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. 

Comments

  1. I like the reduced figure count, smaller footprint, single base regiment. Looks terrific to me. Where do you buy your WI?

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    1. Thanks for tipping me to Steve's efforts. I found the November issue on Miniaturemarket.com. Merlyn's used to carry it in Spokane, but I think they stopped last year.

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    2. How difficult was slicing through a stand to make two halves? Figures are shoulder to shoulder with some overlap.

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    3. I found it was rather simple to score along the join between guy #5 and #6 on each strip front and back. I could then simply snap the strip in two and clean up the boundary. I then hide the cut ends inside the formation so they are less noticeable. As you can see from my close ups I am less concerned by the fine detail on these models than in my normal projects to date. I started this project with the challenge to "paint the detail you will see, not the detail you know is there."

      This is why I haven't worried too much about mixed uniforms, head swaps or individual hat/bonnet colors. I want to be able to identify my units at 3' to 4' not at 6."

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  2. Very interesting stuff I particularly like the dragoon idea 🤔 I haven’t got far enough yet in the project to understand my limitations. The main issue for me is the size of cavalry units and I would prefer to drop to two bases / 10 figures but I’m not sure how it will look against the 80 man infantry units.

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    1. Matt, I saw this video on Youtube from "Boots on the Table" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHx97_JuSGk where it appears that they have switched to 2x stands for Artillery and Cavalry and retained the larger 80 man blocks for infantry. I think it actually looks better, which is why I opted to go with smaller bases for my Cavalry and supporting infantry in my reorganization

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  3. Wow they look outstanding! Your experiment paid off sir! I think for the Tercio, you "could" technically just place one unit directly behind the other? (but wouldn't give you the Tercio distinction, rather just the depth). I need to get working on mine! I only have 10 units done!

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    1. Thanks for the inspiration! I thought about stacking two units togethering, but I really want to make the Tercio look like something different. The ECW focus for the range makes TYW efforts rather ancillary. I have seen a lot of commentary about the difference between the Tercio and the Swedish emphasis on smaller units and want to make it visually apparent on the table. Just not sure how to make that happen yet.

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  4. I think they all look great, and I'm in favor of smaller units myself as well!

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