Sunday, August 25, 2013

Great Northern War Phase 2: Swedish Infantry

On Friday, a copy of Terry Wise's Introduction to Battle Gaming arrived. It took about 30 seconds of skimming through and glancing at the pictures to become inspired, especially by his focus on 20mm plastics.

So, with that bit of momentum to carry me into Saturday evening and today, I started getting my Zvezda Swedes ready for painting.

The figures are very clean and despite my hack job freeing them from their sprues, they needed little other than a clean up of the bases, from my perspective. 

Others may want to go around looking for mold lines and such. I have done that, but usually at great peril to the figures - not to mention it's time consuming, mind numbing and completely deflates any bubble of enthusiasm I may have for the entire painting task.

This time, I decided to let sleeping dogs lie.

And here they arrayed for priming:

 
 This represents two boxes of figures, 43 per box. 

Notice the paltry number of pikes - odd, considering Zvezda is a Russian company, and they should know better. Of course, their Russian set suffered the same disproportion. 

They also inexplicably give you nine of the marching pose per box. Most everything else is in 6s, which works great for my 12 figure units. Nine, not so much.

Combining the pikes with the marching pose, however, does give me two 12 figure units, with 25% pikes per unit. That works for me, although the remainder of the unit will be pike free for the time being.

Unlike the Russians, who still need their officers and standards painted, I'll be priming these by hand and painting them in small batches and including the officers early on. I intend to mix cavalry and artillery for both sides in between the completion of every 2 units, with the intent of being able to field very small engagements, with 1/2 size units (6 figures) using some variation of Bob Cordery's various grid-based rules, or using as 1:1 for various skirmish rules for 18th century.

6 comments:

  1. Regarding "mould lines" . . . it is worth noting that once figures are painted and in units, what you see are the units and not individual figures . . . so unless screamingly blatant, I ignore them too.


    -- Jeff

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    1. Thanks for the reminder, Jeff! It's far too easy to start focusing on the individuals when I won't actually be viewing them that way.

      I'll just make sure to avoid any macro closeups!

      -John

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    2. I tackled the pike-shortage in 2 ways: first, I bought some Stelets GNW sets. They are not in the same league with Zvezda, of course, but size-wise they are compatible, and the Swedish sets include quite a few figures that are either pikemen outright, or can easily be converted.

      Second, the Zvezda Swedish Artillery set has too many crew (surely a unique complaint!) Happily, this includes a great many figures with a musket slung over their back, and their empty) hands held out in front. These make excellent pikemen. They would not have had muskets, I realize, but who cares? It's better than not having enough pikes!

      Best regards,

      Chris

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    3. Weird. I deleted spam on my Flames of War post and this comment got deleted. Well, anyway, Chris, just wanted to say thanks for the tips! I ordered the Strelets boxes yesterday after reading your comment.

      -John

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  2. Good progress. I think I am too OCD, I can't seem to leave the lines alone.

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    1. Thanks, Sean. I have some figures for which I wouldn't dare skip this step, but I'm hopeful that, with the Zvezda figures at least, I really won't notice them since there are barely any anyway.

      -John

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