My 1/72 Waterloo project

My most time consuming project of late has been a Waterloo based project in 1/72 soft plastic. This is due to my prior purchase of the Airfix Waterloo set. I had an existing set of the British Infantry bought on a whim and this was to be the starting point of the collection.

Here is the contents of my Waterloo box in various states of paint, there is also some scratch built scenery/terrain pieces (not shown here I'll save that for another post) that are to ground scale not figure scale. I decided to base the figures according to a set of Wargame rules, just in case I ever found a fool friend to play this scenario with me. I settled on Jon Linney's Fast Play rules that I found at Free Wargames Rules.

I chose these rules for three reasons:

1. They're free
2. They're fast play
3. The basing system allows me to display my battalions in column, line and square

There are 16 figures to a battalion, 4 figures to a base. The bases are 60x20mm. I'm shooting for 10 battalions each of British and French. The British represent Wellington's reserve, the 8th (Kempt) and 9th (Pack) Brigades (excluding the Hanoverians for now as this would mean an additional 8 or so battalions to paint), plus two additional Guard battalions. The French will be made up of Donzelot and Marcognet's Divisions plus two additional Guard battalions. To date I actually have all of the British battalions painted. The figures are as accurately painted as I can research on the Internet or with my limited (not really I've got loads) library of books. I do find, however, that the Mont Saint Jean website is a fantastic Waterloo uniform reference if you don't mind the text being in French.

Each base is painted to represent either Grenadier, Centre or Light companies (or their French equivalents). I realise this might not be numerically accurate as there are normally more centre than flank companies, but I'm not that anal... yet!

The figures are also painted to accurately portray these company types with the correct plumes or epaulets. Because of the small sizes involved I have decided to only use one standard, which isn't a problem for the French but The British tended to carry 2 colours (flags). I have opted to use the Regimental Colours for a bit of variety as the King's Colour was generally a variation on the Union Flag. All my flags are laser printed, free from the excellent Napflags.