Sunday, January 10, 2010

Wargaming the English Civil War in 1/72 Scale Part 3: Artillery

3. Artillery

So, you have your cavalry and infantry for your ECW army, but what about the artillery? Fear not, you are well served.

Revell Imperial Artillery

See the review here:

http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=310

A great set. Three guns, a surfeit of crew figures and a horse team to pull one of your guns. Sadly this set has been out of production for some time, and attracts crazy prices on Ebay. Mars has pirated the set, but their effort only includes some of the crew and leaves out the horse team. As usual with Mars the quality of the moulding is awful. Grab the Revell set if you can.

Revell guns and crew

Revell horse team

A Call to Arms Royalist Artillery

See the review here:

http://www.plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=20

Ignore the title. As with all of ACTA sets this is equally appropriate for Royalists, Parliamentarians or Scots too for that matter. Four guns and nicely moulded crew figures in four poses. Nothing like the variety of figures that Revell offers, but good enough for wargamers.

Mars Swedish Army with Culverin

This new release appears to be an original effort from Mars, and it looks promising. See images of the figures here:

http://www.marsfigures.com/

The horses are awful, but the gun, crew and mounted officers look quite useful. I will be getting this at some stage.

Tumbling Dice

Tumbling Dice have a number of guns and crew for the ECW, from very light falcons and volley guns to demi-culverins. I have two of these (unpainted) and they are excellent. The crew figures as usual with TD come with separate heads, there is a good range of poses, and the guns also come with accessories (barrels etc). Highly recommended.

Light gun and crew from Tumbling Dice

That pretty much concludes this little survey of what’s available for the ECW in 1/72 scale. There is far more variety than one might expect, especially if you are prepared to use metal figures as well.

4 comments:

  1. Nice survey and comparisons for the ECW in 1/72. Do you know if there is a lot of height variation in the size of TD ECW figures? It looks like the gun crew is a lot shorter than the musketeer from your earlier entry.

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  2. Hi, thanks for your interest. The TD figures are all quite consistent with each other (in scale and style). I think the artillery crew just look a little smaller because they are missing their heads (and the musketeer is wearing a big hat)!

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  3. I really enjoyed your three posts on this topic. In fact, I have posted an item on my metal/plastic comparison blog to encourage others to check it out.

    Did you consider the Les Higgins ECW figures?

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  4. At a push as additional crew for ECW/30years war and or similar paint old Airfix ACW artillery crew in generic rustic colours and perhaps do a bit of conversion to cap headgear and creating baggy trousers... Certainly the superfluous Revell set is surprisingly good especially the volume of different poses rendering perhaps older options such as this somewhat void.

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