Vive le Roi! French Line Infantry for 28mm French and Indian War Gaming

Well it's nearly Halloween, so seems fitting that I return from the dead with a new post, this time about the completion of the last major unit for my French and Indian War force.

These figures were painted in late August, right before we finished playing out our FIW campaign and I took an abrupt and unplanned hiatus from wargaming and mini painting. My main wargaming partner in the area has left the country for two years on a Peace Corps assignment, and work has limited the time and energy I've had. Nevertheless, I do intend to make more posts here this fall, including battle reports from the FIW campaign.

But, back to the miniatures. In Sharp Practice terms, this is three groups of regular French line infantry. I've got them painted as the Regiment Languedoc that served in North America, but I believe they could also stand in as campagnie franches de la marine troops in line formation. To that end, I've modeled flags for both units, since I shouldn't need two standard bearers for the small scale actions in Sharp Practice.

The figures are a mixture of Warlord's French line set and two sets of Brigade Games' French line. I think the figures work well together, although the detail in the Warlord/Conquest produced figures don't match the newer Paul Hicks sculpts from Brigade. I've forgotten where the movement trays are from, but they were pretty highly modified to magnetize the bases while keeping them low profile.

Here's eight of the Warlord sculpts. The box only includes four firing figures out of twenty-odd figures, which I find a little disappointing. But they're not awful sculpts by any means.

And eight of the Brigade figures. They're also lacking in firing poses, but include some nice loading and charging poses.

This group is Brigade in the front rank and Warlord in the back. I've been mixing them throughout the three groups on the tabletop so there's not three groups each doing different things. The Brigade sets have no figures with shouldered arms, so there's no direct comparison. It makes the rear rank look a little undisciplined, but they still look good together.

The command group, from the Warlord set, which has a senior officer, two sergeants or junior officers, a drummer, and two flag bearers.

I had to do some slight modification with green stuff to this figure's sword hilt - in fact, several of the Warlord figures had slight casting defects that I patched with green stuff. No big deal.

This sergeant originally had a shouldered musket, but I wanted a figure with a spontoon, so I cut his hand and musket away, used thin wire and a hand from a plastic set to kitbash the spontoon, with a head sculpted from green stuff. Unfortunately, the angle I took this photo from seems to have neatly obscured the spontoon head.

You can see that a little better in this photo from their first tabletop outing.

The flags are simply printed on paper, then attached and stiffened with white glue.

I'm quite pleased with these guys. I'm tempted to add another group, or maybe some grenadiers. But for Sharp Practice, three groups of line infantry is usually where you max out in FIW and AWI games.

Lastly, I should mention some of my future plans. I've got a few more FIW miniatures to paint up, and then I plan to return to WWII figures for a bit. I'll begin posting reports on our FIW campaign soon, and just yesterday I joined in two long-distance tabletop games during Virtual Lard 7, so I'll have battle reports up for those soon too.