Troops in Review: Perry 100YW Plastics

The Blood & Crowns Kickstarter has wrapped! That means that digital copies of the rulebook will be fulfilling soon, but also – the late pledge manager will be open for those who wish to add physical products to their kart (or who missed the digital offers the first time around)

As expected, Firelock is carrying the Perry Miniatures line of 100 Years War plastics. Players have been asking how these kits can be used in forces for Blood & Crowns. Rather than an in depth review of the miniature line itself, this article will provide examples of how these kits can be assembled to represent the different troop types in the game.

If you’re looking for a good review of the quality, scale, and pricing of the Perry line and many others, you can check out our article Blood and Crowns – the Miniatures

editor’s note: I apologize for the photo quality on this one. I did the best with experimenting with the cameras ‘Macro’ options, and they came out looking a lot more aggressively sharpened than usual. The boxart and painted miniature photos are all supplied by Perry Miniatures.

The Kits

Sold under Perry’s “Agincourt” collection, the plastic portion of the line is aimed at covering your more common troop types; much like Firelock’s own plastic range for Blood & Plunder.

More detailed reviews of the 4 kits on offer can be found below, or you can jump to a particular section by clicking the tags

AO 40 English Army 1415-1429
AO 50 Agincourt French Infantry 1415-29
AO 60 Agincourt Foot Knights 1415-29
AO 70 Agincourt Mounted Knights 1415

Bases
Assembly Tips
Further Reading

AO 40 English Army

The ‘English Army’ kit is really meant to represent Henry V’s army at Agincourt; being 2/3rds or more longbowmen, with only a small retinue of supporting Men at Arms in the center. To this end, the box contains
24 Archers – Bowmen, English Longbowmen, Welsh Longbowmen
12 English Men at Arms, Afoot – with poleaxes or hand weapons

This is a very limiting combination of minis if you’re trying to build for Crowns. It’s most useful specifically for the English at Agincourt list, where longbowmen are your only available Vanguard units. You will almost certainly want at least the Agincourt French Infantry box to add some footmen to this box.

The Men at Arms, Afoot are the same as those found in the Agincourt Foot Knights box, so this section will focus on the archers.

The box contains 4 of these frames (show front & back, above)

Assembled, they create a series of bowmen who are nocking, drawing, and loosing their arrows from a static position. With a 100lb draw or more, a “static position” was really the only option.

These are 6 of archers assembled in the “standard” fashion. I built half (12) of the archers in the box in this way; using only the components from the English kit.

One of the advantages to a plastic line however, is the ability to mix & match kits with ease. The French Infantry kit provides several poses which are less static. I snipped 12 of those bodies to build some more dynamic, skirmishing archers.

These archers are built with bodies and heads from the ‘French Infantry’ kit, and arms from the English Army set. Even the swords, axes and bucklers are from the English kit. The shoulder-slung, canvas-wrapped longbows are from the Mounted Knights kit. I assembled 12 bowmen in this style.

In Blood & Crowns, only the English armies field Longbowmen armed with powerful War Bows. Unaligned forces and the English can also have units of simple Archers, equipped with bows. At scale, they would not look vastly different to a longbow. The skirmishing models with their swords drawn are also not out of place. English longbowmen especially were known for their willingness to stand and fight in melee, and this is reflected in the game. The Welsh Longbowmen also benefit from the Ambush special rule, so in large games I will use the skirmishing bowmen to represent skulking Welshmen.

View this kit in the Firelock web store
View this kit from Perry Miniatures

AO 50 French Infantry

The French Infantry kit is likely to be the backbone of most player’s collections, whether they’re playing French or any other faction. The set contains:
6 French Men at Arms, Afoot – with Poleaxes or Hand Weapons
24 Footmen – see below

The Men at Arms are the same as the Foot Knights kit, and we will cover them in detail there. What makes this kit so useful is that it is the primary source for Footmen from Perry.

The set contains 3 of these frames (shown front and back).
Simple math will show that you can build any combination of the following:
12 Crossbowmen – Light Crossbows, Heavy Crossbows, Genoese Crossbowmen
18 Footmen with Spears or Pikes – Footmen, Pikemen
9 Footmen with Polearms – Footmen, Galloglaich
9 Standard Melee Weapons – Footmen, Pavisiers
6 Pavisiers – with Heavy Crossbowmen, or Genoese Crossbowmen

Crossbowmen

In assembling my own kit, I started with the Crossbowmen. As I had scrounged torsos for my Welsh bowmen, I decided to use the lightly armored and rather static archer torsos here. This worked well enough, since the dynamic French bodies can look odd for crossbows.

