Wargaming the English Civil War in 1/72 Scale Part 3: Artillery

3. Artillery

So, you have your cavalry and infantry for your ECW army, but what about the artillery? Fear not, you are well served.

Revell Imperial Artillery

See the review here:

http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=310

A great set. Three guns, a surfeit of crew figures and a horse team to pull one of your guns. Sadly this set has been out of production for some time, and attracts crazy prices on Ebay. Mars has pirated the set, but their effort only includes some of the crew and leaves out the horse team. As usual with Mars the quality of the moulding is awful. Grab the Revell set if you can.

Revell guns and crew

Revell horse team

A Call to Arms Royalist Artillery

See the review here:

http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=20

Ignore the title. As with all of ACTA sets this is equally appropriate for Royalists, Parliamentarians or Scots too for that matter. Four guns and nicely moulded crew figures in four poses. Nothing like the variety of figures that Revell offers, but good enough for wargamers.

Mars Swedish Army with Culverin

This new release appears to be an original effort from Mars, and it looks promising. See images of the figures here:

http://www.marsfigures.com/

The horses are awful, but the gun, crew and mounted officers look quite useful. I will be getting this at some stage.

Tumbling Dice

Tumbling Dice have a number of guns and crew for the ECW, from very light falcons and volley guns to demi-culverins. I have two of these (unpainted) and they are excellent. The crew figures as usual with TD come with separate heads, there is a good range of poses, and the guns also come with accessories (barrels etc). Highly recommended.

Light gun and crew from Tumbling Dice

That pretty much concludes this little survey of what’s available for the ECW in 1/72 scale. There is far more variety than one might expect, especially if you are prepared to use metal figures as well.

I/52(e)/(f) Early Hoplite Greek DBA Army

I'm gradually putting up images of armies I've painted on this Blog, and this time it's the turn of the Early Hoplite Greeks. I painted these about 3 years ago. The figures are Zvezda, which are really nice although they insist on moulding designs on the shields. So I carved them all off (adding a few more scars to my thumb in the process) and painted on my own designs. This is an Athenian phalanx, so I added a scattering of alphas and triskeles (the triple running leg design) on the shields to give a sense of this. The DBA list for I/52(f) gives options for LH, Cv, Ax and Bw, so I plan to get around to adding these eventually. I also want to make a camp perhaps depicting Miltiades arguing with his fellow strategoi prior to the Battle of Marathon. For now however I present the unwieldly beast of a phalanx with a couple of elements of Psiloi in support.

Here they all are:

The general's element is on the right. Most of the shield designs were sourced from Athenian red and black-figure pottery, and I'm particularly pleased with the hydra and pegasus here.

The thetes (poorest citizen class in Athens) run out in front of the phalanx to harass the enemy.

I don't have a historical opponent for this army, but Early Achaemenid Persians and Corinthians are on my list...

Wargaming Miniatures: The Case for 1/72 Scale

My favourite scale for wargaming and figure painting is 1/72 scale (20mm). This puts me in a minority in the wargaming fraternity, with most 'serious' wargamers playing in 15mm or increasingly in 28mm. At least this seems to be the case in Australia. So why 1/72 scale? Here are my top 10 reasons why 1/72 is the One True Scale.

1. They are very cheap!
2. Because the figures are cheap and easy to get hold of, 1/72 scale is good for the hobby. Buying a box of plastic figures to make an army makes historical wargaming accessible to young people who can't afford expensive metal figures. There are many teenagers who love history and would join the hobby with great enthusiasm if it was more open to them.
3. In contrast to 15mm and smaller, 1/72 scale figures are large enough for me to enjoy painting them as individual figures.
4. In contrast to 25mm and larger, 1/72 scale still allows the spectacle of a mass of figures on the table. Some of the new 28mm figures are great little works of art, but to my mind they don't simulate huge units of men as well as smaller scales.
5. Plastic figures are easy and fun to convert. Need some Prussian mounted Jaegers in your army? No problem - just take the head of a Prussian infantryman and add it to the body of an Austrian dragoon. Or build your own Lord of the Rings armies by altering historical figures.
6. By and large, 1/72 plastic figures are more realistic and anatomically correct than 15mm or 25mm metal figures. Certainly this is a generalisation - there are some awful plastic figures, and some fantastic metal ones. In my experience however many 'serious' wargamers field armies of figures that bear only a passing resemblance to human beings. The weapons of metal figures are also usually terribly over scale, with men carrying spears that seem to be the diameter of telegraph poles. Conversely, there are some fantastic manufacturers of metal miniatures in 1/72 scale that you can use to add to your armies (eg Art Miniaturen and AB Figures).
7. The range of 1/72 figures available is vast and growing all the time. It is truly a Golden Age.
8. With so many manufacturers of 1/72 figures, we are able to shop around for the best and best value figures. This is in stark contrast to games systems that are designed to limit the wargamer to a particular range of figures by demanding a less widely available scale. Flames of War is an example. By writing the rules for 15mm they make the customer dependent on their own quite expensive figures. Why not play FOW with 1/72 figures and models and enjoy a larger range of better models at a fraction of the price? And don't even get me started on Games Workshop.
9. Metal figures bend and break and their paint flakes off. The newer plastic figures keep their paint better, and spears etc don't get bent.
10. They really are VERY cheap.

Come on - join the revolution.