"The Army of Frederick the Great" has Arrived!

The first edition of Christopher Duffy’s marvelous book arrived in the mail yesterday, and it’s chock full of interesting and useful information about Frederick’s army. While I’ve been advised by Bill Protz over at the OSW discussion board that later editions contain much new and reworked material, I’m happy with my purchase of this used copy. At under $14 US, who can complain? I’ll ask for a new copy of Mr. Duffy’s book for my birthday in November -- just so I’ve got the more complete edition of his work. At any rate, there is all sorts of stuff I can use as a basis for fleshing out the Grand Duchy of Stollen campaign. So, I spent only an hour painting white gaiters last evening, followed by THREE hours reading in bed before turning out the light. Fascinating stuff!

Comments

Snickering Corpses said…

It is indeed full of very cool ideas. I got a good bit of inspiration out of it. Have you seen the layout of the battalion and platoon formations?

69 is the platoon, 84-87 has the battalion formation and some of the various movement and deployment drills. (1st edition pages only, 2nd edition pages are different)

12:21 PM

Bluebear Jeff said…

Rather than get the second edition, you might want to get one of Duffy's other books (don't think that it matters which -- as far as I know they are all good).

Ask at "Old School" and see what is recommended most.

-- Jeff

1:59 PM

WSTKS-FM Worldwide said…

Hi Jeff,

Wel, that tears it! I guess I'll have to ask the Grand Duchess for DUffy's book on Maria Theresa's army or another one of his books. I really like the current one! Glad to have you back.

Best Regards,

Stokes

5:18 PM

And We're Off!!!

Arrrgh! Gotta go back into camera settings on my iPhone to bring all of the frame into focus. Blast! Painting is underway on the 60 or so Minden Austrians, which are slated to become my version of the Anhalt-Zerbst Regiment of AWI renown. More or less indistinguishable from Austrians of the era really, right down to the red facings and turnbacks, but the eventual flags (already in my files) will set them apart. I went ahead and based-coated all of them over a couple of days lthe last week of August, using a mix of light gray and white acrylic gesso, before next applying my usual basic alkyd oil flesh tone to the faces and hands. In a day or two, I'll hit that with Army Painter Flesh Wash to tone things down a bit and bring some definition to the faces and hands. As usual, the plan is to focus on about 20 figures at a time, splitting the regiment roughly into thirds along with the color party and regimental staff. Depending on ...

Sunday Morning Coffee with AI. . .

A rmed with a second cup of fresh, strong coffee, I messed around a bit this morning with artlist.io using its image to image function in an attempt to convert my hand-drawn map from September 2006 to something that more resembles an old map from the mid-18th century. And just like my experiments with Ninja AI in June, the results are mixed. The above map is pretty good, but Artlist keeps fouling up the place names and has trouble putting a faint overlay of hexes across the entire area. Hexes, admittedly, are not likely to be found on any genuine maps from the era in question, but there we are. Frankly, I prefer the appearance of the Ninja map, but there were problems getting it to correct its errors. Grrrr. As is the case with so much having to do with the various AI's out there now, the output generated is a direct result of the prompts entered. For text alone, and when you develop a lengthy, highly detailed prompt, it is...

Continued Regional Map Revisions. . .

F ooled around a bit more with the revised map just before and after dinner this evening, using the Fotor app to reinsert missing text . I also removed a few other things using the 'Magic Eraser' function, which works surprisingly well. Now, we're getting somewhere. I just have to figure out how to ensure that the text is all a uniform font style and maybe figure out a way to add a few bunches of trees to suggest forested areas, Ninja AI is not always entirely cooperative to the tune of "I'm sorry Dave. I can't do that." -- Stokes

The Grand Duchy of Stollen

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