So I was able to order the latest issue of Wargames Illustrated from Mythicos store in New Jersey. It comes with a free promotional sprue of troops from Warlord Games new Epic Scale American Civil War for Black Powder.
I just got my hands on it a few minutes ago. I am loving what I'm seeing with these! They are indeed just a shade under typical 15mm, so the 13.5 description is pretty much on the money.
The multi-basing and single cast of an entire rank in my opinion is brilliant.
The plastic is a hard grey plastic that is identical to GW hard styrene or any hard styrene model.
The details of the models check off a lot of good boxes for me! For one, the soldiers were sculpted with the brass round eagle plates on their cartridge box shoulder belts as well as the brass oval US or CS belt plates.
Warlord games got the essentials of the basic soldiers' equipment right. There are unfortunately no knapsacks but a good number of soldiers do have blanket rolls. Plus it would be super easy to add additional blanket rolls or knapsacks with modeling putty.
In addition, you'll notice that none of the soldiers come with bayonets fixed. This is actually something I like, since when marching and fighting Civil War soldiers had their bayonets unfixed far more often than they had them fixed. The most common times bayonets would have been fixed would be when actually stacking muskets in camp or at a halt, or when doing actual bayonet drill. But when on the march or in a battle firing line they would be unfixed the vast majority of the time. So unfixed bayonets was a good decision for these in my opinion.
For 13.5mm these have really nifty, crisp details. You can clearly make out the facial details of each soldier and in general the details are crisp enough that there's no guessing when painting them.
Some have complained that the artillery pieces wheels have fewer spokes than actual Civil War cannons had. Meh, for me it's a minor thing, particularly in this scale!
In my opinion the single cast piece ranks of troops are an excellent candidate for Citadel Contrasts! I can see going down a line of these very quickly with a dark blue Contrast for the Union coats and then go down the line again with one of the light blue Contrasts for the Union trousers, etc.
For someone like me whose wargames room size is limited to a 4 x 6 table, this new system is IDEAL for getting into Civil War and be able to do decently-sized battles. 6mm is ok but for my tastes it's just too small to really inspire me visually. This scale satisfies the itch of massed ranks of soldiers with enough detail to actually pop on the tabletop.
replicates a mortar schooner at Fort Jackson during the New Orleans campaign.
