First Unit painted and some basing ideas

So having picked up a number of figures second hand from Ebay, Dave Thomas and Colonel Bills I have now got stuck into painting. My first painted unit is the Ostgota Cavalry regiment. Hopefully the picture quality is slightly better than the last post.

These are Footsore miniatures Cavalry I picked up cheap from ebay unpainted. Ostgota is a unit in the traditional Blue faced Yellow and fought in many of the campaigns I will be gaming so an ideal candidate.  I find the footsore cavalry a joy to paint and these flew off the painting table. That said Ideally I would prefer my Swedes to be a bit more dynamic in terms of pose.

In terms of basing these are all on 50mm frontage which is currently my preferred option. It keeps the units nice and tight and has the right feel for the period in my opinion.

This second photo shows the shallow wedge formation favoured by the swedes just squeezing onto the bases. thinking about making bases deeper to fit them in easier, the above are 60mm deep, I may go for as deep as 80mm watch this space.

We have decided to go for units on 3 bases for both foot and horse, foot will be around 18 figures per battalion and horse 9 per squadron as above. There are a number of reasons for this. We initially discussed much larger units, however these smaller ones have a number of obvious advantages. 18 figures are of course half the price of 36, they are also twice as fast to paint and get onto the wargames table, lastly they use up half the space allowing for games with multiple units in a smaller space. I appreciate that is all self evident but it does concentrate the mind a bit, especially when a smaller unit does actually look very nice. At a scale of 1:20 that's 360 foot to a battalion and 180 horse to a squadron.

Lastly a close up of the figures to show off the nice sculpts. I wont be fully basing them for a while yet whilst we tinker with the base sizes. Next up I will share some pictures of Swedish foot so we can see what the base sizes look like for these. Then I want to have a talk about Saxons.

Thanks for reading.