Rethinking Epic Thirty Years War

 

I have been having a long think about my TYW Epic project and came to the conclusion that the units (at 180mm wide) are just too big for my playing area and are going to result in lack of manouevre in any games.

I looked into possibly splitting the sprues in half and came across Dartfrog's blog  ( https://dartfrog06mm.blogspot.com/search/label/TYW ) where he has gone through the the same exercise and I am impressed enough with the results to decide to copy it and to base everything on one base for a unit. These should still work with Through the Square Window (which I think are my rules of choice) as they don't use stand removal.

This way the units will be 3.5" wide which is only about 90mm.

I have put together a test Scottish in Swedish service unit first to check how it look but the sprues split surprisingly easily, and I think the results once painted don't look any different from normal wargames distances.

The first test piece for TYW rebasing:

 

Painted in 3 hours (2 hours while not watching Traitors last night and this morning at 6am when I couldn't sleep).

 

Happy with the look and there is something wonderfully tactile about hold a whole unit like this in your hand....

Also I have ordered a whole load of Scottish and English musketeers from Peter Pig to add to the stands to make them look a little bit busier and more dynamic with some skirmishers out the front.

It also means that the 3 Swedish units I have finished will suddenly be 6 units (once I have painted another couple of strips of pike)

There are few reasons for going with this change, one of which is the realisation that I don't have the time to produce everything I want to get painted and on the table and smaller units take less time to produce.

I like the idea of a single base unit for Pike and shot - it eliminates some of the problems which arise with sets like Black Powder and Pike units targeting musket units  and lets you abstract the unit’s abilities into a single unit.

I think I am over my desire to produce really big units for the look of it - I use 12 figure units for my Napoleonics and my 25mm Franco-Prussian and they look fine to me, let me put on the size of game I want on the normal 6 x 5 table we have at the Guildford Club and fit more easily into my games room.

My main opponent away from the club prefers games that last 2 hours rather than 3 or 4 and playing on a smaller table lets me play the same game and get a result without reducing everything to 6 units a side.  I would prefer longer games but manage to get 3-hour games at the Guildford Club and occasionally at home.

I also have half an eye on using these for a hex based rule set or on grids which is something I have moved to for some periods  - the games are quicker, remove problems to do with wheeling, etc.  A single base unit less than 4" wide will fit on my command and colours mat or on Hexon if I went down that root.

Lastly, I actually like the look of the single base units over the very wide standard Warlord Black Powder unit.  I never had any intention to model exactly the ratio of Pike to Shot in each unit (been there, done that with Forlorn Hope) - I am happy just changing the unit's stats to match the firepower, melee, etc.

Through the Square Window rules use 30mm stands to make up units (with 6 pike and 4 musket stands in a Tercio) so I could have gone that way with this, but I find small stands too fiddly.  I like the look of the Tercios games I have seem in style which uses bases like this - but dislike the use of order cards for every unit, which I think would slow games down massively.

I do realise that quite a few people don't like the look or the abstraction, but everyone can choose their own solution.