TYW- Scottish Experiment

Scottish pike & shotte regiment in Swedish Service

I picked a few copies of the November issue of Wargames Illustrated for the sole purpose of getting three of the new ECW/TYW Scots frames from Warlord.  The three copies of the magazine came out to around $28 US, which is a significant reduction from Warlord's steep asking price for these plastics (~$16 a sprue).  

This also gave me the opportunity to experiment with smaller base sizes.  I quite like the collection and look of the epic scale TYW range, but the multi-stand units are a move away from my tendency towards single stand units.  Jonathan directed me towards Steve's efforts over at Sounds Officer's Call.  I think his efforts at reducing the unit size turned out quite nice.  In addition, I have seen a large number of collectors downsizing their cavalry and artillery units to only two stands rather than three.  This has the advantage of significantly reducing the overall footprint of each army, which should help create some maneuver space on my 6'x4' table.  

Scottish Dragoons, I mix mounted and dismounted to represent the unit, rather than fretting about replacing models on the table. 

I opted to use the Scottish figures to test out a smaller basing standard.  My initial attempts you can see here are a 3.5"x 2" (90x50mm) stand for the infantry regiments and 3"x1.5"(75x40mm) for the cavalry.  I am currently painting up another Swedish regiment with pikes at the ready to test the size, so I may opt to go another 0.5" deeper on the infantry stands. 

Scottish Cavalry

I am planning on using half a normal unit's worth of figures for the infantry, adding in some skirmishers and ready pikes to fill-in the open space.  The Dragoons will be 3:5 mounted/dismounted and heavy cuirassier with 7-8 models, Harquebusiers with 7 models and, light cavalry with 5.  

Swedish Cuirassier in the smaller unit scale

For the Commanded shott units, I was thinking about combining infantry strips with skirmishers on a 3" base to represent the weight of fire they can produce.  This may work out well, as I am still leaning towards going deeper on the pike blocks to 5-6 rows.  

Mob standing ready to commence defenestration.

Lastly, I want to come up with an interesting way to represent a Spanish Tercio on the table, and scaling down the units to single bases may be the best way to pull to that off.  I am currently leaning towards a 4.5" square with six ranks of pikeman 10 across, flanked by four sets of 2x3 "sleeves" of musketeers at the corners.  Most of the collections I find online have Spanish units looking just like the Swedish ones.  The Warlord rules just have you add a second stand of pikemen inside the formation resulting in s a significantly wider unit.  I will just have to experiment. 

 As it stands, I am basing up these units on simple cut balsa bases until I figure out how I want to the final product to look.  I have plenty of spares to experiment with, before I start chopping away at the models I already painted.  

Thanks for looking.