The Orders of Battle for Neu Sittangbad. . .

About two weeks ago, one of you visitors to the Grand Duchy of Stollen blog asked about the orders of battle for the coming, well, um, tabletop battle. So, after consulting Charge!, to get the balance of forces right, here is my personalized OOB for 17 February 1772:

Electorate of Zichenau (Invading) – General Phillipe de Latte
Ermland Garde (The Newts) (4 coy.)
Von Flickenhoffer’s Fusiliers (4 coy.)
29^th (Voluntiere aus Mittau) Infantry (3 coy.)
13^th (Von Auflauf) Infantry (3 coy.)
O’Malley’s Irish Grenzers (2 coy.)
Electoral Pioneer Battalion (2 coy.)
11^th Hussars (3 sqn.)
Trumbach Dragoons (3 sqn.)
Grenadiere zu Pferd (3 sqn.)
1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd companies, The Most Honorable and Efficient Electoral Artillery

Grand Duchy of Stollen (Defending) – General von Tschatschke

Leib Grenadiers (Grand Duchess Sonja’s Own) (3 coy.)

2^nd (Von Laurenz) Musketeers (3 coy.)

Jäger zu Fuβ (2 coy.)

Wolmar-Bock (1 coy.)

11^th Engineer Bn. (2 coy.)

4^th (Trakehnen) Dragoons (3sqn.)

Anspach-Beyreuth Cuirassiers (3 sqn.)

1^st (Princess Waltraud’s) Battery of Artillery

***Unit organization as outlined in Charge! with slightly stronger cavalry units of 30 figures each.

I have the table laid out with most of the scenic items and some of the troops in place, and I must say it looks pretty darn good to my eyes after five and half years of painting, modelling, planning, and nattering on about it to whomever has been kind enough to listen.

Trying hard to get as many of my troops based up as possible before the battle starts in earnest, but, as usual, real life interferes at the least convenient times. For instance, a stack of student papers to read through, comment on, grade, and return this weekend and early into next week. . . Followed by the inevitable whining that has become commonplace among American undergraduates, many of whom have been conditioned by their helicopter parents and K-12 teachers to receive praise and high grades for the fairly simple act of putting their names on a piece of paper. Well-developed and engaging content, evidence of genuine thought beyond the superficial, grammar, punctuation, and spelling be damned! But I digress.

Returning to the more pleasant matters of brightly colored toy soldiers and wargaming, some of my figures will be on painted bases all finished, a few will be on unpainted bases, and most, I fear, will be, unbased. But we'll see how things go in the next week before things really get going here in Zum Stollenkeller.

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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