A third army, or at least the start of it, to scrap with my Slavs and Vikings. Pretty much just Gripping Beast plastics mixed up, with a few metal Franks and warlord Celt heads. The highlight is the shields, made of upholstery tacks and press-molded greenstuff bosses, which admittedly mostly came out more "spike" than "sugarloaf".
These armies are basically the MVP (minimum viable product) for the battle I want to refight. Since I'm not going to try to host this until summer, I've still got time for both practical additions (movement trays, casualty/disorder markers), and aesthetic ones (staff for commanders, some rebasing, pennants and cavalry flags), but the armies shown here could be used as-is for the battle if I wanted to.
Interesting to me is that the current lists put the Polish army at a slightly higher points value, despite a noticeably lower figure count. However, the terrain for the battle favors the Swedes substantially, so the Poles are probably still the underdogs as they were historically. More on army lists and the scenario later.
(technically the Polish-Lithuanians are missing one commander, and the Swedish one artillery piece, unfortunately I didn't make those calls until after the army shots)
36 plastic musketeers here, all from Warlord Games, with a bunch of Warlord's metal helmets and a handful of their metal swinefeathers. The swinefeathers don't fit that naturally with the figures, I had to get creative (even greenstuffing a couple right hands) to use them in minis that aren't actively firing.
According to a board game about Gustavus Adolphus, his subordinates at Dirschau were Graf von Thurn, Herman Wrangel, and Johan Baner. From left to right, I've got: a converted Perry ACW commander as Thurn, Warlord's Adolphus as himself, Warlord's Ake Tott as Wrangel, and Warlord's Gustav Horn as Baner.
Rounding out my recent cavalry work, I've completed 9 Wargames Foundry hussars to mix in with my Warlord hussars. The size matches well enough, even if the gear looks to be from different eras, although I think technically the Foundry lancers are more appropriate to the Dirschau period than the Warlord ones, which are more Relief of Vienna looking.
With these sorted, I'm actually pretty close to having everything I need ready for Dirschau/Tczew. I've got 5 more reiters to paint, then a handful of cannons and their crew, and 36 muskeeteers. Oh, and the Swedish commanders! All doable by March I think, although between Omicron and my fiancée's upcoming surgery I probably won't actually host the game until later in the year....
Another new cavalry unit, 11 warlord games cuirassiers. No conversions, the only deviation is a single TAG horse mixed in. I couldn't decide on blackened, russeted or polished armor, so I did a few of each.
For Dirschau, the Swedes will have three units of Cuirassiers, but since I don't feel like buying any more, I'll mix in some medium-armored cavalry to make up the difference, with units looking something like this...
My Swedish list for Dirschau contains one unit of Finnish horse, of the sort that would go on to gain fame in the Thirty Years War as Hakkapeliitta / Hackapelit / Hackapelite / Hackapell / Haccapelit / Haccapelite. This unit has six TAG hackapells and two converted Warlord plastics. I painted them with a pretty restricted, earthy palette to really lean into the perception of them as backwoods ruffians, and also, all their horses are brown to represent the finnhorse breed, as opposed to how I normally have some black or grey mixed in for variety.
