In September, Peter's first soldiers had already arrived in St. Petersburg and were stationed in his 'toy castle'.

The so-called toy castle is actually the place where Peter played siege warfare. Ordinary children play soldier model figurines at most, but Peter, as the crown prince of the Russian Empire, naturally plays a real-life siege game.

However, Peter was not interested in playing the medieval ladder siege, so he took advantage of the leisure time when the soldiers were not yet in place, and he deliberately renovated the former toy castle to build it in the style of Lingbao.

Lingbao, as the name suggests, is a diamond-shaped fortress. But in reality, the diamond-shaped fortress is not a single fortress, but a combination of several polygonal fortresses. The earliest Lingbao was based on the square castle, and a diamond-shaped fortress was built at each of the four corners, because the diamond always had an abrupt edge and a square fortress at an acute angle, if the enemy attacked the city, this acute angle of the beveled side of the city wall would not be attacked by the enemy outside the castle, but could also attack the enemy who tried to climb the wall.

Therefore, Limbo actually covered the defensive corners of the original castle. Moreover, all Lingbao walls are oblique walls, which are nothing less than iron walls for solid shells that can only fly in a parabolic line. Therefore, when Lingbao first appeared in the Spanish-ruled Netherlands, it became a nightmare for the Spaniards, and even the best Spanish phalanx had to pay a huge price to take Lingbao, which directly depleted the Spanish treasury and led to the bankruptcy of the Spanish king many times.

Of course, that was more than a hundred years ago, and the current Lingbao has been tested and continuously improved by previous wars, and has appeared outside the Lingbao and then dug a circle of star-shaped anticline trenches. This type of star fort makes it necessary for the attacking enemy to rush into the unsheltered death trench before approaching the wall, but the defender can use this trench to build another layer of defense, which greatly strengthens the fortress's counterattack ability.

However, Peter knew that Aunt Elizabeth would not allow him to build a Star Castle, otherwise he would wonder if he was suspected of rebelling. But he was already very satisfied with the existing Ling Castle, although it could garrison two thousand people at most, it was enough for him to 'play'.

"Let's go! One, two, one! One, two, one! ”

When the recruits are in place, of course, they will do the queue training first.

The 700 Holstein soldiers were actually recruited according to different age groups, including 100 from 16 to 18 years old, and 100 from 25 to 28 years old. Mercenaries were prevalent in Germany as early as the Middle Ages, and a large number of mercenaries appeared in all the HRE internal wars, the famous Swiss mercenaries were actually one of the HRE, and the Saxon mercenaries who participated in the American Revolutionary War were even more famous in Europe.

In addition, Peter also ordered people to buy a batch of war horses of German regional breeds, and prepared to pair them with Russian war horses of Eastern European and Mongolian breeds, striving to produce the characteristics of both adapting to the high and cold climate of Russia and having the characteristics of European war horses with tall and explosive power.

Lately, Peter has been spending his days training recruits in the Toy Castle, and has been having a lot of fun, and he hasn't seen Catherine for almost a month.