The Deluge - C17th Test Units

   I think I mentioned after Salute this year, that I came away not having spent much money at all. The one thing that did really tempt me was a game by a Polish games designer called By Fire and Sword, which had just released it's 2rnd edition. The set of rules focussed on the wars the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth found itself in during the 1600's, with various invasions by the Ottoman's and a couple by either the Swedish or the Holy Roman Empire. I managed to not buy the starter set but spent the next couple of weeks trying to decide if I regretted that choice or not.

   At the same time, someone on Bluesky was trying to encourage me to start a 10mm project as they have been saying its like 15mm, which I think look great on the table, but better and cheaper. I didn't want to double (or triple) up on any era, so I wasn't going to jump into any project. Then it dawned on me that I was interested in a new era and I had a scale I wanted to try, why didn't I dip my toes to test the theory?

   I plan to use Pikeman's Lament to play these - although, I'm keeping the basing vague enough that other rules can take over in the future - with two bases of any model being a unit*. I had looked at copying the By Fire and Sword starter set with The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth on one side and the Ottomans on the other, but realised if I looked at the eastern side of their realm about 20 years earlier I could do a cheaper intro game against the Swedish instead and, if I enjoyed the scale, I could work up to the Ottomans. The back of the book has units for such an engagement, so I'm copying that for my initial game - which is only 11 units between the two sides, still a lot of figures but more manageable than the Ottoman units.

*making half strength units easier to track and set up easier

   I bought a few test packs just to see if I enjoyed the painting side before I bought whole armies and this post is the first of those units - the Polish Winged Hussars and some Swedish Musketeers. 

The first unit of Polish Winged Lancers has come up a treat if I say so myself. They need to have some grass of some sort to break their bases up but otherwise, I'm really pleased with them

I then decided to test out infantry. The exact lists I want to try need 2 units of Commanded Shot - which are half sized musket units - but I wanted to see how the full sized units would look too, so I used a single pack to do a unit of each.

The Commanded Shot unit below

The regular unit of Musketeers

I'm working my way through some more Polish Winged Hussars as I type, but I am now fairly confident this project is doable. The pennants on the Hussar's lances might break me though.

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ECW Topups

   Another project that I did want to get on the table this year but just hadn't managed was the English Civil War / War of Three Kingdoms. There is something about the conflict that means I've had thoughts bubbling away about it for months and months but too many projects to really go back and do anything about it.

   My Covenantors and Highland Scots / Jacobite Rebellion projects were given a kick start when my mate Neil was in the process of painting up his ECW army, but there was more I needed to get done once I had some time. This post is about some of the odds and sods that I had in my backlog for the project.

The cannon limber from Warlord Games to go with the cannon I painted a couple of years ago. No idea how this one took so long to get done

Wagon from Redoubt with a cut down load from Colonel Bills

Warlord Games surgeon to add a bit of character to my bag lines

An artillery officer from 1st Corp, although I plan to use him as a staff officer just keeping an eye on the battlefield

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That They Would Be The Lord's People

     I pushed this post back slightly to focus on the stuff for the Agincourt game but I actually painted these figures about mid point into my slog of French knights as a bit of a palette cleanse and to empty some space on my to do shelf.

   Nothing major to say about these that hasn't been mentioned before, but with this unit being finished I can count the project as done. I might add some odds and sods for the project in the future, but for now a captain, unit of pikes, 2 units of musketeers and 2 units of horse, covers what I set out to do.

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A Highland Quarrel

   The last bits I needed to paint from the 1st phase* of the Jacobite Rebellion project were the cannon, associated limber and an ammunition wagon for the cannon. The crew have already been painted, so at this point it's just the horses and constructed bits left to go. The figures are from Front Rank as they just do gorgeous limbers.

*can you tell it's escalated?

   So, I said 1st phase earlier as Gripping Beast had a sale a couple of weekends ago which included their Front Rank ranges, so a pair of lowlander units were purchased at a slightly earlier time period than planned - other projects should probably be getting priority after finishing these. Then not long after I had placed that order, my mate Neil, discovered he had too many troops for this period and has agreed to offload some troops that would be appropriate for the Royal Ecossais and the Irish Piquets. We shall see how quickly they get painted but the anniversary of Culloden is only 6 months away and on a Sunday, so a perfect gaming day . . .

