Classic-Castle.com

So I have been thinking about this and talking to Bronx about it for a little while...and it made me curious.

Regardless what movies and tv shows me, I kind of don't believe that realistic armies all had matching clothing, armor, weapons...etc.

BUT I know that we as castle builders tend to make our armies match.

What are your thoughts?

My friends and relatives and I like to play games of Heroscape (a Hasbro miniatures wargaming system from the early 2000's) using our minifigs as custom units. Heroscape had a mix of heroes (unique special characters), and squads (sets of 2-4 usually identical generic units) so a lot of my castle soldiers are built into pairs and trios of identical soldiers. But every squad is unique from the others, so for the castle factions I have larger armies for there is still a decent amount of variation.

I agree that its pretty unrealistic for most medieval armies (Though I'd also imagine there were some noblemen that cared about uniformity in their armies) and if I wasn't primarily using them for tabletop gaming these day I would probably make an effort to make every soldier unique.

My armies used to match. More and more, I try to diversify them to make them more realistic. Now I have several knights with their retinues which more or less match the colors of their lord but are by no means identical. Some men-at-arms wear their lord's livery but most don't, especially not the archers which are serf-class conscripts.

My 'on duty' troops in the large layout I'm working on wear similar clothing/armor. It's enough to distinguish them as guards.

I try like variation in all my armies, but I also do like to see identical rows of soldiers. So I have a pretty mixed bag. My larger armies look more varied, whereas some of my smaller armies look a lot more similar to one another.

Maybe I'll get around to photographing my armies someday....

EKnight

I know it's unrealistic, and generally I like historical realism in MOCs, but mine match so that in busy scenes you can tell which side is which side.

Bruce

For the most part my armies all match. The exception being my knights in more recent years. I do try and make sure that the faces on the minifigs are all different. Part of me would love to make them all more unique and different but my desire to have order and consistency always wins out. Doesn't help that when I get sets the minifigs usually match to begin with.

Purple Wolf

Completly unrealistic yes, that's why I bought a couple arms and legs of brown, tan, dark tan, dark grey etc... to diversify a bit my soldiers. I have differents smalls armies and try to keep one principal color for each army like dark blue for the Crown guys for so every soldier of this army have some dark blue but they are also all different because one will have brown arms as another one will have dark grey arms, etc...
It's just a personnal point of view as I also like to see big armies of similar soldiers ^^

i also try to avoid old basic colors like blue, red, yellow and choose the dark versions or "new" colors like tan

I can't say I really have enough figs similar enough for "armies", but my small groups of factions are usually highly similar in terms of torsos, shields, and a lot of their helmets. I usually mix up some of the weapons, capes, etc. though so they don't match 100%. That's just not interesting/realistic enough for me.

When I first started looking at castle-themed armies, I was a little jealous of the ones with huge numbers of minifigs that all matched. That was the first type of army I built when I started collecting minifigures in enough number to do so. But my taste shifted over time. I started to find that a little boring, so now I try to have a degree of variation within an army, while keeping some similarities so I can tell who goes in which group, and for sorting purposes and such. So one army will usually have everyone sharing a certain color, especially on the torsos, but I'll mix in some different patterns so they're not all the same surcoat. They'll have variation in helmets, variation in weapons, and variation in legs or even arms. And I definitely try to use different faces on each person, so at the very least there aren't any duplicated faces within an army. I also use smaller but more diverse armies now than I used to.

This thread is headed off with 50 of it's best friends to buy matching uniforms.

All of my armies have different legions within them but the many of the legions look the same. I also have several lords, generals, assassins, wizards, etc within my armies. I like to have variety within the army but my generic soldiers usually have all the same, torso, or colors with some variation on the minifig heads.