While the proliferation of black powder weapons across the battlefields of the world would change the nature of warfare, soldiers mounted on horses continued to play a major role in combat until the early 20th century. Heavily armored knights, flanked by lightly armed and armored outriders were integral parts of the armies ranged across the battlefields of Renaissance Europe. Meanwhile, Spanish Conquistadors continued to spread across North America using the speed and power of their horses, along with the savage ferocity of their war dogs who killed men, women, and children indiscriminately at the behest of their masters.
Box art by Wargames Atlantic
Ever since building out some skirmishing forces from Wargames Atlantic’s Conquistador box, we’ve been anticipating a matching set of cavalry models. They’ve released a pair of cavalry kits with a wide variety of weapons and armor options, allowing you to create models that will be equally at home in your Conquistador, Landsknecht, Condottieri, or Old World Army. Both kits also include dogs, so you can really put together quite the little pack of them if you buy both boxes.
Thanks to Wargames Atlantic for sending over their Renaissance Heavy Cavalry and Conquistador Cavalry boxes for us to review.
All photos are by TubaGlue and Inquisitor Moloko unless stated otherwise.
Sprues and Assembly
Each box comes with components to make twelve 28mm cavalry models with a variety of equipment options and eight dogs. Like the earlier Conquistador kit from WGA, there are no bases included in the box for either the horses or dogs.
The dogs are a welcome surprise with a box of cavalry. They’re fun, characterful sculpts and will be at home either as basing decorations for your cavalry models or as units on their own.
Each left side only has a single matching right side, so there are only two distinct dog sculpts.
The horse sculpts are reused from other Wargames Atlantic kits with new saddles and armour to dress them up. They’re well sculpted, and all the new components are designed to fit over the old sculpts very precisely. These are easy to clean-up and assemble, though we’ve found that the straps that go over the horses’ rears are a bit fiddly to line up and glue, so make sure to dry-fit them before gluing them on.
The horses easily fit on 25mm x 50mm bases and the dogs fit nicely on 25mm square bases. The integral bases are fairly thin, but we still recommend using a bit of modeling putty or other filler to hide the edge of the integral base. While you’ve got the putty out, the dogs’ tails have a small gap at the base that will look better filled in. Both animals have a small seam where the halves come together which can be filled with a gap filler, like Liquid Greenstuff.
Top: Conquistador Cavalry. Bottom: Renaissance Heavy Cavalry. Photos by Wargames Atlantic
The rider’s legs and torsos are a single piece, so you really only need to sort out adding heads and arms. The light Conquistadors have options for swords and spears. The heavy cavalry box has swords, spears and pistols. It’s worth noting that even though the heavy cavalry box says you can make 12 models, each of the 4 sprues has 4 riders on it. That means that if you don’t mind using the bodies with ruffles around the neck, you could actually build up to 16 riders with the box (although you’d need to score more horses).
The heads and shields are all included in each box so you can mix and match them quite easily to get a little extra variety. Note that there’s only one arm with straps for holding a shield per sprue, so you’ll need to glue shields to arms without straps to complete a full unit with shields.
The helmets with neck guards don’t quite sit flush with the bodies due to the body’s neck. Simply trim the neck to eliminate the gap.
Painting Considerations
TubaGlue: The models have well defined details and take washes well, making them ideal for ‘traditional’ layering, washing, and highlighting. I’ve opted to use metallic paints on the armor on my guys, but I’ve mixed a bit of black acrylic in to edge it toward blackened steel. This improves the flow of the metallics while painting and gives a nice dark color. Follow that with a dark wash and some subtle highlighting and you’ve got a nice dark steel.
Inquisitor Moloko: By way of comparison I’ve gone with a “quick and dirty” Slapchop style, using a mix of GW Contrast and Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 to match the models up with the WGA foot Conquistadors I’ve already painted. I’ve used a tiny bit of true metallics (mostly Vallejo Brass) to add a bit of pop and visual interest, but overall I was very much going for speed and completeness to get them tabletop ready before I ran out of momentum and hobby steam. Much like the foot models, I found that the riders take to the contrast paints very well. The details are crisp and each piece of gear is well defined. The horses and dogs have much larger, smooth areas so the limitations of the Slapchop technique tend to become much more apparent with those (although I will say that I’m happy with the horse musculature on the legs). Without going back to do some bright highlights with traditional paints the effect can be muddy and dark, but I do think they came out reasonably well for the amount of time and effort I put into them.
Comparisons with Other Kits
Unsurprisingly, both the Heavy Cavalry and Conquistador Cavalry are fully compatible with WGA’s earlier Conquistador kit. As an experiment, we were able to assemble a horseman with a set of crossbow arms from the foot kit with no conversion needed. While it’s unlikely that every single set of arms from the foot kit would work seamlessly on the cavalry, after all there is a horse in the way, it does seem like just a touch of creativity would allow you to build well outside of the original intent of the boxes with some mixing and matching. Additionally, the inclusion of a left hand pistol, fully helmeted heads, and variant heavy armor sword poses means that your foot knights can be assembled in a staggering array of poses, adding a ton of character to your leaders and champions.
While we tend to mostly play Force of Virtue with these models, don’t be surprised if you see a number of arms and heads from the cavalry set showing up in the steaming jungles of Lustria attempting to plunder the lost relics of the Old Ones during a Mordheim campaign.
Naturally, many players will be tempted to grab a few boxes of the heavy cavalry to fill out the ranks of their Old World army. The heavy cavalry can be built as either pistoliers or knights which will fit right at home in an Empire or Estalia army. The lance arms don’t quite match up with the chunkier Games Workshop lances, but the pistols will work great. Having access to two cavalry kits to quickly and affordably bulk out a Dogs of War army (Tilean, Estalian, or otherwise) makes these great kits for the Warhammerers out there.
There are some noticeable size differences between Games Workshop’s horses and the Wargames Atlantic horses. Nothing insurmountable though – not all real life horses are quite the same size as each other, and the difference will mostly disappear if you aren’t mixing different sized mounts in the same unit.
Let Slip the Dogs of War
Overall, these kits are excellent additions to Wargames Atlantic’s Renaissance line-up. The overall quality of the sculpting is quite good and the wide variety of options makes the kit extremely flexible. We’d love a little more variety in the horses but they still work well as a unit.
The dogs are a very welcome bonus and are quite possibly our favorite part of the kit. There aren’t many options on the market for plastic 28mm scale dogs, and these are very characterful bulldogs. They’re extremely quick and satisfying to assemble and paint and look great on the table. The only flaws we can find on the dogs is that they could use more poses and that there’s a small gap that needs to be filled at the base of the tail.
In our opinion the value of the kits is quite good. The price of the kit Conquistador Cavalry is $35 for 12 cavalry and 8 dogs ($2.92/figure not counting the dogs). The Heavy Cavalry are $40 for 12 cavalry and 8 dogs ($3.33/figure not counting the dogs). Both kits have a broad range of uses, are flexible, and you’ll end up with an absolute ton of bits left over at the end. If you’re picking up some for yourself, be sure to order direct from Wargames Atlantic and use Goonhammer’s affiliate link!
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