Friday 8 November 2013

2nd Battalion King's German Legion

It was way back in June that I presented the new Peninsular British infantry from Xan, supplied by Empress Miniatures here in the UK, when I completed the 7th Battalion King's German Legion.

I really liked these new figures so decided to buy another six battalions of them to complete my British forces for Oporto.



A really useful source, for any "would be modellers" of the KGL, is Osprey's KGL volume one, which looks at the units that took part in the early to mid stages of the Peninsular War. The book covers the interesting aspects of these battalions that look like other British "Royal" line battalions, but have rifle armed contingents in their light companies. This helps explain the fact that the 1st Division didn't, as a norm, have a 60th Rifles company added, as the KGL with their own riflemen were able to add that firepower to the 1st Division's Light battalion.


With the addition of the 2nd battalion seen below I just need to do the 1st battalion and that will complete the KGL line battalions that formed a key component of Wellington's 1st (The Gentlemens Sons) Division, along with the Guards and others. To see the other battalions in my KGL collection, just check out the "British" label to see the gallery of units completed too date.



The battalion is not entirely Xan figures, and I have used the AB figures for the command base. The colours, as usual, are from the excellent range from GMB Flags. Links to all the suppliers I use are listed under the links tab.




6 comments:

  1. I just had a good look through your blog, you have really done a nice job on everything.

    Your terrain articles are great, I especially like your discussion on scale, I game in 28 mm with 28 mm terrain aside from buildings (I use 20 and large 15mm) as they jus do not work. I find that works but stone walls etc are more tricky. My WWII is 20 mm, just liked the scale, so it was good I had the buildings but walls need to be 20 mm.

    I also found your discussion of the BattleGroup ruleset interesting, I am not interested in the rules as I like CoC, but is the book worth getting?

    Again kudos on a great blog.

    John

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi John, thank you for your comment.

      I like the Battlegroup rules, but as you will see from my comments, after several games, I find some aspects of them a little bit hard to get my head round, and as I said in my post, that's probably just me.

      If you like to read and collect rules then the production quality of these are worth having for that alone. I would be very happy to play a game of Battlegroup, but I would use IABSM as my preferred company level rule set, and I am planning to play Chain of Command when I get an opportunity. I guess I really buy into Richard and Nick's ethos of playing the period and not the rules, and I look for that in the rules I prefer to play. I find Carnage & Glory does the same for Napoleonics. I think rule sets are like different size shoes, I like to wear size 8's but if you need size 12's you probably won't be interested in my size. One doesn't invalidate the other, they're just different and suit different people. The best thing is that the more rule sets there are the more figures seem to get produced to be played with them, which is great.

      Thanks again

      Jonathan

      Delete
  2. Another two beautiful battalions, Jonathan. Great stuff!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Beautiful paintjob, really beautiful!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey guys, thank you. I'm really pleased with these Xan sculpts, they are fun to paint

    ReplyDelete