Organisation

One of the bonuses of blogging if that your own efforts ever flag, you can always surf the numerous links through other blog pages to find some previously-overlooked site for new inspiration.  I was recently looking at the site ‘Les Reves de Mars’ – the title of the marquissangfroid.blogspot.com blog – when I saw something very impressive. 

The author, obviously with something of a flair for graphics and visuals, has done a great little diagram of his army, with each figure represented by a dot or oval.  It’s a great way to get a sense of his collection, and it’s further polished up with various portraits of commanders, titles, etc.  This also includes his higher organisation, where his army is split into various brigades.

The corps system is of course a bit of an anachronism in our period, since it really came into it’s own a few decades down the line thanks to some French upstarts.  Knowing this, I’d avoided doing anything of the sort myself.  Things probably went a bit too far the other way.  At present, the Aschenbach or Luftberg HQ is basically a scene of luxuriant indolence where generals sit around engaging in national pursuits (making troops run the gauntlet for Aschenbach; engaging in complex backbiting plots for Luftberg.)  They hang around until the night before a battle, when a bunch of regiments will be assigned to them, and they lead them the next day.  After the fight, they are detached back to the general mass of the army and the general goes back to kicking his heels. 

Clearly, this will not do.  Although corps are a bit too formal, the army regiments could at least be grouped into some formal brigades.  So, I’m looking over my armies and shaping them into some sub-commands.  Juggling the different combinations is proving to be good entertainment all on it’s own (surprising just how much of the wargaming hobby can be entirely paper-based) and I’ll shortly put details of my proposed army organisation system!