My on going 25mm Project continues with the ESU ‘Heavy’ infantry that were produced in partnership with Eureka Games for quite some time until only a handful of years ago. The Eurasian Solar Union in the Tuffleyverse consists more or less of China, Russian, India, most of the rest of Asia and these troops are clearly meant to mirror the padded uniforms of WWII Soviet troops. In my Tomorrows War games these troops will be used to represent the Democratic Peoples Republic of Glory conscript troops. The DPRG is, more or less, space North Korea. I love the almost retro look to these troops and think they really invoke the image of poorly trained conscripts forced into service.
The sculpts are detailed and the old casts were clean, requiring only a little cleanup. I contacted Eureka in Australia and they offered to spin up the molds for me, but they didn’t have the minis on the website anymore so I had to dig around to find a cached version of the catalog. Shipping is going to make them expensive but it will round out my platoon.
True to the Soviet/despotic ruler stereotype there are political officers as well as an NCO. Unfortunately I like variety in my squad NCOs, so maybe I’ll have to do a head swap on someone…
The riflemen on the other hand have twelve poses! I could easily just take one of these guys and treat them as an NCO. There’s four kneeling poses but no prone ones so I won’t complain.
There’s only one squad support weapon and a shoulder fired missile launcher, with two poses each. That’s still plenty for my conscripts since they’re not well armed.
There are a couple support figures. One with some sort of optics, laser designator or field glasses of some sort, and a trooper running with an ammo can. There are a couple more poses, including a tripod mounted heavy weapon, that I will be ordering from Eureka.
I am very happy with the figures and the paint jobs overall. I would like some more variety in NCOs in GZG’s lines so I could have three different squad leaders, so there being only one obvious NCO in this line is disappointing. Not having more than two support weapons would annoy me if I wasn’t using these as conscripts. Most of the other lines have three or more heavy or support weapons it seems, but they all have at least a SAW type weapon and a anti-vehicle missile launcher.
I’m almost done with puttying up the bases to even these and the NSL troops built in bases with my Litko bases, and then I’ll finish basing and flocking them all at once
I love them!