Coming Soon to Zum Stollenkeller. . .

The Battle of Neu Sittangbad is about to begin in the next few days! It will feature LARGE units of painted 25-30mm plastic and metal figures, painted over five and a half years, fighting over scratch-built, and some improvised, scenery on a 6'x10' table painted in a pleasant light green.

The game will be a solo affair, using the Basic rules presented by Young andLawford in Charge!, along with a few Featherstone-inspired bits to introduce random events.

I am in the midst of tacking my figures down to multiple bases. While this particular feature departs from my previously faithful adaptation of the unbased units in Charge!, The War Game, et al it should speed play appreciably. A necessary compromise, but I console myself by remembering that it was those photographs of colorful Napoleonics, on multiple bases of three, six, and eight figures apiece, from Peter Gilder's Wargames Holiday Centre, that inspired me in the first place thirty years ago. So, the "look" of my games from now on will be a mix of Young &Lawford's and the Grants' mid-18th Century armies on the one hand and Peter Gilder's massed ranks of Napoleonics on the other. Not a bad visual combination.

In the meantime, please look around the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog for a bit of fictitious background before the big game and another inspiring guestpost on figure painting from one Mike Siggins. Initial moves in the Battle of Neu Sittangbad are set to begin this coming Friday afternoon, February 17th, once I am home from school for the weekend. This production has been rated A, suitable for ALL audiences.

Later. . .

I've just spent an enjoyable 90 minutes or so, gluing another unit of infantry onto thin plywood bases and setting up more troops on the table. Whew! That's a lot of soldiers, and I'm not finished yet. No wonder, it took five and a half years to paint everything. So, three or four more plastic tubs to unpack, a few minor adjustments to make to the tabletop battlefield, then I'll place the troops where Young and Lawford had them, more or less, at the start of their account, and away we go! Someone, cue the 1812 Overture, please.

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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