Romanoff Pikemen - RTW1 'Charge Your Pike!'

This set has the same approach as the other Romanoff packs, 5 multi-pose figures who therefore require some thinking and assembling. This does result in an ability to play with the poses and reduce the "toy soldier effect" if desired, and get more realism albeit at the price of some more work. There are:

• 5 identical bodies / trunks in back-and-breast with tassets [no gorget],
• 5 identical nicely sculpted swords,
• 6 pairs of arms [2 types - one set has the right had pushing the pike from the rear end of it, the other set has the right hand holding the pike shaft, so based on the provided arms you will have three of one and two of the other],
• 5 heads with helmets in three types [2-2-1, the 1 has no mustache, the two others both have a slightly different face with very different helmets].

All are pretty clean with nice small details like the fastening buckles on the armor, etc.

When assembled, they will look something like the below pic; this nicely shows both hand sets and the narrower helmet of the closest pikeman compared to the others, so for example you could have pikes up as high as about 45 degrees or completely leveled with the ground:

http://www.oldgloryuk.com/thirty-years-war/english-civil-war/43/154/408/416

with gracious permission from Andy the OGUK chap! Check out his site for more pics.

It should also be noted that the arms all have the somewhat "older fashion" of wings on the shoulders.  These are part of the arm sculpt and as they were falling out of fashion during the ECW one may consider trimming them off or down a bit.

For me, I like a little more variety in the leg posturing, and I've included the pic from my other post on Romanoff musketeers firing, to show how I snip the base and then use it as a lever to manipulate the leg somewhat. Combined with some head and arm posing differences, and you get a nice natural and realistic effect.

Based upon the above pics, and a close examination of the two sets of arms, I can actually see a few other possibilities for "postures" [poses] of these pikemen.  Looking at my trusty copy of de Gheyn [by Dover Editions] I'd say that the most restrictive pair of arms is the one with the long-extended right arm, but could still have the following postures:

Granted, these are not radically different poses!  But you can see this as both a fighting posture and a transitional posture in the notations.

For the other pair of arms, there's several different postures:

These two show a high point, useful to spare cavalry figures in contact a spear in the face! The second is some sort of trailing pike posture, which also shortens the distance the pike tip would be in front of the figure and therefore within the base.

These two postures have an interesting facing, with a flat body but forward pike. The lowered tip will - again - keep that tip out of the way for gaming. Only thing about this posture is the left hand would have to be flipped over so the palm is down [twisting, or cutting off and gluing back on].

I think these pics show how effective a real drill manual is - that is also easily accessible - and how simple it is to not only get variety of pose but also to find historical postures that are "gaming friend" and teach a bit about drill in the 17th C.

Hope this is useful for you if you are considering getting into 40mm, ECW, or just picking up a few packs of these sculpts to make a unit.  Mine will make their way into my ECW story as some sort of Trained Bande for the county in which my fighting will take place.