Pokesay Castle - 4, Gatehouse completed

What do I do with this left over paint ?

Throw it in the moat, nobody will notice ..

Having got the shade of my roof tile paper right, I painted the timber beams. For windows I used a dark grey and put 'leaded' widnow lines on. The overall effect has captured the look I wanted. I made the gates so they could be removed and replaced with two open ones.

The gatehouse done I then stuck tile paper onto the roofs of the other buildings. Having finished that I realised I hadn't added the chimneys, a minor modification for later.

Limbers for Guns

A lucky day while out shopping provided me with what I needed to make up limbers for my guns. A Brum coach model, for £4.00 in a charity shop, with 4 horses in harness; plus a bag of 30 Lego wheels (but only 4 axle peices) for £1.50 at a car boot sale.

As you can see the small Lego wheels and a single horse look just right pulling a gun.

Ideally should be a team of horses but what the heck, modeller's licence !

Pokesay Castle 3 - the gatehouse

Just finished the gatehouse construction. I used some thick paper strips to add the wood framing to the building shell. I tried some red tile paper I created for the roof; this will need darkening a bit though. Next job is to paint up and fit some gates.

New Regiment of Foot - with Red Coats

I combined all my remaining spare figs left from my unit reduction exercise to make up a new regiment of foot. Since I already a Redcoat regiment I gave them white cuffs, instead of red (and also marked the underside of the bases as well).

Baggage Wagon - Completed

Finally finished painting the baggage waggon and horse; the baggage wagon is scratchbuilt from cardboard on some wheels off a gypsy caravan which I bought at a car-boot sale. I'll have to look around for some more cheap wheelsets and horses to make another.

New Regiment of Foot - with Dark Green Coats

I combined my two firelock companies (made up with my Romanoff figs) with some repainted Irregular Miniatures spare figs left from my unit reduction exercise, to make up a new regiment of foot.

Unit Sizes

I've had a bit of a re-think on unit sizes and fig-actual ratio. I've been using 1:20 with 12figs (240 men) for horse regiments and 27figs (540 men) for foot regiments. This is fine but with the size of my wargames table and the overall plan to have larger battles I wanted to go for less tabletop space per unit.

After mulling things over I went for a ratio of 1:33. This gives:
1. Horse 9figs - ~300men (5 troops of 60 men)
2. Foot 18figs - ~600men (10 cys of 60 men)

This come close to actual average unit sizes I worked out from various sources. I tried out how the regiments look with the new sizes and they are ok. Mind you anything smaller than 18 figures for foot regiments and the stand of pikes effect is lost.