Reinforcements for Peter the Great's Army

When I started this GNW project, my intent was just to make a small company of soldiers, suitable for skirmish games using The Pikeman's Lament.  That was all, no great ambitions to build another great army.  Well, as the Bard saith, "the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley".  And so, miniature megalomania has struck again and the army has mysteriously grown.

Our intent now is to try Black Powder for the GNW.  Units will be 12 infantry, 6 cavalry or one gun or general model.  As the units will be smaller than the intent of the rule writers, we're planning to cut all movement distances and ranges by half.

Here is the army in its current form (and note that I still have some more units on the painting table!).

That's 6 line infantry, 2 grenadier regiments, 4 dragoons and 4 guns with 12 crew, plus 4 officers/generals.

These are the new grenadiers.  I assembled them using a combination of bits from the Warlord Games plastics, including bits from the WSS artillerymen, cavalry and infantry frames, with heads from Ebor Miniatures (so that they have the same mitre style as my Repnin's Grenadiers that I recruited earlier).  The two grenadiers with muskets in the front left are metal figures from Ebor.  The idea here is to have grenadiers actually using grenades, not just line infantry with funny hats!

Although I based them in pairs and singles for ease of skirmish gaming, I've blue-tacked them to 40x40mm square bases to make it easier to move them in a BP game.  I really should paint the edges of those bases, though!

Here are Repnin's Grenadiers with the same base treatment.

I like the grenadiers to look ready to assault the enemy!  A GNW-specific rule we'll use for BP will allow grenadiers to ignore one level of cover, to encourage their use in taking out dug-in enemies.

As I used up my plastic artillerymen building grenadiers, that meant I was short of gunners.  These men have stepped up to fill in the ranks.  Ebor artillerymen.

Just for fun, some side-by-side comparisons of equivalent poses from Ebor and Warlord Games.

I've also recruited more dragoons.  These are from Warfare Miniatures (aka League of Augsberg).  I've painted them as Moscow Dragoons, because I had a fit of temporary insanity and decided that I wanted to paint white coats.  (Normally, I hate painting white uniforms...)

A contribution from my friend Doug, these are nominally the Semenovski Guards, although they have a fairly generic pair of flags.  One of the pleasures of painting this army is that there were many different coat colours used! 

 And finally, the commander in chief Tsar Peter Mikhailovitch with some brigade commanders.  The Tsar is from Reiver Miniatures, the white wig officers from Ebor and the skinny chap on the left is Wargames Factory/Warlord Games plastic.

Grenadiers WIP

For my Great Northern War Russian Army, I decided that I want grenadiers with grenades, in active poses, but, alas, I was not able to find any readily available.  So instead, I decided to make my own!  

Starting with the WGF plastic WSS Artillerymen as a base, and with lots of bits from other WGF WSS plastic sets generously shared by Doug and Kevin, plus a supply of pewter grenadier heads from Ebor, I have fabricated these:

Torsos don't match exactly.  I considered adding a bit of modelling putty to fill the gap, but I don't think I'll need that.  Once these are painted, the overlap won't be easy to see.

I used Ebor heads to match the Repnin Grenadiers I'd already painted:  https://willstoysoldiers.blogspot.com/2018/05/grenadiers-for-peter-greats-army.html

Grenadier mitres come in a distracting variety of styles. I'm not judging which is best and I'm certainly not ready to research the exact style of mitre used in this army, but I do want to be consistent.  The mitre here supplied by Ebor matches the mitre shown in the Osprey Man-at-Arms book so it's good enough for me.

Ingermanlandski Regiment

I'm still here, despite having not posted anything in about 6 months!  Here is the latest unit to join Peter the Great's army, the Ingermanlandski Regiment.  My original plan was to paint the whole army with the traditional "green coat and red turnbacks" but then I started to find references to various different coat and turnback colours for different regiments in Peter's army.  The yellow coats really stood out, so I knew I had to do them!

Then, once they were painted, I found this reference:  http://peter.petrobrigada.ru/unif/project3342/page23296.html

"In 1708 Tsar Peter wrote that green was the preferred color for soldiers' coats, however the diversity of uniform colors was considerable in Russian army of the Great Northern War period. They varied from such traditional shades like green, blue, white and red to more unusual like yellow (was proposed for Menshikov's Ingermanland Infantry Regiment in 1706 but it wasn't carried out)."

Well, I'm not going to repaint them!  They're going to add a nice bit of brightness to my army, and a quick check of other GNW blogs shows me that I'm in good company with my yellow-coat Ingermanlandskis!

I converted a few of the musketeers into pikemen, by carving away the musket and replacing it with a metal pike (liberated from pewter pikemen, who will now need to find pikes for themselves!)

Since Kevin and I started our GNW project with the idea of using "The Pikeman's Lament", I've organised the infantry so that they can be in units of 12.  Command are individually based to facilitate two units of 12 each, or they can be combined to a unit of 23.

