Napoleonic's: how to get started

The purpose of this series is to walk you through the steps that I went through to create my 6mm Prussian army,

For me it began with seeing a friend of mine painting up some of his 28mm Napoleonic's from warlord games I think. He has two forces for Black powder. I went cool and then it just sat there in the back of my head. I started looking at models and rules from various companies. I had already settled on Black powder as the rule set since most people around her that I have met play it. With models I was immediately hit by the many options in scale and company wise.

After searching around for awhile, reading forums and then talking to that same friend I found out about Baccus. I went for 6mm even though no one here has it for two reasons. First I want a full force based off of a mostly historically based one. I say mostly historical because I am not basing the force off of a specific force at X battle. Second, I really wanted to be able to have the grand army  view when playing. In 28mm its cost prohibitive to build said force and the space it would take would be enormous. In 6mm I can easily build 2 different forces that will take up half the space of a single 28mm and cost less than half as much.

After that I started readying to decide who I wanted to build. I had already decided I didn't want a French or British force because most people do them. I ended up picking Prussians after reading Napoleonic Armies: A wargamer's Campaign Directory 1805-1815 by Ray Johnson. After that I started tearing through the net trying to learn more and diving into my Osprey book collection.

I have easily spent 200+hrs researching these guys everything from army structure to uniform colors and names of units. While doing this I settled on 1812 as the period I wanted to focus on. 

So things to consider if you want to do Napoleonic armies.
1. Rule set: there are many out there (some easily scale, some don't)
2. at the same time scale (6/10/15/28) 
3. who you are going to play with and what they want to play as
4. More specific time period (this can alter your armies composition quite a lot)
5. $$$- ie how much time and money you want to spend on it.


Hope this helps other people if you need help let me know and I will try. I will start reviewing the osprey books I used in the coming months.

Aruki