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.
I like the look of the new ECW unit and agree that compact is the way to go. When I had my set (gone now), the plan for an inf unit was a single block of pike on 60mm frontage (4 deep) and for the wings, cut the musketeers in half and have them on 30mm bases at 3 deep. That would give an overall width of 120mm ……. A sort of halfway house from where you were before, to where you are now.
ReplyDeleteI’m fairly convinced with Epic, that it is worth while thinking a bit before jumping in to Warlord Games’ recommended basing / unit size.
They look quite good, I really like the appearance of depth you got with the pike block.
ReplyDeleteThanks - I have used the same base sizes as you have used.
Delete@Norm
ReplyDeleteI don't really understand the decision to make 15mm scale base the same size as 28mm - it seems to miss he point of using smaller figures on a smaller table.
But I guess it sells more figures.
I rather fancy that it harks back to the ACW release, which was an experiment and WG simply saw it as more heads on the table. Since then, Epic seems to have become its own thing, largely driven by the people who want a smaller scale to do what a small scale has always done for them.
ReplyDeleteI suppose that is true with ACW. I know that a lot of people just fill a 25mm scale base with smaller figures for a more mass effect. But with Pike and Shot the units are just too big for sensible size games on a 6 x 4
DeleteInteresting stuff - what you've done looks good. The suggested 180mm bases do seem a bit large for the scale of figures. There's no law saying you can't make alterations!
ReplyDeleteOne question that's been nagging at me - do the 'Epic' rulebooks specify that Pike & Shot infantry units have pikes in more ranks than muskets? Most of the pictures of 'Epics' I see on blogs seem to show that setup, but as far as I understand it the real formations were equal depth - in ECW, commonly 6 ranks deep of both pikemen and musketeers. hmm... I feel a blog post coming on!
The Epic rulesbooks are based on Black Powder so you have a combined Pike and Shotte unit of 3 stands. The depth of the pike doesn't matter.
DeleteI think the unit size comes about because they wanted to provide an equal number of pike and shot and put them on 3 rather than 4 bases (which would make the units even wider).
Also, there has been a look and style of pike and shot units going back to the 70s with George Gush rules which have two 2 rank musket sleeves and 4 rank pike blocks.
I have thought about using 3 ranks of muskets (as some people have with epic), but that required quite a lot more painting and also would mean using more musket than pike from a sprue - BUT I haven't ruled it out and might add a back rank of musket to each side to see how that would look.
Thanks Mike, that's interesting, I can see the dilemma for the rule writers if they want roughly 1:1 Pike:Shot ratio and three stands for the unit. Mention of George Gush rings a bell too - I guess he gave melee bonuses for deep pike formations, but limited the number of ranks of muskets that counted for firing. Unintended consequences..
DeleteThis might be a fun subject to discuss on my blog - thanks for (inadvertantly) suggesting it!