By Fire and Sword project - Holy Moly Empire!

[Battle Brush Sigur]

Hullo, this is my first thread here on Lead Adventure after friends armtwisted me into joining. I've been following the forums on and off for years of course, but never really signed up. No particular reason really. It seems to be one of the best places to forummage around out there.

So let's head on straight to the project I'm currently working on (well, one of them):




17th century stuff, so right up my alley. It's a large project altogether. Pretty huge actually. A very cuirassier-heavy force of the Holy Roman Empire under the capable leaderships of the Habsburg dynasty. The one with no P in it.

I myself only played a short intro game to By Fire and Sword last summer. If I remember correctly the rules seem servicable, but don't quite measure up with the scale of stuff I chose with my 10mm TYW figures (I should do a thread on those on here some time soon). By Fire and Sword of course does not cover the TYW, but all the stuff that went on in Poland between the late 1640s and roughly 1675 if I remember correctly. When everybody who had too many soldiers and weapons went to Poland to have a fight. Because most of what's Germany today was all messed up at the time, the British were having their own lukewarm remake of the TYW, the French wouldn't let other armies into their country, Spaniards were licking their wounds, and you don't start a land war in Asia. So Poland was the only option left pretty much.

The setting is a very interesting one actually, for several reasons: European armies had developed a whole lotta new tactics and such during the Thirty Years war, there were Transylvanians at the southern border, Ottomans, the Khanate of Crimea, Moscovites (who later would become the Russian Empire of course), Tartars, Poland-Lithuania, Prussia-Brandenburg already causing a ruckus and foreshadowing their later upstart-y and ruckus-causing ways, Swedes attempting to cement their standing as a major European power, and so on and so on. Add to this the geography favouring mobile warfare and lots and lots of space. Great setting. Which is why there's a very popular Polish series of novels about this time and an excellent mod for the equally excellent Mount&Blade:Warband.

By Fire and Sword plus the accompanying 15mm miniatures range are published by Wargamer.pl, a - you guessed it - Polish company. Very friendly dudes from what I can tell as I met some of them at last year's Austrian Salute.

The books are huge and full colour and extremely well produced, there are army lists and points values and whatnot and a huge range of figures. Proper big setup for a brand there.

I never got into it myself, because I already do pike&shot things in 10mm and with the TYW and I'm holding off on getting into it until they maybe come up with a TYW supplement (until then I got the very good Baroque to play with). Which I don't think they will. But that's okay. Anyway, I gotta do a huge army of those 15mm chaps now. First, as always (after having talked details and such with the customer), I did a a few test bases:





Four bases of Cuirassiers (very old-school for the setting, but they're depicting veterans. These are from Khurasan Miniatures in the USA. If you don't know them, check out their ranges of 15mm figures. They are amazing. For years I planned to get a bunch of sci-fi minis of theirs, because they do amazing minis ranges.), two bases of dismounted Dragoons.

The bases were met with favour, so off I went to get them mass produced. Jump ahead a few days - hello!







These are all the Khurasan Cuirassiers done (in the right, dudes in dark armour), as well as the "Imperial Skirmish Force" boxed set by Wargamer.pl. Flags were all included with the Wargamer.pl minis as well the bases.

One thing about the flags: For some crazy reason Wargamer.pl are using self-adhering sticker flags. Hadn't seen these abominations since the last time I did an early 90s GW vehicle set. I have no idea why sticker flags are considered something anybody may want. I'll have proper paper flags any day over the sticker ones. Way easier to work with, at least as resilient and surely not more expensive to produce.

Anyway, hope you like the minis and stay tuned for more!

[mellis1644]

Wow looking great there. I have some to do for this and a lot of ECW stuff but not to this level.

[dijit]

Lovely work there! 

[Battle Brush Sigur]

@mellis1644: Thanks.

@dijit: Cheers!



New WIP shot:



That's the Imperial Regiment of Foot box. Those have to be done by the end of the week. After that I'll do some more Cuirassiers!

