More green Imperial

 Did the pike block, it's tight packed 16 15mm figures on a 40mm square.
4 Command figures and 12 pikemen, a mix of full armor and half armor.

 The command was very quick to do, but the pikemen was alot fo work, first the uniform, then the armor, both take quite a long time to do. There is also quite alot of leather, gloves, vest and belts.

 I read that imperial sashes were often white, so my command got that.

My entire HUGE force of 15mm pike and shot figures.

Heavy guns

 Some Evil imperial guns, these are the death star of the 17th century, sadly they didn't have any 15mm Darth Vader to command the guns.

 They do look kinda evil and scary, napoleonic guns are actualy quite small and nimble compeard these monsters.

 But these guns would outclassed by their smaller cousins from the Napoleonic era.

Did not belive this existed

 So I have always asumed that AB was the pinical of 15/18mm, some have come close Eureka has made some very nice 18mm figures, and of late Blue moon has beome the second best 18mm out there, It had kinda always anyoed me that AB only made ACW and Napoleonics.

 I have tried 15mm for other periods, 7YW, Samurai, ACW, and nobody really came close AB, while it's not fare to compear say Peter Pig to AB, as peter pig is true 15mm, and so are notesably smaller, same sevral other 15mm I've tried.

 But now I have actualy found a 15/18mm thats is PRETY DAMN CLOSE to AB, and in a very diffrent period. Acies Edizioni is avalabe from Vexillia, it's a new range, first avalable in 2011, not sure when or if more figures in the range is going to be made, but I hope they do make more, as they are fantastic, When I fist got them today, I was suprised by just how nice they were. I do see that the pikes might be a problem, they are very thin, so I do wonder how well they will hold up during gaming.

So on to the figures, they have lots of delicate features, if you take some time, you can get some great effect with highlights on the folds. Hopefully this shows up on the pictures.

I painted them as a green imperial unit.
I did imperial since I have painted lots of swedish in 28mm,  Second I painted them green, becuse I wanted to use my new foundry forest green.

Great to paint, and actualy very fast to paint, I did these 12 in just a few hours while watching QI. I will still use blackpoweder for these, but the units will be bigger, 12 musketeers on each wing, with 16 pikemen and command in the center, so each unit will be 40 big, so quite alot bigger then my 28 strong 28mm units. Still, my 15mm figures will be 16 cm wide, compeard to my 24 wide 28mm. So lots more room for more units.

So I'm giving Acies Edizioni 30YW figures 98/100

Compear that to 98.5/100 for AB napoleoincs, they really are that close.

More TYW

So I finished the central pike block, I was gonna do it with 16 figures, but I wanted the command to stand more out, so I dropped two pikemen and let the command stand in front alone.

I used a generic Imperial standard simply to show it's an imperial unit.
So, So far I've painted 8 musketeers, 2 command and 12 pikemen, Still need 28 musketeers.

I've also been thinking of which rules to use, the strongest contender so far is Carnage and glory, others is waiting for blackpowder pike and shot, then you got the under the father tilly.

The plan is to either use this as a single unit in the gusvasons style that became standard later on, or I can combine it with 4 other units to make a Tercio, the tercio would be huge, 4 pike bases, of 48 figures surrounded by 72 shotte a total of 120 figures, thats alot, and FAR FAR into the future, for all I know after painting this one unit I might get bored fast like last time.

Now for something completly diffrent

So this is one of the big 3 periods I really like but never seem to get started on. The other two are 7YW and ACW. ACW I've tried to do in 5 diffrent scales, 7YW in 3 diffrent scales.

Then we got this period, 30 years war, I did one unit, then bought some more figures but never got around to painting anymore, well I bought a "imperial regiment" box at my local store, for dacades, only warhammer was avalable in norway, then FOW came, and now, they stock a few boxes of plastics, Warlord games and Victrix, even warlord metal boxes, like Cremian and bolt action WW2.
Most of their stuff is pike and shot and roman stuff, but they also have some Napoleonics.
Natuarly the price is is norwegian, but with warlord beeing the most expencive of of the plastics, so the diffrence is only about 30kr or £3 thats VERY good normaly norwegians prices are from 50% to sevral times more expencive then the rest of the world, cars are about 4 times as expencive as in the UK and close to 6 times more then American car prices. Our food ect is 2-3 times more expencive, our alcohol is 2-5 times more expencive.
So the fact that I get boxes here that are only 30kr more expencive then directly from the source, saving money on shipping, thats actualy very competative.

I wanted a cuirassier unit two, but I'm saving up for something so I've hidded most of my money from my self.

Anyway this is going to be a huge unit, 36 musketeers and 16 pike and command, 52 figures, in total, if I ever finish it. I'm fankly not that happy with these, the idea was to make a short of generic merc unit, and a ragged one at that, so I gave them dark earthly tones to the clothes, thinking that mercs used civilan clothes, well turnes out TYW units were more colorfull then I thought. But now I've commited my self, so this unit just has to be this way, and I have to paint better units next time, the only unifom thing I gave them were bravarian blue sash and bravarian blue leggings. In the end this is a fantasy unit, can't hide that.

Also I find these very hard to paint, while I can do a decent Napoleonic soldier, these are just meh.

I think it's a mix of the clothes and the colors I've chosen.
The beige brown, is easy to shade but hard to highlight, I have to highlight with leather brown, the problem is I also got leather to paint, so the leather brown highlight and the leather kinda mixes and just looks wrong, I rectefied this by using dark leather on the pikemen, not sure if that's historic or not.

The faces are actualy very good, they arn't what you would call complicated, but they are very easy to get to look ok, just dark flesh, ink wash and light flesh, but I scrued up even this by glueing the hats on first, blocking the face. so I'm not gonna do that again.

So this unit is going to have 5 bases, 4 musketer bases each with 9 musketers, each base is 60x60mm, then one big pike base of 16 pike and command, this one is 7.5mmx7.5mm base.