So long story short I got tired of hearing "please add fantasy pistols to the conquestdor cavalry" when WA could just do the awesome sauce knights of Malta back when they where harrasing the Ottomen empire's fleets and do more types wheel locks pistols and arquebus, not to mention halbards, boarding axes and other fun 16th-17th melee weapons.
They fill a niche, would be great opponets to sell alongside Turks, work with conquestdor sets too, and honestly would be better for filling oldhammer firearm needs than the conquestdors sets and are frankly more warhammery what with cross decortions. TBH I am not even sure why these guys have not had 2 or 3 plastic sets done already by diffrent mini companies (like why didn't Wargames Factory do them back in the late 2000's?😆)
More variety for kitbashing. That´s cool, I guess.
An STL upgrade kit, along with a standalone officer that is more identifiable as a Knight of Malta, would work well.
@C A Forsyth actually while I did suggest a similar thing in the past, given all the "Please add anachronistic fantasy pistols to this historical cavalry set for that DOA GW fantasy game so I don't have to go to my local library to print out STL files!" comments I have heard, (plus other sea action wars in the late renaissance these guys could fill in for like the Castilian war), I think doing dismounted Knights of Malta infantry set in hard plastic with a boat load of wheel lock pistols and a mix of melee weapons suitable for ship to ship and island to island combat in mind (ie no pikes) would be a good idea in the short and long run.
Simply put it would sell well on its own if the oldhammer comments are anything to go by (since knights of Malta would work for fantasy empire, in fact they would work better than the conquistadors artistically) and they would pair great with the ottomans while still actually working with Aztecs and fill in/kitbash with conquistadors themselves for those looking at post 1550’s conflicts in the America’s and elsewhere (cause this happened in South East Asia apparently😆).
>dismounted Knights of Malta That would be Knights not aboard a ship, I assume :-) While the Knights of Malta - and previously Rhodos - were recruited from the nobility of Europe, they rarely fought on horse. That said, Artisan (which is not Artizan), a small company, once ordered a set of metal Knights of Malta by Paul Hicks, if I remember that correctly, and that line was bought and released by Warlord Games.
Some of their metals are made for the Knights of Malta in the mid 16th century and fit for campaigns from the Siege of Rhodes over the Conquest of Tunis (where a fortress was held over decades by the Knights), the aborted assault on Algiers to the defense of Malta and the batte of Lepanto. Having digital sets for Knights, Brothers, Spaniards or the native Malta militia would be great, and one or two plastic sets would probably sell wel as the "golden age" Spaniards of that era would also work to fight the early 80 years war in the Netherlands, slug it out with the French and Ottomans and then threaten England with invasion.
They could even come with pistols.
@Axel Schudak Not "could", should come with pistols. Seen enough of depictions of them with pistols that it would be a crime not to add at least 4 of the poorly firing contraptions in "one for each hand"pairings set up to the frame (frankly I think they could be done as a pistols+plus melee single hand weapons half frame sprue and maybe make a miltia set of halberds users later or as the other half frame).
