The East of India Company
Press Release
Ancient Greeks.
We are proud to announce 4 more phalanx sets to add to our existing set;s which were successfully launched in the Autumn of 2005. In addition we have made and will be launching a Persian army throughout 2006 as opponents to this formidable formation! Personalities and casualties are also planned.
These 4 new sets comprising of 12 new figures have newly sculpted heads and 12 new shield designs to compliment them. To show the very fine detail on these figures we have deliberately enlarged 2 of them below to show you what our 54mm figures would look like in approximately 160 mm scale. This will save you from getting out the magnifying glass! The research was hard for these figures but again a friend, who is a brilliant graphic designer, drew all the shield designs by hand from historical sources (urns and plates etc.) and then Till Weber my friend and samurai painter agreed to change subject matter and looked after the master paintings.
I had wanted to produce for a ages a complete phalanx. A phalanx with as many different varieties of figures involved in it as was commercially possible. Thanks to our loyal collectors the initial sets were a huge success! At the time, not even knowing the demand, we never thought of limiting them, so these sets (ACG01 to ACG04) will remain in production until at least the end of this year. I hope that gives enough of a notice period to collectors who still are missing these sets from their collection. On this note we have decided to make the 4 new sets (ACG06 to ACG09) strictly limited to just 500 sets of each. That way if demand continues we can hopefully bring yet more shield designs, heads and variety to this popular range of phalanx figures. Of course we will still continue to produce other Greek figures for the range but outside of this static "phalanx" configuration.
A quick note on pike length : Our initial offerings for this Ancient Collection is a Greek phalanx around the time of the battles of Marathon (BC 490) and Plataea (BC479). At that time, with the armour we have chosen for our first warriors, a short pike would have been more historically accurate. However having spoken to a large number of collectors a few have the opinion that "a phalanx cannot be a phalanx without those huge long pikes". So we had a dilemma; but not really as we have decided that each set (ACG01 to ACG04 and ACG06 to ACG09) will contain both the long and short versions:. 3 figures 6 pikes. We hope therefore everyone will be happy!