Yes, that's right, 23.  I managed to lose one of the little buggers.  Maybe he'll drag his AWOAL ass back into ranks, or maybe I'll conscript soldier from another unit, or maybe I'll just live with one unit being one man short.

Peter the Great - Russians finished!

Here's something you won't have heard me say very often:  I finished an army!  Hopefully I'll get better at this - I just need to learn to say, "enough is enough"!  I've reached a point where I don't need to grow my army of Peter the Great.

Here are the last couple of figures finished.  Here is Tsar Piotr Alexeyevich Romanov, aka Peter the Great.  The figure is from Reiver Castings, and I picked him up after doing a search for a PtG figure and this was the only one I could find in 28mm!  He is here with a mounted officer from the Warlord Games WSS plastic artillery set.  

And here he is with a Ebor Dragoon.  Flag is also from Reiver, and is the standard of the Ingermanlandski Dragoons.

A group shot to show relative size.  Peter is much more massive.  Of course, he was over 2 metres tall in real life, but was lanky, as opposed to this fairly hefty fellow.  He's also got a suitably massive horse to ride.

With these figures completed, I now have enough figures to field a fairly balanced force for Pikeman's Lament with a mix of cavalry (dragoons only, which was normal for Russia), infantry, grenadiers and an artillery piece.  Here are a couple of group shots of the entire force.  

Due to points limits, I would not field the entire army.  With what I have available, I can mix and match a bit.  Most likely, I'd field something like this, unless there were scenario specific reasons to change the selection.  The force would include 2 units of shot, 1 forlorn hope, 1 commanded shot (dismounted dragoons) and two units of dragoons - note that I would ask my opponent to accept my proposed rule amendments for dragoons that I presented here:  http://willstoysoldiers.blogspot.com/2018/05/thoughts-on-cavalry-for-pikemans-lament.html

Russian Artillery

Following on my review of the Warlord Games/Wargames Factory WSS Artillery Box, here is my painted version of the gun and crew.

First the gun.  The gun comes with a choice of two barrels, nominally 8-pdr and 12-pdr. I went with the slightly smaller barrel.  As I mentioned in the review post, there are some small bits that can be a bit fiddly such as the dolphins (handles) on the gun barrel as well as the trunnion plates. But all in all, a nice wee model.

Wargaming convention is that artillery pieces should have 4 crew each, and so there is a tendency for miniatures companies to sell sets that include 4 crew with each gun.  Warlord Games is no exception.  However, Pikeman's Lament calls for each gun to have 6 crew.  Accordingly, I assembled 6 artillerymen.  I ran out of tricorne hats, so I attempted to convert a couple of the plastic heads from wide-brimmed floppy hats to Russian kartuz caps. 

Reading a bit further into Russian artillery uniforms, I realise I should have painted the stockings blue rather than white.  

And finally here are a couple shots of the men serving their gun.

4th August edit:  now looking to find one of these in 28mm!  Bombardier with hand mortar, possibly more dangerous for the user than the enemy...

Warlord Games WSS Plastic Artillery review

I picked up a box of the Warlord Games 'Marlborough's Wars' plastic artillery, in case I need to add some artillery support to my Pikeman's Lament Russian company.  As I previously reviewed Warlord's WSS infantry, I might as well show you what you will get in the artillery box.

As with the infantry, the set is a repackaging of the now defunct Wargames Factory War of the Spanish Succession artillery box.  I don't know what came in the WGF set, I am just looking at what you get with the Warlord Games offering.  And in my opinion, it's a reasonable chunk of stuff.  

The box comes with three identical frames, each containing enough bits to make one cannon (choice of 8-pdr or 12-pdr barrel), 4 crewmen and one mounted officer.  There's also some nice extra bits, including a couple of barrels, a bucket and several small stacks of cannonballs.

The artillery crew can be assembled holding either a sponge, a rammer, a scoop/ladle or a linstock.  One poor bloke is stuck holding a cannonball, no alternative arms for him!  There are 4 heads for the artillerymen, so not much variety unless you've saved your bits from the infantry or cavalry box (I didn't save my bits, dammit).  I really wanted the crew to be wearing tricorne hats, so I took some of the heads from my spare dragoons.

There are a few choices for the officer.  He can be with or without hat (he wears his wig either way), and there are three arm choices:  pointing, waving hat or waving sword.  I suppose he could have a linstock or a rammer...  I went with pointing.  

The cannon goes together quite nicely.  There are some small parts, like the handles and trunnion plates, so it's handy to have a pair of tweezers when doing the fine bits work.  

All in all, you get quite a bit from a single frame, and there are three of them in this box.  Everything in this photo (except the bases) came from just one frame.

The box also has two frames of bases, in a variety of sizes.  I love getting extra bases, and this box has lots of them.  If you wanted some 40 mm by 40 mm bases for your infantry, they're in this box!

About my only gripe about this box is that I wanted tricorne hats, and of course I found them in other sets.  I could grumble about the lack of variety with the figure poses, but that's only because I've been spoiled by other products.  The box certainly provides what it promises, and there's more variety in poses and equipment than I'd get with metals.