Planning the Eighty Years War

Over the last six years or so I've gradually bought generic and Rocketman-specific figures, the idea being to provide the props for all the table top games my friends and I have played. I have now, more or less reached the point where I can provide elements for most bog standard medieval or fantasy war games, providing for four players with roughly twelve elements per player. There are a few gaps of course, I have more armoured than unarmoured figures, and I don't have any cannon or hand gunners yet, but on the whole I'm more or less covered now and I'm pondering the next ten years... Where to go next?

Most of our games have been small scale skirmish games. This is because our interest in table top war games grew out of role playing, which we have all played for many years (over a century if you add them all together).

Over the last five or six years then, we've played any number of games, some of which have been quite large and ambitious (by our standards). What we've never played however, is historical battles. All that is set to change now. My funding is limited and my time frame extends over the course of the next five or ten years but for some time I've been pondering building up an historical army and I've had several candidates in mind.

Imperial Romans were my initial thought, because I've always loved that period, and because I found Iron Mitten's Roman blog posts to be very inspiring. Samurai of the Sengoku period were my second thought as I've always loved Samurai movies and the English Civil War was my third thought as the ECW offers a wide variety of weapons and troop types with masses of literary resources available. Speaking with my friend Oleg however, my thoughts ranged further afield to the Eighty Years War which offers the same choice of weapons and troop types but a much wider variety of forces (and thus uniforms and heraldry). The EYW also offers the chance to explore naval battles using galleys and carracks, which in 28mm means building (and finishing) those models I began a few years back.

As of yet, I've not decided on what I'll focus on, but I'll probably be the Protestant Dutch (with English allies?) against Oleg's Catholic Spanish.