These models are all assembled with Bowman torsos and heads, with arms from the French kit. The only exception is the model second from the left, using a French torso and helm, and the second from the left with a French helmet on an English torso. Even the model leaning forward to wind his crossbow is a mix of the two kits.

Pavisiers

Above are my Pavisiers. The model furthest left actually uses an English Longbowman’s torso, but the rest are built with the standard French kit. The man on the right – holding his pavise on the ground – has had some custom knifework done to make it look like he’s lost the fabric covering of his shield.

I could have assembled these models using the hand weapons in the kit. In hindsight, that might have been better, just so that I could have more spears for my Footmen. However, Blood & Crowns treats simple spears as “standard melee weapons” with no special bonuses, and has no rules for shields outside of the Pavises attached to Crossbow units. As such, these guys are fine to be added to either unit as I need.

Footmen w/ Spears or Pikes

Six of my assembled Footmen, equipped with either Spears or Pikes. The difference between the two weapons is a little arbitrary. I’m somewhat skeptical of the plastic spears, and might eventually cut them off and pin the hands to accept wire spears.

The model on the center-right is actually a French Foot Knight torso and head. There is a reason for this. Firstly, I hate the jupon “smock” look. Secondly, I borrowed a much cooler looking Footman for my French knights, which I’ll show you later.

Footmen with Polearms

The final 6 models in my kit were assembled as Footmen armed with Polearms. The model second from the left is another French Foot Knight, with arms from the Footmen frame. The model center-left is actually sporting arms from the Longbowman kit, with a small mallet. I did this because again, I was poaching pieces for my French Knights.

As a word of warning – the English struggle to utilize footmen with polearms. The English do not have Footmen as a Main Battle unit in any of their lists. Instead, they have a specific unit marked as ‘Spearmen’, which is a unit of Footmen expressly disallowed to upgrade to pole weapons.

View this kit on the Firelock web store
View this kit on the Perry Miniatures web store

Agincourt Foot Knights

The Agincourt Foot Knights box is a repackaging of the armored Men at Arms that you can find in either the English Army set (12) or French Infantry box (6). Here, they are packaged together as 2 frames of each.

Whether or not you will need this kit is really dependent on which of the “main” kits you have already picked up. Men at Arms are an expensive unit, and the English Army kit already includes 12. The French will probably want to grab this kit, however.

The English Men at Arms

You get three of these frames (shown here front & back). Frustratingly, these 18 knights can really only be assembled as
9 Men at Arms, Afoot – with Poleaxes
6 Men at Arms, Afoot – with Standard Melee Weapons
6 Men at Arms, Afoot – with spears

The spears are tricky. You might count them as cut-down lances, and treat them as Poleaxes, but that feels wrong somehow. I took the approach that as long as the unit is armed mostly with the appropriate weapon, then it’s okay. But if I’m being honest, I am throwing a bit of a tantrum and have so far refused to build any of the standard melee knights.

My intention is to use the rightmost model to represent a flagman. Banners area good way to differentiate each unit, and a flowing Standard can denote your leader’s personal Retinue and also the Standard Bearer unit upgrade. The model is also wearing an Orle; a fabric circlet around his helmet. Battlefield use of the Orle is disputed, but they’re sometimes shown in artwork, but only on the English. The kit only provides enough to give 6 knights, but it could be useful for marking out Veteran units.

The French

The French half of the box consists of 3 of the frames above (shown front & back). This frame is the same as the English. Even the arms are interchangeable and if you look closely, the poses are matched. The difference is that the French knights are “bearing arms,” meaning that they’re wearing some kind of heraldic outer layer of fabric over their armor. Aketons, jupons, and tabards all fit this role.

I assembled my French a little differently. The two models on the right are using bodies from the French Infantry kit. I think these are supposed to be men wearing an older style of armor, since they’re covered over with the more outdated tabard. But I liked the look more than the big smocks. Because the visors are separate, it was easy to attach a visor to a footman helmet, and get “close enough” to a proper looking helm.

The model center-left and furthest right are also using Footmen polearms. This is to get a few extra poleaxe-wielding knights, but also to free up one of the cool French greatswords for using on my English.

I’d like to point out that the visors on all of these models are separate from the helmets. This can be extremely frustrating, as they’re small, fiddly parts. Not only that, but the soft plastic is prone to deforming and not fitting “quite right” over the face. Be very careful to match up the visor to the helm of the man nearest; they are not all universal. I found it easier to model open visors than closed, but didn’t want everyone walking around with their faces out.

