15mm Italian Wars with "Liber Militum: Tercios"

[robh]

This is the first outing for any of my 15mm Renaissance collection in about 20 years, having been virtually destroyed by the removal crew during our house move to Spain in 2002.

Virtually all original Mikes Models with a smattering of Minifig and Naismith-Roundway amongst them.  Previously based for Armati/Maximillian (DBx style basing) almost every base had damaged or broken figures and detached pikes, banners and lances.  But you can't keep a Landsknecht out of combat for too long, so after much work they return to war, now multi based for an “unofficial” expansion of the excellent Liber Militum:Tercios rules (the official Italian Wars expansion being long overdue).

The battle here is Ceresole d'Alba from the DBR Scenario book by Peter Sides, although based on accounts largely negated by more recent research it remains a very well balanced generic Pike and Shot scenario in it's own right.

In this action the French army advanced the massed Gendarme units deployed on each flank which, as he did not have sufficient heavy cavalry of his own to counter them, prompted the Imperialist Commander to realign his massed pike blocks to the flanks. This proved a mistake as now unable to mount an assault on the much weaker French centre the Imperials were forced into an almost static defensive posture. Eventually, pinned by repeated cavalry attacks, they were flanked by the smaller French/Swiss pike blocks and broken, despite causing heavy losses among the French noble cavalry.

Initial deployments, Imperials on the right, French to the left.



Early French advances on both flanks





The Imperial (Landsknecht, Italian and German) pikes take a defensive posture







The final death throes of the Imperial army





The culmination of a bloody day

[robh]

A few better shots of the repaired figures and the Tercios basing. The pike are about 50 figures on a 12cm frontage everything else on 8cm with 8 or 9 figures for formed troops and 4 or 5 for open order.

[blacksoilbill]

Those do look rather splendid!

[OB]

They do indeed.

[Friends of General Haig]

A fabulous looking collection, Rob.  Really pleased you have got those repaired 👍

[LouieN]

a good looking battle

[robh]

Thanks. It has been a long and somewhat tedious process to get them back to the table. Most of my figure collections survived the container ship crossing pretty well but I think this particular crate must have been dropped or rolled as it was a real mess inside.
This is the middle era iteration of the figure set with crossbows units replaced almost totally by arquebus/early musket but before the adoption of pistol armed Reiters. It is one of my absolute favourite eras to game.