Perry Salute 3Ups

For those of us not able to attend salute the Perry's have made a brief announcement covering the plastic 3Up 'surprise', below is the 'Napoleonics' part of that announcement.

For those people who couldn't attend Salute, we have a brief line-up of our new 3ups that were on show. This is just an overview - we'll be going into more detail with more photos on each set in the coming week. We hope you like them. Please note that some parts of these figures are held on by blue-tac, which might show occasionally.

Austrian Napoleonic (German) Infantry 1808-15

All the figures in the box will have both helmets and shakos, so they cover the mid-to-late-war period. You'll be able to equip all the figures in the box with either. They're wearing the 1808 pattern jacket, which is used up to the end of the war and beyond. There will be 48 figures in the box. There will be other box sets in this series.

Russian Napoleonic Infantry (summer dress) 1809-15

There will be enough early shakos and later kiwers to equip all the figures in the box with either. The earlier corded 1807 pattern shakos were worn alongside the 1812 kiwer during the 1812 Russian campaign, as reforms took a while to complete. There will be two boxes of these - one infantry (with elites), one grenadier - as there are so many variants of headgear.

Prussian Napoleonic Reserve Infantry 1813-15

These are represented in their 1813 basic grey uniforms and minimal kit, although some reserve regiments still wore this uniform in 1815. Both peaked caps and shakos will be included for all figures. The command wore the regular Prussian uniforms.


There are no release dates on any of these at the moment.

Well Perry clear up the future direction for their Napoleonic's, we are at least going to be able to source all our needs for 1813-1815 over the next few years from Perry. Also based on the Perry's previous track record we can be fairly sure that there will be an extensive range of metals to accompany the plastics and round out the ranges, that is an important point.

The figures themselves are standard Perry fare, if you can call anything Perry 'standard', excellent 'wargame' poses. The sets sound intelligently designed with the right options to make them flexible, no doubt as with all the previous sets these will be designed to be assembled quickly so we can get them on the table. As before plastics are aimed squarely at the gamer and are largely march attack poses, we probably can expect more variety in the accompanying metal ranges.

From previous release we can expect that it will be some time before these see the light of day, at least 6 months for the first of these if they are only just going to Renedra and there is still a lot of work needed on the Prussian metals to accompany the latest releases so I don't think these are things we will have on the table this year but the timing sounds right if you are building armies to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the 1813-1814 battles as I am.

Now the elephant in the room has got to be what does this mean for Victrix? In one fell swoop Perry have claimed the entire field from 1812 on, and just a couple of months before Victrix release their own 'late' Austrians. I can see a lot of people now preferring to sit and wait for the Perry figures sadly. I also said at the time that Victrix should have gone for late-Russians rather than early-Russians last year and again I think people will prefer to wait especially as Victrix have not been very good at making a range coherent so far, we have for example been left waiting 12 months to get horses for the British Limber and their is not even a sniff of a French Artillery set.

Don't get me wrong Victrix sculpts are great and there is also plenty of room for more than one manufacturer in this scale but I am not sure their is room for two plastic manufacturers targeting the same segment. If I was them I would focus on metal rather than plastic and start fleshing out the ranges they have started rather than continuing to just randomly launch the odd set here or there. There is still so much left to be done to cover the whole of 1813-15 in Napoleonics and plenty of room for more metals even ones that duplicate what is already available from Perry but with the very high investment required for plastic sets and with Perry making it clear they are going to own the high volume segment I wonder whether Victrix are wise to continue developing new plastic sets