The Action at Federstein 4. August 1769. . .

Pain medication and swollen face permitting, a small game is about to take place. Look familiar?

Haven't felt terribly well, or like doing very much the last couple of days since my set to with the periodontist on Thursday morning last week. A pretty invasive procedure all things considered, and I both look and feel like someone has smacked me in the side of the head with a baseball/cricket bat. Not exactly pain, but a persistent, dull throb, which has finally let up a little today. No, dental implants are not for the faint of heart!

That said, I finally felt good enough midday today to clear The Young Master's things from my table and set things up for a small action between limited forces tomorrow. The first in a series of four linked battles, all of which are based on well known demonstration games as presented in titles by Donald Featherstone (Three Basic Battles), Young & Lawford (Blasthoff Bridge), Charles Grant (Sawmill Village), and H. G. Wells (Hook's Farm).

The rules are my (?!) Call It Macaroni set (two sides of one page), which owe a great deal Featherstone, Grant, et al. I've been tinkering with these fur two or three years now, have used earlier versions in a few games, and have been trying to whittle things down to just six easy-to-remember steps that will give a playable, fun game that takes 1-3 hours depending on the number of troops involved. We'll see how things go tomorrow (Sunday).

-- Stokes

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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