Collecting a Wargames Army 101

This article is is the first in an ongoing series that will document the new project I've embarked upon. For a long time, I've been interested in the pike and shot era and after researching the different wars of the period, I decided to start on an English Civil War project. The first couple of articles will describe the steps I take when gearing up to do a new army or period and those that follow will mainly focus on the individual units as I finish them. Although I'll primarily be discussing my ECW army, I follow the basic same outline when building an army for Warhammer or Warhammer 40k. My first step is always research. For a GW game, this means getting my hands on the army codex and sifting through all of the White Dwarf articles and online material I can find. For my ECW project, it meant hunting through the Osprey Military books for appropriate titles, sorting through my Wargames Illustrated collection, hunting through the online articles at MagWeb, and surfing the web sites of other gamers and painters. I also read through various rule sets and searched for reviews of these online as well. The rules you intend to use will have some bearing on your collection since you need to determine how many figures you need to a regiment. I intended to mount my ECW models on multiple figure, mini-diorama stands regardless of the rule set - I am over games with figure removal, rank bonuses, etc. I like those for skirmish level games, but I want to be able to simulate battles on a 1:33 scale or thereabouts so I bypassed 1644 and GW's ECW rules (but not their army lists which have proven very useful). Piquet has always been a favorite game of mine for Napoleonics and after chatting with Mark from The Ilkley Lads on the League of Augsberg forum, I decided to take a look at the Anchor of Faith supplement. Mark's group bases their regiments on three stands, one pike block flanked by two shot, and this is exactly what I was looking for. I still haven't decided for sure, but Piquet looks promising. Who knows, maybe I'll write my own rules.

After reading about the armies, I try to find a small battle with a good mix of troop types that I can use as a model for the collection of a core force. I don't intend to refight historical battles and plan to use some fictional units mixed with actual ones in my army, but choosing a model helps me come up with a more realistic force. For the ECW, I chose the Battle of Cropredy Bridge because I found several accounts of it online and in Wargames Illustrated. It was a relatively small battle, but featured a typical mix of troops and some famous personalities (Sir William Waller the foremost among them). My initial army will be Parliamentarian. I'm going to model my core infantry units after one of the brigades in Lt-General John Middleton's brigade which includes Col. Samual Jones' regiment and two regiments of Col. Ralph Weldon plus Sir William Waller's small foot unit (which I intend to represent as commanded shot or a forlorn hope due to it's small size). Note that these will not necessarily be these units when I field them on the wargames table. Sir William Waller's regiment might become Harrison's Firelocks, but I will use them as templates for my coat colors, pike to shot ratios, etc. The units will be of standard sizes (three stands of 6-8 figures each) since I read three accounts of the battle and all three differ on the estimated strengths of the regiments that were present. The early English Civil War is neat for a painter because the army did not have uniforms (until the advent of the New Model Army of course). Instead each colonel who raised a regiment outfitted the unit with a coat of his choosing and thus you can have blue coats standing next to red coats on the same side. Foot units will work for either the Parliamentarian or Royalist army as both sides even used the same flag designs for the most part! I actually find this something to look forward to since painting 150 models in the same uniform can get old after a while. After I paint the infantry, I'm going to paint two cavalry units (one of which will be Waller's), a unit of Dragoons represented both mounted and on foot, and an artillery piece. I intend to paint several individual figures for each unit to use as game markers: casualty figures to mark stand loss so I don't have to remove figures, a loading figure to mark the unit when it's... ummm... reloading, an officer to mark a unit with great elan, etc. The next article will show the completed foot regiment of Col. Samual Jones...