Warlord Epic ACW sprue and what to do with it

 As I dig deeper and deeper into Warlord ACW I started to play with it a little. SO here is a small sprue review and what I do with them and some suggestions.  Warlord made 2 ACW sprues. Original release sprue of infantry, and newer Cavalry/Zuaves sprues. This post is about original sprue.

So here is our protagonist. The Infantry sprue (ACW was Infantry war, and cavalry rarely engaged in pitched battles so here you have 90% what is needed for any ACW scennario :)

We have there: 1 command strip, 4 Infantry strip A and 5 Infantry strip B, and one  artillery piece and one commander. So we will end with overcrowding of commanding officers and unless you play on giant table in 5 stand unit ratio hunger of command bases. And I experimented with  multiplying them. But first things first

This is a Stripe A - a knife strip - 4th guy from the right looking from the back have his bayonet/knife visible on the belt. You are getting 5 of this stripes to a sprue.

And Infantry Strip B (4 to a sprue)

And most important Command strip

 It features commanding officer - most of the time he will be a colonel), drummer and pair of standard bearers. Throughout the war Union regiments carried pair of flags, a national flag (national colour) - a stars and stripes flag with few difrent arrangemnts of stars and regimental color - which was generally dark blue with coat of arms and with some different styles present (like green Irish brigade flag and such). But confederate regiments normally carried only onne battle flage be ther a one of national flag variants, state flag or regimental flag. So technically correct this stripe have more flag bearers than CSA regiment would require. Easist way to confederate your stripes is to cut one of the poles to a rifle length and paint it as one... and its enough its unrecognizable from half a meter distance and just another rifle on the table. No more work is needed but... we want to multiply our bannerem not hide them so:

So this is the first and simple way to mitigate it for confederates - split the strip and use flag bearers as centerpiece of 2 bases.

Those 2 bases use one commend strip and no converting or sculpting whatsoever. Just simple cuts and those strips cut easily in some places but look closely before cutting to choose places with minimal damage to the arms...

 Similarly infantry stripes cut nicely -but again mind the cuts as they cut in many different ways.

If you want to have officers in each sprue there is easy way to incorporate command figure from our sprue that no matter the rules you want to play them with you inevitably will end with a lot of spares.

Lets look at Black Powder as advertised (and provided in the box) ruleset. You want one officer for 3-5 regiments of infantry. So 1 sprue worth of commander per 3-4 sprue worth of soldiers.  Here is union base I made  as my first command base. and my most recent confederate base with mounted officers. 

ACW regiment commanders fought both on horse and on foot in battle. Sharpshooters was a thiong but extra mobility was always important.

Both bases are made by incorporating mounted model and put on the base with cut up stripes of infantry/ command strip. Union base have flag poles made from pins heated over the fire and melted into the model in place of the rifle. Really simple conversion but be ready to destroy one or two dudes if you've never did anything like that. Generally this plastic takes heated pin perfectly well and provide solid bond.

Here is an example of a strip with two banner poles added in place of rifles and some work done on the officer figure (rifle trimmed to look like sabre hold at rest and long coat and sash and drum for the drummer made from green stuff. Simple crude work that is completely unnecessary but its cool to have a drummer.

If you want to go deeper you can convert commanding figures in easy and complete rebuild way.

Easy way is again utilizing mounted commander cut in waist and placed on infantry body, and rebuild is an infantry model with arm added (here in armature state)

Mounted model cut easily at waist but you have to watch out for his sabre arm and cut some of the horse mane (especially if you want to use the surplus horse ( I want)

Finaly last part f the sprue is artillery piece. Cannon and 4 crew.

There is some controversy what kind of cannon this piece is meant to represent. Its not most prominent 12 punder Napoleon cannon for sure. Judging by its looks its most probably 6 pounder or 12 pounder howitzer (which looked alike just howitzer was larger). COnverting them to Napoleons will be may next project :>

Summary: This is almost perfect sprue for gaming in ACW. My only gripe is strange choice of cannon barrel (and lack of  command sprues but that is hardly a valid argument to have against sprue made for certain game miniatures allowance in mind). Warlord is producing command sprues - but they are copies of the plastic one unfortunately and not thet affordable). Another way to suplement command figures are metal miniatures. There are some comparable in scale and style but they werent so easy to get so I ended with working what I got - and you getting a lot of spares in the starter box if you want to play in 3 bases per regiment. 

Another thing to consider is small number of strips. It could easily be a 9 different infantry strips in place of pair we getting - or at last 3-4, and it should be quite easy to do with 3d designed models. Warlord did this with Napoleonic and into a perfections with nevest Pike and shott sprue where every strip is different. But ACW sprue was the first one - so all upgrades came from lesson learned with it.

This is great wargamming product. Honestly I havent seen anything of this usability for a long time.

Only comparable product really in  usefulness as one product for a whole conflict to wargame   will be sprues for Pike and Shotte.