Reply To: ECW Rule Recommendations / Warnings ???

[Timmo]

Henry Hyde wrote:

Steve – thanks for the FoG assessment. I’ll certainly be giving them a try. I’ll call your plastics and raise you old Minifigs! When I was running Battlegames, the previous owners of Minifigs owed me some money for advertising, so I took figures in lieu of payment to help them out. Scratching my head about what I liked in the catalogue, I decided on the 25mm ECW stuff which has a certain old-fashioned charm. But it’s been languishing in boxes for several years now! There’s a chap called Tim Elcock (he writes for the magazine as Tim Beresford) who does an absolutely amazing job painting up these old school figures with modern techniques, which I may well try myself.

 

Did I hear my name mentioned? Thank you Henry.

The Minifigs (MF) ECW figures are actually better proportioned than many more recent figures, including one make that might surprise you. I had lots of them painted up and just decided to stick with them than start all over again in 28mm. One of the issues with MF is that lots of folks have only ever really seen them painted up in gloss enamels or in flat block colour and so dismiss them out of hand. If you paint them in a style influenced by what’s been going on in the hobby for the last 20 years the results can be surprisingly interesting. I’d just say avoid any Roundhead infantry as they will be in pot helmets and armour. Generally I use the Roundhead cavalry and the Royalist foot from the MF range. I do conversions and I add apostles where there are none (it’s much easier to do than you’d expect. If you consider you mostly see heads when looking down on our armies changing the head gear of a few figures in a unit can make so much difference to break up the MF induced regimented look.

I have three figure command groups as vignette pieces for each regiment  and these almost always feature conversions.

Rules:

Currently I dabble with modified WRG and modified Forlorn Hope, I’ve played both with card activation. I’ve also played masses of both as written back-in-the-day. Both suffer from too many morale tests, which you can largely do away with. Forlorn Hope is great once you’ve ironed out the flaws in the ratio system that favours small pike heavy units too much. Essentially FH favours classic Royalist armies far too much. Even after all these years WRG does give good results but its perhaps a bit boring to play. In it’s favour the cavalry action is better than FH but if you introduce the way WRG handles pistols then you can make the FH cavalry action more level and interesting, as written the Parliamentarian horse are always at too much of a disadvantage.

I prefer the separate pike and shot units of WRG – I don’t find them a pain to use and the pike block becomes a rallying point which is as you’d expect. I just find giving foot units a ratio tends to make the units like say WSS, SYW or even Napoleonic regiments but having sleeves of shot supporting the pike and visa versa gives an ECW feel to the game and introduces some micro tactics that FH lacks.

I found FoGR to be too much a game of dice luck and dragoons are far too powerful IMHO.

However, I’m looking forward to when TooFatLardies publish In The Buff.