[Codsticker]

Hello Sigur! How do you rate the sculpting/casting of the By Fire and Sword minis compared to the Khurasan minis?

[Battle Brush Sigur]

Oh, hullo.

The casting's poorer (especially on horse legs), the material is WAY softer (but less brittle. Khurasan's felt a bit grainy while shaving off mold lines). Sculpts are good on the BFaS minis as well as on the Khurasan ones.

[Captain Blood]

Wilkommen 

What a great looking army.

[Vagabond]

My first thoughts were very nice and then I realised they weren't 28mm. Very very nice both the figures and your painting.

[Davout]

Glad to see you here Sigur. I've followed your work for a long time on Warseer and I'm excited to see this project on LAF and looking forward to more.

[Erik]

Hello Sigur
Great looking miniatures and very nice paintjob. Would you like to share some of your painting technique. I have a decent size polish force, but stranted after painting the swedish skirmish set. Your miniatures look great and it seems from your posts that your technique is rather speedy.

Cheers
Erik

[Engel]

Really impressive force.

[mweaver]

Welcome to the forum!

That is a very handsome army you have there.  Thanks for sharing.  I imagine it is quite a challenge to work that much detail into 15mm models.

I like "Holy Moly" Empire.  Once, many years ago when asking a question of a prof, what came out of my mouth was "Holly Rolly Empire".  Ever since then I pause before saying "Holy Roman Empire".  (I also occasionally slip up and say "spontaneous combustion" when I mean "spontaneous conversion").

-Michael

[Axebreaker]

Lovely work on your army!

Christopher

[GamesPoet]

Looking very good!

[Battle Brush Sigur]

@Captain Blood: Dankeschön!  (on both accounts ).

@Vagabond: Cheers!

@Davout: Thanks very much, Sir! It's really silly how it took me AGES to finally sign up on here. Hope to do many project logs on here and just post stuff, look at what other peeps do, and so on.

@Erik: Hmm, there isn't much of a technique to my painting in many cases. Especially these guys I paint VERY straightforward. I don't even use washes on these (apart from the horses. On those I also use a dark brown primer spray which speeds things up a little bit). Basecoat, highlight, highlight, highlight. I think the key is to know where to stop the highlighting so the contrast is just right for 15mm considering they'll be standing on a table full of stuff and usually not the best lighting in the world. No matter how well lit a gaming area is, it's never as well lit as a lightbox or the painting desk of course. The thing about these minis here of course is the lack of uniform, which is a bit annoying, but I'm used to it from my 10mm 17th century armies. So yeah, the work is hard, but the pay isn't good.

@Engel: Hullo, good to see you on here as well. And thanks!

@mweaver: Thanks! The challenge really is keeping the details down to what makes sense. 15mm minis really are pretty much as detailled as 28mm minis, but it makes no sense working out ALL the detail in full. Another thing I learned when working on my 10mm armies (which are crazy detailled as well on the models, but if you paint and highlight all the bits on there as you would on a 28mm mini or even a 20mm one the mini ends up looking like a mess). I do like Holly Rolly Empire. Maybe you could try just yelling "HEILIGES RÖMISCHES REICH DEUTSCHER NATION" instead if that's easier. It may be a bit of a long shot, but when I was over in the UK to study for a year I always used this stupid word creation "bittle", which is a mix of "a bit" and "a little" I always spouted out for some silly reason (it doesn't help that "bissl" is our local dialect version of the German "ein bisschen" = "a bit"). Language is weird, brains are weird, the two combined is more than a bittle bit of a mess. :p

@Axebreaker: Thanks very much, Christopher!

@GamesPoet: Cheers!


Right, finished picture of the Regiment of Foot:




Hope you like it. This weekend I commenced work on another regiment of Cuirassiers (50/50 with pistols and arquebuses), and I have to admit that I'm ever so slightly getting fed up with 15mm 17th century dudes. So I cleaned the next big batch of Super Dungeon Explore things (for which I guess I should open another project thread):



But yeah, I'll hang on to doing Cuirassiers as long as possible.