I may have found a  compromise to my cost conundrum.

After Azael commented about 3D printing pikes I went on a bit of a hunt. I couldn’t find any historical pikes. I got a bit miffed to be honest as I can get pretty much any period. I put calls out on various groups and still nothing, then I noticed a warmaster advert and the penny dropped… so after a bit more searching and further requests…I drew a blank… no pikes to be had, but then all of a sudden the clouds parted, light streamed down and angels sang… on Thungiverse, the free place I came across a Warmaster dogs of War Pike block. I downloaded them and had a mooch.

Apologies for the naff photo, but these are in heavy armour on the torso and a mix of helmets and hats… success…

So I then set about trying different sizes to fit in with irregular. I started off with making them 9mm tall I included the pikes and eyeballed the figure… too small

I then chopped the Pike off to speed up print time and did one  ar 60% one at 50% and one at 40%. The larger size won. They still looked too small as the Irregular base stood at 2mm. So off I went again and made myself a 2mm base in 3D builder and stuck a couple of three’s on there.

My attempts are seen below…

As you can see the larger ones to the right of the painted minis look too small… so here they are with their bumped up base…

Another naff photo,  but they do seem to work. I will redo them with their pikes and paint them up have a look properly. Here they are from the front…

So the plan is… Irregular in the front rank and printed ones behind. This should drop the cost a fair old bit as the 32 bases of pikes were the ones bumping the costs up. So with these removed I have dropped the price to £50.00. If I remove the hand gunners and cannons and print some then the cost drops to £36.00.

The advantage with this pose is that no supports are required. They print at an hour 20 due the the height of the Pike, the cut down test was just over 30 minutes.

I am now off to print some hand guns and xannons to see what they are like.