The Loose Association of Wargamers

Anyone of you brains trusts got experience of matching these 3 makes? Are the vastly different in height or heft, do they work together?

No I am not doing a new period.... honest.... just thinking about it....

By a spooky coincidence, I'm just rebasing my mate's old Russian Napoleonic army and am dealing with exactly that mix... AB superb. OG meh. Lancashire avoid like the plague. I'll take a photo of the three next to each other and post it up when I get home.

From memory - OG15s are (like a lot of OG stuff, albeit marketed by another company now) a bit hit-and-miss, some are ok, even good, others not so much; Lancashire Games I looked at for 15mm WSS and AWI a good few years ago, and rejected out of hand - essentially, 15mm figures wearing 20mm hats and riding 25mm horses; AB are, well, AB - the Rolls-Royce of 15/18mm figures. I do recall that, in the Mike Hickling days, he would refuse to make up orders composed only of command figures or horses, as people were buying other stuff (mostly OG) and using those AB types to "pimp up" their forces. But then Mike, gawd love 'im, could be a bit strange like that.

Hmmmm just that OG15s do Suvarovs Russians, and between them and lancashire they do all the bits AB do not do in revolutionary terms.

BaronVonWreckedoften wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 1:17 pm From memory - OG15s are (like a lot of OG stuff, albeit marketed by another company now) a bit hit-and-miss, some are ok, even good, others not so much; Lancashire Games I looked at for 15mm WSS and AWI a good few years ago, and rejected out of hand - essentially, 15mm figures wearing 20mm hats and riding 25mm horses; AB are, well, AB - the Rolls-Royce of 15/18mm figures. I do recall that, in the Mike Hickling days, he would refuse to make up orders composed only of command figures or horses, as people were buying other stuff (mostly OG) and using those AB types to "pimp up" their forces. But then Mike, gawd love 'im, could be a bit strange like that.

He certainly could!

Yes, I'd always generally go for OG where AB wasn't available. I've got loads of them covering the 'AB gaps' (or former AB gaps, such as 1815 British, Hanoverians, Netherlanders and Russian cavalry) and my SYW armies are almost all OG. They fit in well with AB height and heft-wise, but they're just not quite as good.

The packaging policy is also rather irritating - bags of 100 infantry or 30 cavalry, seemingly filled (in the finest tradition of Airfix) with extraneous figures and poses you can never use. I worked out that once I removed all the inaccurate mitre-wearing SYW Prussian grenadier officers and grenadier standard-bearers (and there were A LOT, as the bags were geared to 12-figure battalions), each figure was actually FAR more expensive than AB! Lancashire also suffer from this problem. Bulk-buying figures may seem cheaper, but being able to buy figures individually and get EXACTLY what you need, without 'leftovers' can actually make AB cheaper. I generally do cavalry units in 12s or 16s, so a bag of 30 cavalry is cock-all use to me (oh and if you want the command figures, you need to buy another bag of 30).

OG's sword-blades and bayonets are very thick, apparently to make them stronger, yet I seem to lose far more of them than I do of the thinner AB swords and bayonets. Their horse-ankles and tails are also a lot weaker than the AB equivalents.

If Lancashire were the only option... I'd buy Minifigs.

Battle Honours always did a rather nice range of Tony Barton-sculpted Revolutionary Wars stuff, including Suvorov and his lads. They were one of the last things that Mr B did for BH. However, I've no idea who now has that range, or what state it's in. There's also the danger that they may have padded it out with inferior figures - they certainly did that with other bits of the BH Napoleonic and ACW ranges.

RMD wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 1:46 pm The [OG] packaging policy is also rather irritating - bags of 100 infantry or 30 cavalry, seemingly filled (in the finest tradition of Airfix) with extraneous figures and poses you can never use. I worked out that once I removed all the inaccurate mitre-wearing SYW Prussian grenadier officers and grenadier standard-bearers (and there were A LOT, as the bags were geared to 12-figure battalions), each figure was actually FAR more expensive than AB!

I pointed exactly this out to their UK agent (back in the day when OG15s and OG25s were the same company), having just examined a bag of 50 AWI British grenadiers, of which 16 (including four standard bearers) were command, and his advice was: "Just do what I do and chuck the extra figures in the bin, they're still the cheapest on the market." I explained to him that (a) unlike him, I didn't get a staff discount, and (b) even with that, his maths was still crap! That was the exact moment I stopped buying OG15s from him, or anything else for that matter.

RMD wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 1:46 pm If Lancashire were the only option... I'd give up wargaming.

FTFY.

BaronVonWreckedoften wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 2:08 pm

RMD wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2020 1:46 pm The [OG] packaging policy is also rather irritating - bags of 100 infantry or 30 cavalry, seemingly filled (in the finest tradition of Airfix) with extraneous figures and poses you can never use. I worked out that once I removed all the inaccurate mitre-wearing SYW Prussian grenadier officers and grenadier standard-bearers (and there were A LOT, as the bags were geared to 12-figure battalions), each figure was actually FAR more expensive than AB!

I pointed exactly this out to their UK agent (back in the day when OG15s and OG25s were the same company), having just examined a bag of 50 AWI British grenadiers, of which 16 (including four standard bearers) were command, and his advice was: "Just do what I do and chuck the extra figures in the bin, they're still the cheapest on the market." I explained to him that (a) unlike him, I didn't get a staff discount, and (b) even with that, his maths was still crap! That was the exact moment I stopped buying OG15s from him, or anything else for that matter.

Ah yes, Andy Copestake...

That's the fella!

(Sorry, Fred, we seem to have gone a little off piste with this..... )