Of recent date there has been a number of articles in the Newsletter about 1/300th scale Napoleonic wargames. I have been painting up a Heroics Prussian Army in this scale, and also some French, of which I hope to amass more in the future. I organise my infantry battalions into 20 figures and standard, 4 companies of 5 figures. Cavalry regiments are represented by 12-20 figures and the remaining figures are held back in reserve in a battle. There is always enough figures in each cavalry pack to form a regiment. My artillery batteries are organised as I gun and 5 crew stuck to a green card base. The time spent on painting these figures is really nothing compared to 25mm figures. It takes me approximately 2-1/2 hours to paint one twenty-figure battalion, whereas a 25mm figure usually takes at least an hour to complete. At present I have a Prussian force 7,788 men strong at full strength (236 figures). I am using Paddy Griffiths' ground scale of 1mm=10m in formulating my rules. Before I used a ground scale of 1 inch = 100 yards and got the movement values for troops by scaling-down the 25mm. equivalent arriving at (e.g.) 1 inch for line, 1 inch for column, add 1 inch for charge move, etc., etc. The new scale proves more accurate. My wargame scenery is made up of light green pipe-cleaners for hedges, and I make brick walls by cutting strips off the brick paper sheets available in model shops and glueing them to a card base coloured green by paints or felt pen. Simple trees are made by cutting up wooden cocktail sticks into segments about 20/30mm long and sand-papering one end until it is smooth. Then it is painted a brown colour, or could be left blank if it is already a realistic brown colour. Next, a piece of lichen is stuck to the top end of the stick and finally it is stuck to a green card base (by the sanded end) about 1mm square. I have made several trees in this manner and it is worthwhile having made your own because some of the sets of small scale railway layout trees can be quite expensive. I have based my Prussian units on the order-of-battle of the Prussian Army at Waterloo giving each battalion a particular number of a unit that was engaged in this battle. It is a shame that Heroics have not yet produced any Prussian Landwehr (Reservists) figures as the Landwehr units made up a large part of the Prussian Army at Waterloo. The size of 5mm figures allows a whole infantry brigade to be massed on the table-top where there was only a battalion in 25mm scale. A small engagement, involving a couple of battalions a side could even be fought on an oversize book! Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter # 174 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1976 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com