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He Also Made A Covenant Between The King And The People

   Again, during 2019 when I was just buying boxes of Warlord Games English Civil War plastic boxes whenever I saw them cheap or had points to spend online, one of the boxes I picked up was of cavalry. The plan for the box was to split it evenly between Royalist and Parliamentarians to boost each side to 3 units, however, with the Royalist gaining two units of dragoons, I felt like I needed to give Parliament two units of cavalry back.

   At the start of the summer when I was painting a lot of horses, I remembered I had this box, and as I was starting to build it, it dawned on me that it would make sense to make the riders Covenanters. The addition of the famous bonnet (which I had bought spares of) felt like enough in my head to prove the point and off I went. The horses were painted in big batches during July, but the riders have waited until now.

   Depending on my needs for the particular game, these will give me either the cavalry wing of a smaller Covenanter force or a boost to the Parliamentarian cavalry, boosting me to 4 units which could still be improved upon, without costing me too much in metal figures.

   This just leaves a single unit of musketeers to paint and this project is done. I still need to go back to the Jacobites/Highlanders too but I have other projects that are demanding attention.

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Jehoiada Then Made A Covenant Between The Lord And The King

   In what tuned into less of a flurry of Scottish themed posts than I had planned to end the month on, due to work levels and general real life, but I have been trying to keep painting in whatever free time I can slot it into* and then I only just realised I forgot to post anything this weekend.

*these projects won't move themselves

   This is the pikeman unit for my Covenantors with the Earl of Buccleugh's banner. Nothing particularly different from the first musketeer unit except I've given the officers a bit more colour in their clothing - but not too much that they stand out in this unit.

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A Highland Squabble

   The last two batches of highland clansmen were always going to be in a more historically accurate tartan* and I had the batches split up on movement trays ready to paint, but in an extended session pushing Edward on a swing, I realised that if they were all going to be various shades of brown, it made more sense to just do them as one big batch and damn the consequences. I hate doing big batches**, but sometimes they just make sense, so in this case I set aside any notions of the speed in which the batch would be completed and knuckled down.

*earthy colours

**and yet keep coming back to them for some reason

   Finishing these means that all my planned clansmen are now complete. Four units of regular clansmen and two units of commanded shot for Pikeman's Lament or five units of "natives" for Rebels & Patriots. All I need to paint now to complete this army is a cannon and limber (crew being done in the clansmen batches).

   In the fullness of time I plan to buy a couple of units of lowlanders to provide a more stable shooting line and probably a couple of units of Royal Ecossais, although I am a tad nervous that if I buy, what are effectively French infantry for the Seven Years War, then all I need is a cannon and some cavalry*** and I have another army almost by accident****.

***Cavalry which would also be appropriate for this project . . .

****am I doing a 7 Years War French army?

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For Religion, King and Kingdom

  When I visited Marston Moor in 2020, I'd just finished two sides for ECW, played my first and only games of the period and was busy buying up boxes of figures aware that with lockdowns and a kid on the way, a backlog wouldn't hurt. I came away from the battlefield as inspired as you might imagine but also having learnt how important a role the Covenantors had played in the war, so I was still in sight of the battlefield when I placed an order for a box of Warlord Games Covenantors*.

   Two years later and I feel like the box has matured quite nicely, so it's time to crack it open and get to work. I'll go into detail about which regiment these are once I do the pikemen, but for now they are wearing the favoured Covenanter grey jackets and blue bonnets.

*this being the same holiday I started ordering early imperial romans as well**

**which turned out to be interesting as I think there ended up being 3 packages from that company waiting at my local Royal Mail depot

   Also, it was quite interesting on my last post that I got picked up on the phrase "our king". I can only assume I ended up on an anti-monarchy facebook page somewhere as my page views sky rocketed with anti-monarchy comments from anonymous posters. I explained to the first one my view point and why I had used the phrase, then as I received about another 20 or so over the next 24 hours, some of which were getting fairly nasty, I decided to delete all but the first comment.

   I suppose at this point I should probably thank the commenters as they have helped my blog's SEO - not something I care about, but never hurts.

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A Highland Brawl

   Hot on the heels of the last batch is another, this time in my attempt at Stewart Hunting Tartan, something our new king has sported himself on numerous occasions according to my research.

