Altenburg 1813. The terrain

The table game for Altenburg is ready. There some subtile differences with the proposed map (see here)

The fog of war in action!

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The terrain for Sellerhausen

The town of Leipzig has grown with the years and some of the nearest villages have been incorporated into the city itself. However, many old places can be still easily located in a modern map or in Google Earth.
To draw the terrain for this combat, I have used two main sources. The first, 'Leipzig - Situation at 1630 Hours: October 18, 1813' is accessible at Napoleon-Series, and shows the military situation at that date and hour. The map is very schematic and mainly good for showing the disposition of the different troops on the terrain.

The other source is the Leipzig Karte of 1891. I have found it at Academic dictionaries and encyclopedias by using a Google Search of images for Sellerhausen. The Karte is downloadable in many different pieces (until 8!), that were then collated into a new map with a graphics program. The final map has many blanks left and shows the railroad network, the roads, the streams and the villages.

From all this information I drawn at last the terrain map for Sellerhausen with Powerpoint, by following the same technique used for Connewitz (and forn the rest of my battlemaps). The map is rotated at will and the terrain scale changed until the villages, Sellerhausen, Stunz and Molkau were located in the middle of the table. The final result is:
The more significant features of the actual battle, villages and the stream, are present. However, the final shape would include some low hills and ondulating terrain: the fog of war in action!

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The battlefield of Connewitz

I have built (at last!) the battlefield for Connewitz, and the final terrain is very similar to the initial map.
You can see below a full panorama of the battlefield with Connewitz in the left foreground and Dölitz in the distance, with the small Lössnitz hamlet between the other two.

Below is a next view of the Manor House at Dölitz (no gatehouse available, sorry)

I hope to finish the deployment in the next days.

The terrain for Connewitz

The terrain around the Connewitz-Dölitz has changed with the years. After the second World War, there was some extensive lignit extractive mining works in the area between the Pleisse and Elster rivers, so the terrain shape is irreversibly changed. Some villages have dissapeared, whereas the remaining ones have grown. The shape of the main branchs of the Pleisse River is still recognizable, but the minor ones and the mill races can be not found today.
After an internet research, I found a map in the http://napoleonistyka.atspace.com/ site, one of the better internet sources for the Battle of Nations. The map covers the Markleeberg-Dölitz area and also shows the initial dispositions of French-Polish and Austrians forces.

The table-map for Lasalle has been desgined by using the above map. The map was rotated near 90º and the terrain scale changed until the villages, Connewitz and Dölitz, were located near the table borders. The final result is:


The more significant features, the villages, the bridges, the Dölitz manor, the swampy areas, are present. However, the final shape would change because of the fog of war, i.e. because of the actual availability of terrain features!

A very interesting video collection

Watch this Youtube site: thekamloopian's channel full of many funny and useful tips about wargaming terrain. See an example about conifer trees:

The link is a courtesy from Valion of Benno's Figures Forum

I'm back

Well, I returned from Antwerp (or Antwerpen) Belgium, a very friendly town.
I'll be at home a pair of days and after I'll be on travel again. No painting for now, but only a watch to my favourite web sites, and a great discovery: Mi Waterloo by Pedro Marquez from Spain, an astounding site with a very ingenious method to place a dioram in a room!

Some diorama pages

Looking for inspiration in the web, I found these sites with some superb dioramas about Leipzig campaign:
Der Neuaufbau des Völkerschlachtdioramas
Markkleeberg Diorama
Croebern 1813

The pages are in German but a picture is worth a thousand words.... and the one below is from the Croebern 1813 site