The cast-pike controversy

15 mm mediaeval Florentine spearmen. All my 15 mm and
25 mm pikemen/spearmen have been re-equipped with
wire/pins, but I wouldn't want to do that with 10 mm figures
unless they come open-handed.

Doing the Thirty Years War with 10 mm Pendraken or 6 mm Baccus figures has been on my wishlist for a long time. For someone in Britain brought up on an Anglocentric view of history, doing the TYW rather than the English Civil War appeals to my offbeat tastes.

However, I am completely put off large pike armies by the prospect of bent and broken pikes or the effort required to replace cast pikes with pins or wire. Replacing 10 mm cast pikes is very tedious and time-consuming, and not always successful. Replacing 6 mm pikes is probably not even an option.

Red Actions

I have a bucket list of rules I'd like to try out and Red Actions by The Perfect Captain is one of them. At one time I'd have felt compelled to buy and paint a couple of armies first, but why go to such self-defeating trouble when I could just label up some ceramic blocks? The Perfect Captain even offers ready-made top-downs which are ideal, so I printed them onto label stock at 90% reduction and began attaching them...

I have a strong interest in 'offbeat' early 20thC armies: the Anglo-Irish War (which I've done in 28mm), the Spanish Civil War (which I've done in 15mm for Crossfire), the Chaco War, and a whole host of wars that I've planned to do for Square Bashing including the First Balkan War, the Mexican Revolution, early WW1, the Russo-Polish War and the Chinese Warlord era. If I ever get round to doing any of the latter, it will almost certainly be in 10mm but I am put off by the number of bases I would need to paint up. That's one reason why I've been working on some Interwar rules of my own, but I will come back to that another time.