Again an empty flag pole as I'm waiting on the flags*

*on which note I might chase as they were posted 2 weeks ago

   I also ended up with a little Warbases order recently and I added a couple of packs of highland cows to that delivery, working on the theory that they will help place the game in Scotland . . .

   I'm well over half way on this project now with only two batches of clansmen left to go, but I can feel myself losing a bit of steam on it. The next two batches are both built and sprayed ready to go, but are going to be in a slightly more muted/earthy tartan as I have been painting (purposely) anti-historically bright tartans so far, I'd like to tone them down for the remainder of the project, so I might have a look at the other side for a little bit to have a break before coming back to finish this off.

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A Highland Scuffle

   With a week or so off of painting with a trip to the Lake District and Hadrian's Wall, I'm back to painting my Highlanders. My next batches were always going to include some sort of royal tartan but with the current news it felt right to push Royal Stewart Tartan up the painting order.

   So I said last time that I planned to paint each box in a different tartan colour, but looking at what I have left to do (4 batches from 2 more boxes*), I think it makes more sense to do each batch in a different tartan.

*ish - actually 2 boxes and some extras

   As with my first whole box, this batch of 12 will be mixed between different units and will be used as clansmen and commanded shot for ECW using Pikeman's Lament and mixed Natives units for Jacobite Rebellion using Rebels and Patriots.

As always, I have about 20 projects I want to be getting on with, so I'm going to just knuckle down and get painting.

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A Highland Loiter

   In a surprise twist to my painting schedule, may I present the start of Scotember, a month of Scottish themed armies*. I have 2 and a half Scottish armies to paint up and as I have been reading a series called The Rigante, which starts as a fantasy take on the ancient British and ends up being the Scottish Highlanders in the English Civil War, I thought I would take a look at some projects that have ended up being pushed right back due to a lack of deadlines.

*although, I might add some other stuff on if my attention starts to wain

   The first army is a Highlander army for ECW and for the Jacobite Rebellion. I need about 60 tartan clad highlanders for the 24 point Pikeman's Lament force, which works out at about 3 packs of Warlord Games' Highland Clansmen**. I had planned to paint them as a single clan army, but the more research I did, and sorry to any Scots reading this and shouting at the screen about the idiot Englishman, it doesn't seem like clan tartan was a thing in this period and it was more a range of tartans that were worn as part of the culture. So I plan to paint a mix of tartans - although based on real modern ones for simplicity - and then mix the units up, so the first box I painted in the same tartan as my Napoleonic Highlanders***, in the colours of Cameron of Erracht.

**plus change to make up numbers

***more on them later (hopefully)

   The bannerman doesn't have a flag on his pole as it is in the post. The plan with these (especially as I have more bannermen than I need for a normal army) is to have a mix of ECW/War Of Three Kingdoms and Jacobite rebellion flags so I can flavour the army as needed.

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Essex Regiment of Foote Pt2

  I've called this the Essex Regiment of Foote pt2 as its basically a rehash of a project from last year, so let's start at the beginning. Last year, I finally managed to get my ECW project moving and once the momentum had started, I found I really enjoyed it. It was a pity it only got onto the table twice, but with everything that happened last year, twice is actually really good going.

   However, with my head currently thinking in terms of 15mm armies, ECW was one of the projects where it dawned on me that 15mm would make a huge difference. A regular infantry company of pikemen and musketeer wings takes up a lot of space and as I'd like both sides to have at least two of these blocks, 28mm on a 6/4 board looks cramped very quickly. So on a recent trip to Essex Miniatures (I was only going to have a quick look) I saw the ECW figures in the display cabinet and decided to sate my curiosity.

   As this is the second time I've painted this unit, I decided to match both the officer's uniform and the flag to the 28mm version of the unit. I'm not planning on getting rid of the 28mm stuff any time soon, but if my idea is right, I think the 15mm might see more table time. Size wise, I've double the figure count from 28-15, so that I think the pike block looks more dangerous and less like a minor annoyance with 20 pikes vs only 8, while the full length of the unit is about half of what it is in the bigger scale.

I really do need to focus on a single project again now, though.

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The Second Skirmish at Much Dithering

    The weekend following the last game at Neil's house, I had a bit of an ECW buzz on the go, between the game and reading another couple of books in Michael Arnold's Civil War Chronicles (sold as an ECW Sharpe which it basically is), so I decided to put the motivation to a good use and crack open the 3rd box of ECW infantry that I had recently bought - the trip to Marston Moor was really dangerous for my wallet.

