Starting a 10mm War of the Spanish Succession Army or Two or Three

 

Oh my God its 10mm, I hear you cry ! Well yes it is, but let me explain. A long time ago, probably 15 years ago, I bought a couple of army packs (which grew to 8 army packs, but thats another story) to try out this "new" 10mm thing, but after doing a few test figures, I couldn't make my mind up how to represent units and my attention drifted off elsewhere.

Now I am no wargames butterfly, in fact I am pretty good at seeing Projects through, if not to the end at least to my usual 500 figure test game level. But this one just wouldn't flush and it sat in the box file I put it in all those years ago.

Moving to present day, regular visitors to Yarkshire Gamer will know that my current Big Project is the Battle of Mentana from the Italian Risorgimento, but apart from 4 Border Reiver figures from Flags of War, I have painted nothing but 28mm Italian Wars of Independence since 21st December 2021, I needed a palette cleanser and quickly.

So my lead pile is pretty small, I've been painting more than I've bought for about 10 years now and the backlog is slowly dissipating, so my eyes were drawn to the huge box of 10mm which had been maturing nicely in my mound of opportunity.

My intention was always to build a Savoyard Army of the period, something I have been interested in since an article way back in Issue 10 of Wargames Illustrated. The Army is relatively small so is a pretty realistic target, not including Milita it's 18 Battalions and a similar number of squadrons of Cavalry.

I decided, with my usual total disregard for rulesets to do 40 figure Battalions, based on 4 40 x 30 bases, for no other reason than it looked right to me. Cavalry will be on 40 x 50 bases, 8 figures per base, representing a Squadron, again for no other reason than me liking the look of it.

But after starting to sort out the figures into units I realised very quickly I had way more than 18 battalions, well you know what I say on the Podcast, Go Big or Go Home. The way I normally build a Project is to pick an Order of Battle from a particular Battle and build units to fill it, the Savoy Army was involved on both sides of the conflict, starting Allied with the French (at Chiari) before switching to the Imperialist side by Turin.

I picked the Battle of Chiari as my template, it has a large number if Savoy units in it and I had some half finished Frencb figures from my early tests 15 years ago so I could get a reasonable number of units together quickly. The whole thing has 120 Battalions and a similar number of squadrons so it will keep me busy for a while.

At the moment I am working on a unit in between Garibaldi Battalions but I reckon when the Mentana Project is done I will rattle through these pretty quickly.

So there you have it, the start of a new Project and my first "proper" blog post in a while, more updates to come.