Warlord Games ECW Dragoons review.

Hello again,

Now that I have temporairily exorcised my WWII bug from my system, I have been able to get back to painting ECW. I have finished another foot regiment and a cavalry regiment along with my William Waller command figure. I will post pictures of them shortly in another post.

At the moment I am painting up the Warlord Games Dragoons and I thought I would give a quick review of them.

What do you get? Well in the box, you get 12 mounted Dragoons (metal rider and plastic mount) and 12 metal dismounted Dragoons and a set of plastic bases. The plastic horse sprue is the same as the cavalry horses. The size of the horses are quite big compared to other manufacturers and the difference is quite noticeable. Dragoons typically rode poor quality horses compared to the cavalry so these horses are a bit too good for dragoons but that is only nitpicking.

The sculpts of the figures are very good with good poses, and good facial expressions. The characters come with separate metal hats so you can choose what type of hat they can wear, however there are not enough hats for you to, for example, give them all monteroes, so you would need to use some left over plastic ones from the infantry boxes.

Overall quite good value for money.

Now for the down side.

The plastic cavalry are good sculpts but they are let down a bit by the poor casting. The bodies are in two halves which require a fair amount of putty to fix up the gaps around the neck and across the chest.

The metal riders are cast very poorly with quite a bit of flash. Parts of the sculpt are wrecked in the casting so that I had to use green putty to hide it by turning the blob into another sack. The figures look like they have been quite carelessly pulled out of the molds with muskets and standard poles bent quite badly (particularly the standard pole which was also twisted!). The cast riders also do not sit on the plastic horses without considerable filing and bending of the legs with pliers. 

Also the mounted commander figure was missing an arm! Luckily I was able to use a leftover plastic sargeants arm from the infantry box plus some green stuff to effect a passable repair job.

These issues took a lot of time to fix. The finished and painted figures will no doubt look very good, but I will not be rushing out to buy another box anytime soon based on the poor quality of the casts.

There were no problems with the dismounted dragoons.

Overall, very good sculpts severely let down by poor casting. Methinks that they have rushed these figures out to meet the demand and the quality control has gone out the window.

5 out 10.

Cheers
Neil

World War II British Paras - The curse continues...

Here is the latest addition to my World War II forces. The airborne operations in Normandy during D-Day and the Operation Market Garden in Arnhem have always interested me so it was the next obvious force to make to oppose my late war germans.

The miniatures are from Peter Pig and I picked them up at Little Wars back in May. They are excellent figures with good poses and attention to detail. They painted up pretty easily followed as usual with the army painter dip which I am pretty much addicted to right now.  The denison smocks look particularly good.

Here is the company arrayed.

Here is the company commander with radio operator. During the Market Garden operation the British paras at Arnhem had great difficulty maintaining radio communications. The Cromwell IV tank is a prepainted miniature from the Axis and Allies collectible game. I picked it up in a bargain bin along with a Russian T34/76, German Panzer III Ausf. F and US M4A1 Sherman for a few bucks and surprisingly they are correct 15mm scale and will be good for the crossfire games when we start using tanks.

1st Platoon. In the Crossfire organisation list for a Para company they give one 2"mortar. However a bit of digging on the net showed that each platoon had a 2" mortar team which was directed by the Platoon commander. I therefore decided to add two more mortar units to the company along with a HMG section. The added points cost brings them up to the same as the late war german company.

2nd Platoon

3rd Platoon

Forward observer.

 Heavy Machine Gun section.

I now have my opposing forces done. I need to start working on the terrain and plan to have my first game this weekend.

Cheers

Neil

The Curse of the Wargamer - Dawn of a new age!

Hello,

The curse of the wargamer has struck again!

I had my wargamming year all sorted out. I had finished my Bloodbowl team ready for the league starting this year. I had painted up enough Gaslight VSF stuff to keep me busy playing for a while and I was slowly building up my ECW parliament forces.

My other project planned for the year was Zulu war. I picked up a couple of boxes of the Wargames factory zulus at the Little Wars show and with the new Army painter leather brown primer spray and dip, I should be able to churn out plenty zulus for a Rorkes Drift game later this year.

So I had a bit on, but totally manageable.....really?

It started as a few emails between fellow wargamers and then the show Band of Brothers rescreened on TV, and then came The Pacific, a fantastic series (although IMHO not as good as Bof B).

Our emails of course moved to the subject of WWII. Before I knew what had happened  people were buying miniatures and discussing rule systems. It was uncontrollable; my nice ordered world was crumbling around me. I had no choice but to succumb to the curse of the wargamer.... another period to game.

WWII is a foreign country to me. I had always been a "Horse and musket"  man. My early days spent playing Napoleonics, ACW and colonials. After a break from wargamming I have dabbled in Ancients/medieval with DBA and its cousin HOTT and I guess dogfighting is WWI which is the 20th century but I have never played land wargamming in the 20th century.

After many discussions we settled on a scale... 15mm; and then a ruleset..  Crossfire. So what to paint first?
Some of the guys at the club had already bought some Old Glory 15mm WWII stuff and I was able to buy some of their late war Germans. I had no reference material on WWII but there are plenty of people at the club gamming WWII and I got hold of info on painting up my late war germans. I was painting camo!! I have never painted camo!

The good thing about crossfire is that you only need a company to start playing, which is about the same number of figures as a DBA army approx 40-50 figures, so I have managed to get my first army finished in pretty quick time.

Here are my late war germans  i.e 1944 -45

The company arrayed

Company HQ

The First platoon equipped with Panzerfaust antitank rockets.

2nd Platoon

3rd Platoon

Heavy Weapons  HMG

Heavy Weapons  81mm Mortar and Forward Observer.

Heavy Weapons  120mm Mortar and Forward Observer.

The miniatures are all Old Glory Command Decision WWII with the exception of the 81mm and 120mm mortars which are Peter Pig figures. The figures were base coated in black and then painted with GW,Tamiya, and Vallejo acrylic paints, followed by the Army painter strong tone and matt varnish spray to finish.

I have never used Vallejo paints before, but they have a large range of correct colours for WWII camoflage. I think these paints are terrific. They have a lot more pigment than the GW paints and covered black undercoat easily. I will definitely get more of these paints as my GW stuff runs out. They also have a fantasy range as well.

So there you have it!  The curse has struck again!  I am very happy with how these guys have turned out. Now I need to give them an opponent. At little wars I also bought a bunch of Peter Pig British Paras. Airborne operations have always been the one thing about WWII that has appealed to me. I also read Pegasus Bridge a few months back so I am keen to do some glider actions.

Oh and then I need some WWII terrain for Arnhem scenarios and some Marines and Japs for Pacific games....Aaaaaargh  the curse! The curse!

Bye for now :)

Oh and I just realised today is the 66th anniversary of D-Day!!