Also, to talk about armor a little. The English tended to fight in uncovered “white” or “alwite” armor. Shown above, they’re shiny and plain. The French and other continental knights fought more often in the slightly older style of covered armor. This is not a hard & fast rule however. For example, the English occasionally issued orders that knights retiring on the battlefield should doff their arms. We can infer two things from this:
Firstly, that English knights did sometimes wear arms over their armor
Secondly, that despite this, arms were considered so French that seeing covered knights moving into the line could result in incidents of “friendly fire.”

View this kit in the Firelock web store
View this kit in the Perry-Miniatures web store

AO 70 Mounted Knights

The Agincourt Mounted Knights kit comes with 3 of the following sprue (shown below, front & back). You’ll notice that this means you actually get a total of 18 possible riders.

I can say confidently that this is enough armored cavalry to last the average player a lifetime. Cavalry in Blood & Crowns can have a points cost that is 5 times higher than an infantryman. Horses pay a premium in this ruleset, because of how armor and saves work. If you want cavalry, one kit of these is likely enough.

These riders can be assembled as either
12 Men at Arms, Mounted – Men at Arms Mounted, or Esquires
6 Mounted Archers – English Bowmen upgrade
6 Light Cavalry with Standard Melee Weapons – Hobelars without javelins

But first, let’s talk horses, shall we?

You get four of this frame in the kit. You’ll notice that they are labelled ‘WR Horses’. These are actually available on the Perry site as ‘War of the Roses Horses‘, and you can pick up one of these frames for about $5 US, depending on exchange. So for $10, you can recover another 6 models from this kit.

Because I am a dork, I agonized over building my horses “correctly” – making sure that I matched the left and right sides properly. After much trial and error, I gave them to my girlfriend. Within 30 seconds she had them assembled in much more natural looking combinations. What we found was that the frame is laid out like a page. With the horses arranged with the detail facing you, start in the top left corner and match bodies going across the row from left to right. Then go to the row below, left to right – just like reading a page. You end up with this:

I had fun assembling my knights, and saved them for last as an encouraging “reward” for myself. I also wanted to be familiar with the style of the kits before tackling a unit as eye-catching as mounted knights. Unlike the Foot Knights, I could not see a major difference between the Knight torsos in this kit; if they were cloth-covered or “alwite.” Instead, I relied on the sleeves to tell the difference between the French and English.

On the right is a French or continental knight, with his fabric sleeves. The right is an English knight, with bare armor. I also tried to give my English knights the more modern visors; the rounded, less angular designs. Like the foot knights, the mounted knights visors are also separate and just as finnicky.

With the regular knights complete, I tackled an English command group. On the left is a standard bearer. I did some transplant surgery on his upraised hand; that will be modeled with a banner after he’s painted. The commander is on the right with his visor open. Both men are riding armored horses. The more modern armor shown here is aggravating to match up on the horses. I found that I needed to bend the collar almost to breaking around a paintbrush handle, so that it would fit the curvature of the horse.

The English done, I next built the French. Nothing too fancy here. The chainmail on the horses comes from the Knight frame. It has small dimples meant to fit right over the horse’s sculpted-on harness, so it’s fairly simple to fit. Still, getting both sides matched flush together and curved to the horse is frustrating and can require excessive bending.

I left my riders separate from the mounts. This is less for the sake of reusing horses for different units, and more for ease of storage and transport. I’ve found from other games that transporting spear or lance equipped cavalry on their horses usually ends in heartbreak.

View this kit on the Firelock web store
View this kit on the Perry Miniatures web store

Bases

Throughout the article, my miniatures have been shown on 3mm thick MDF bases that I picked up from frequent Firelock collaborators, the Phalanx Consortium. My cavalry are on 25x50mm “pill” bases.

The Perry model photos are on their 25mm squares, and 25x50mm squares for the cavalry. Unfortunately, while there are bases included in the kit, there are none of the simple squares included in any of the infantry kits; only multi-bases.

Assembly Tips

There are no instructions included with the Perry kits. This didn’t make basic assembly any more difficult, as I found the kits to be relatively straightforward. The arms are paired, but the pairs are generally close together on the frame and can be identified by matching patterns. It’s most tricky with the mounted knights, as the arms are further apart and some of them are cut at the wrist to be matched with hands.

For any of the dual-hand weapons, I found it easiest to apply glue to the shoulders of the torsos, and to the wrist of the hand on the weapon. That way, the smallest piece (the arm without the weapon) could be handled with no risk of getting glue on myself, and the two pieces could be pivoted up and down or slide around to match as necessary. It’s less fiddly than it sounds, and certainly less fiddly than the visors.

Use plastic glue, and remember to use the side of a sharp XActo to remove any mold lines. Scape at these, don’t try to cut them – this plastic is soft, it is very easy to slip and gouge the model.