates created....many of which are still around, still in armies, including mine.
Another way of looking at the numbers is to imagine that across the twenty years they were selling that 800 to 1000 wargamers created armies of HH with say 300 figures per army (10 battalions, six horse regts, guns etc.) that would also give a figure of 200,000 plus figures. Nowadays , with the good prices raised on Ebay one would have thought that these figures would turn up, but actually there is only a trickle of stuff. Where are they all? Were they junked? Are they in attics? Its a puzzle.

the Archduke said...

Well, Roy, if you of all people didn't know you had painted HHs in a drawer, where is the surprise in non believers having no idea what they have? I bought figures from one guy who said he'd bought boxes of them at a general auction. He didn't know what they were and was pleasantly surprised when a few of us threw our life savings at them. I like to think that not too many have been destroyed, as they were once cherished, but drawers and attics must be full of them. Market forces would be painful for us if they all emerged at once.....

Stryker said...

The 200,000 figure is interesting. I would imagine that a fair number may have simply gone to landfill by now. However if you consider that the people that bought these figures are now in the 55 to 75 age range then in theory they will start emerging big time in 10 years or so!

lewisgunner said...

Yes, but tgat will be a bit late. In most estate sales they would. either be dusty, bent and ignored or sold cheap as they would not be perceived as of value. Its not practical for us to get catalogues for all the places they might appear and even then they might not be catalogued in any recogniseable way! Would an auction house know they had any value? Would they know what HH are.
There must be hundreds of thousands of old Minifigs out there and not that many of them come up on Ebay.
Roy