   This regiment would be painted as the Earl Of Northampton's Foote, a second Royalist unit as I have a second Parliamentary unit already bought as well. The Earl's greencoats fought at Hopton Heath which features in the second novel in the series and one that has given me a few ideas.

   With a new regiment of foote painted up - although missing their banner currently - it made sense for them to take to the field instead of Apsley's foote. This game saw much more combat than the last one with both flanks being hotly contested, but by the end of the game the Royalists had lost more men, but due to reinforcement rolls had more units on the board when we called it, so it's hard to say who actually had the victory.

The Royalist cavalry on the right flank did very little all game except move to hide behind their infantry when the Parliamentary troops moved up.

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The Skirmish At Much Dithering

    A couple of Wednesdays ago saw the first game of English Civil War using the Pikeman's Lament ruleset. The Earl of Essex's regiment of foote lined up against Sir Allen Apsley's regiment of foote at the village of Much Dithering. Both sides had 30 points, but with slightly different make ups based on getting sides to feel right - Royalists feel more right with an extra couple of units of cavalry - which left the Parliamentarians with the field gun and guard.

   In the build up to the game I had been frantically painting and these are what I got finished in time for the game;

A pair of mounted dragoon units - I still have the foot versions to paint and banners to put on.

A unit of flintlock armed shot - but using regular shot rules as I doubt on the scale we are looking at there would be much difference. The jackets match those worn by the cannon crew, so are from the same unit.

Something I've started doing - stolen shamelessly off my mate Neil - is do separate command for armies. While the rules say that one model in a unit from your army is nominated as the leader, some periods make more sense with a leader slightly detached from the fighting, e.g. a Napoleonic Colonel with aide du camp directing from behind while captains and lt's push units forward.

So I built a base for each side and tried to make each look like the right flavour.

   Then the skirmish itself. The village of Much Dithering is a quiet village, but as it is situated between two Royalist and Parliamentarian strongholds, it seems doomed to see action.

While we didn't get very far into the game we decided we enjoyed it enough to arrange another game the week after.

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Draw Up The Artillery

   Before I even started thinking that a second army for my English Civil War project would be a good idea, I had already been fishing about online to add a few more units to my Parliamentary force that weren't going to constitute another major project on their own and a cannon was one of the obvious answers.

    The cannon I chose was from Perry Miniatures and is a properly nice model, as you would expect. I painted it and it's crew blue so that it isn't tied to either side to give me some flexibility in assigning troops to either army when I come to set up a game. It could do with a limber, baggage train and guards in the future - where will this project end?

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Fight for the village!

   I was researching the English Civil War both in terms of historical research, but also looking at how other hobbyists have approached the subject, and I ran across the ECW posts Rob did at Four Colour Supers Minis. I've followed him for a while, but going back over his ECW stuff really got some ideas into my head and I found myself looking for Clubmen online.
   The two sites I found (I have no doubt I missed others) were Warlord Games - who sold packs of 8 when I needed 12 - and Redoubt Miniatures - who let you buy by the figure, perfect. It probably has to be said at this point that the Redoubt figures weren't the best cast models I've ever received, but once I had them cleaned up I was pretty pleased with how they looked.
   I'm not hugely sure what I plan to do with them, but I have a vague idea of sitting them in a settlement on one side of the board and firing at anything that gets within range, but that's a problem for after the lockdown is lifted.

   While I was there I also picked up a few other bits and pieces, never turn down the opportunity to top units up, and I picked up a few locals to fill my villages - the double of the same model was a freebie that Redoubt threw in (along with the extra clubman from the unit above).

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ECW Royalist Cavalry

   In a mirror to what I think was my first proper post of the year, here we have the painted results of another box of plastic Warlord Games ECW cavalry, this time for the Royalist cause rather than Parliament's. I've got quite a bit more to paint for both sides of this conflict but it's good to be in a position where I can get the game on the table as soon as the lockdown is over.

   Like I said in the last post, I've been churning out figures at a fairly quick rate, so there are a lot of posts coming, but I've also had a chance to go through most of my backlog* and catalogue it, so I have a better idea of what I am dealing with**. See this as more of a warning that anything could get painted in the short term while going out isn't an option.

*I've also done the same with my books which is no less a scary proposition

**It's scary how many bits of projects I've not finished

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