Lockdown Landsknechts

On Sunday my son and I had a kitchen table game of Pikemans Lament using some old GW Empire figures which I had started to roughly convert a few years ago.

On a whim I'd started painting them up again and supplementing my units with a few choices of EBay. Anyone interested in painting true landsknechts and neat converters of figures should look away now 🤣.

For a start these are great sculpts. To be sure advances have been made in plastics and the clothing and poses are basic and other ranges exist now, but when you have to guts of two small armies kicking around in various tubs in the loft and can't go out anywhere why not put them to use.

I adopted a very simple style for painting them and stuck to basic colours for the pike units.  The pike themselves were at first thin plastic rod, but this broke too easily. Then I tried a pin and some thin tubing but this didn't work either. So in the end (look away now if squeamish) I inserted a hot metal wire pike into the figures hand! On the table this looks perfect as you cannot see the join but up close it's a little ugly. Well never mind I was going for overall effect not individual masterpieces. Supporting handgunners had a bit more variety. I added some pistoliers, riding huge fat-ar**d horses and some cannon which are lovely pieces. I looked around for matching figures and tried some Casting Room pike and some Warlord Dopplesoldners. The latter look a little weedy but as an independent unit they do fine. Ebay supplementary GW figures finished things off

The bases for the moment I have left as is. I have yet to decide to use the 3-2-1 style of basing or keep them on square individual bases. I had some sabots which I was going to use for a version of the Ancient Rules which a friend and I play so to try out PL I thought I would use them.

Why PL and not Lion Rampant? I have both but I thought that the former suited the 1500's better than the more medieval focused LR. I imagine these figures as raiders and plunderers engaged in "Bad War" somewhere in southern Germany during the Peasants War, not as pike blocks at Pavia or similar.

I threw down some terrain and drew up two forces. One lead by a bit of a ladies man with a fine moustache but of limited experience. He was accompanied by a large band of average troops, pike, handguns and pistoliers and a regimental gun. Facing him was a different fellow entirely - A rather belligerent lion of a fellow leading an experienced but smaller band of veteran pike and aggressive forlorn hope. My son picked the larger company and I took the veterans.

As this was a test of the rules as much as anything being only the second time I have played them I was just interested in seeing if they felt right for the period and getting a game in. We paid little attention to terrain placement or scenario and just got fired into some across the table action. 

Lew's cavalry scampered round my flank, so I sent the forlorn hope to hold them off, using them as skirmishers. They took some fire from the caracoling pistoliers but caught them and chopped them up a bit and forced them back again and again due to some poor activation roles, eventually they were cut down and the remaining dopplesoldners looked around to see if they could swing into Lew's flank. 

On the opposite side of the table, Lew managed to move his handgunners into a farm complex and took advantage of the cover it provided to shoot up my flanking shot. These two units traded fire for much of the battle without much effect. 

In the centre my veterans, the black band,  advanced while my leaders unit closed formation, and took fire from Lew's cannon. This whittled the, down and they really didn't get a chance to close as they suffered from some poor morale throws and were forced back. That just left the black band and the forlorn hope who were by now in amongst Lew's second unit of shot, having seen off the gun. 

Pike are very strong defensively but I thought my veterans would have the upper hand. They didn't and came off worse in the melee. They took a volley from the handgunners too and reeled back. The forlorn hope had caused some casualties but they'd now been whittled away and so effectively the game was over. It was good fun though and looked and felt right and we both enjoyed it, all the right ingredients for a game.

What would I change. Smaller units of shot. I checked my few reference books and online and figured that I would have much less handgunners or more pike. So I will fiddle with the troop type and costs to come up with right ratio, probably units of 6 shot rather than 12.. Cannon might look good but the Warlord handbusch is a better model for   this size of game and actually none of these fit with the raiding and looting concept so these won't be reappearing except as part of fixed positions. Some light horse might be worth getting. Gringo 40's make conquistadore cavalry and their figs are big and horses large too so 6 of these wouldn't go amis. 

More landsknechts in the future. But it will be back to the Sugar Islands for the next game with some newly painted Maroons.