In 1525, outside the walls of Pavia, a Spanish army trapped inside a walled hunting park did something that should not have worked. Spanish arquebusiers, screened behind hedges and garden walls, shot apart the finest heavy cavalry and the most feared pike blocks in Europe before either could close to killing distance. The French king was taken prisoner. The Swiss mercenaries who had dominated European battlefields for a generation went home and never fully recovered their reputation. Historians are still arguing about exactly what had just changed.
In January 1955, the historian Michael Roberts stood up at Queen's University Belfast and gave an inaugural lecture that would define that argument for the next seventy years. Roberts claimed that the new gunpowder tactics of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, disciplined volley fire, smaller and more mobile units, standing rather than seasonal armies, did not just win battles. They built the modern state. Any prince who wanted to field these new armies needed permanent taxation and a professional administration to pay for them, year after year, whether a war was actually happening or not. Geoffrey Parker later revisited and substantially broadened that thesis, pushing the timeline back to 1500 and forward to 1800, and adding the new star shaped fortresses of the period as a further driver: a state that wanted to build or besiege one of these needed a siege train and a garrison on a scale that no medieval treasury had ever supported. Critics have spent decades pushing back on both men, arguing the change was slower, messier, and far less revolutionary than either historian suggested.
This is not an abstract argument for anyone building these armies on a tabletop. It plays out directly in the collections themselves, in how many pikemen stand beside how many musketeers, in whether an army is a temporary levy of gentlemen and their tenants or a paid standing regiment, in whether the cavalry still fires pistols from the saddle or has learned to trust cold steel. WoFun Games display three early modern miniature collections built for exactly this argument: the Renaissance, the English Civil War, and the War of the Spanish Succession. Set side by side, they trace the debate from its opening shot at Pavia to its enormous, coalition scale conclusion at Blenheim.
Pavia and the Birth of Pike and Shot
Before Pavia, European battles were still decided largely by the shock of heavy cavalry and the immovable hedge of a pike square. WoFun's Renaissance collection recreates the armies that fought across Italy from 1494 through the 1520s, when France and the Holy Roman Empire spent thirty years testing every possible combination of pike, shot, and horse against one another. Andy Callan's ruleset for the collection sets out a typical clash between the two powers: French Knights in full plate, Stradiot light cavalry recruited as mercenaries from the Balkans, blocks of Swiss pikemen six ranks deep, and companies of Arquebusiers able to deploy loosely enough to skirmish or tightly enough to stand and trade fire, facing an Imperial army built the same way around Landsknecht pikemen and German heavy cavalry.
What both sides were groping toward, and what the Spanish tercio and its French counterpart, the legion, would soon turn into a permanent institution, was a fixed answer to a simple question: how many gunners does a block of pikemen need to survive contact with the enemy. The tercio combined pikemen and arquebusiers in one large unit, at a ratio of roughly two pikemen to every gunner when the system was new, with the proportion of gunners creeping upward as the sixteenth century wore on. That creeping ratio is exactly the mechanism Roberts and Parker point to. A pike block is cheap to raise and quick to train. An arquebus company costs more, takes longer to train, and needs paying every campaigning season, not just when a war happens to break out. The same gunpowder logic was being tested on the cannon that battered medieval walls, which is why Italy in these decades also saw the first angled, low lying bastions built specifically to survive artillery fire: the beginning of a fortification arms race that would eventually demand armies and treasuries neither side could yet imagine.
The 18mm Renaissance Starter Pack puts two such armies on the table straight out of the box, built to the same balance Callan describes: Swiss or Landsknecht pike blocks anchoring the centre, Arquebusiers screening the flanks, a squadron of Stradiots or German cavalry, and a single gun a side. For anyone who wants to field the full sweep of the Italian Wars rather than a single skirmish, the 18mm Full Pack carries 905 figurines across 16 sprues, enough for French Ordonnance cavalry and Knights, Landsknecht, Spanish, and Italian pike and Arquebus companies, Late Reiters, and the Genitors and mounted crossbowmen who still fought in a style barely changed since the previous century. That last detail matters more than it looks. The Reiter, a cavalryman trained to trot forward, fire a pistol, and wheel away rather than close with the sword, applies the same gunpowder logic to cavalry that the tercio applied to infantry, and it would take the rest of the century for anyone to work out whether that particular logic actually held up in a fight.
An Army With No Country Behind It
By the time fighting broke out in England in 1642, the pike and shot system was three generations old and thoroughly settled. What England lacked was not tactics but infrastructure. Unlike France, Spain, or the German princes, England had no standing army and no established machinery for paying one. King and Parliament both had to build their fighting forces, and the taxation to support them, from nothing, in the middle of a war they were already fighting.
That gap between military ambition and administrative capacity is precisely what the military revolution argument turns on, and the English Civil War supplies one of its clearest test cases. A typical regiment of Foot in Callan's rules for the collection fields two bases of pikemen flanked by four bases of Musketeers, a ratio that has already inverted from the Renaissance tercio's two pikemen for every gunner. Parliament's answer to the funding problem, a new excise tax and a compulsory assessment levied county by county, was deeply unpopular but administratively new, and it fed directly into the creation of the New Model Army in 1645: England's first regiment paid on a standardised national wage rather than the patchwork of aristocratic patronage, county levies, and unpaid promises both sides had relied on until then. Whether that counts as a state building the permanent capacity Roberts described, or simply a wartime improvisation that happened to leave a lasting institution behind, is close to the whole debate in miniature.
The 18mm English Civil War Starter Pack sets out two small armies built to that same regimental ratio, pike flanked by musketeer sleeves, three regiments of Horse apiece, and a single gun a side, enough to fight the kind of advance guard skirmish that decided nothing on its own but decided which side held the ground for the battle that followed. Scaled up, the 18mm Full Pack supplies 764 figurines covering every coated regiment from Blue to Purple, Ironsides and Cavaliers, Highlanders and Scots cavalry, and dragoons able to fight mounted or on foot as the situation demanded. What the war could not supply, in the end, was an army resting on anything more permanent than an act of Parliament that could in theory be reversed the moment the fighting stopped, which is exactly what critics of the revolution framing point to when they argue that a standing army raised for one war does not automatically add up to a modern fiscal state.
Blenheim and the Limits of What a State Could Carry
Sixty years after Edgehill, the scale of the problem had grown almost beyond recognition. At Blenheim in 1704, the armies of the Grand Alliance and France between them put more than 140 infantry battalions and roughly 300 cavalry squadrons into the field, more men on a single battlefield than either side in the Civil War could have raised for an entire campaign. Field armies operating in the Low Countries grew from something like 60,000 to 80,000 men early in the war to well over 120,000 by 1708, and every one of those soldiers needed feeding, paying, and marching on top of the fighting itself. Sieges, not pitched battles, were the main business of this war, which is precisely the scale at which Parker's version of the argument becomes hardest to dismiss: no medieval or early Renaissance treasury could have carried a force that size through a single season, let alone the better part of thirteen years of continuous campaigning.
WoFun's War of the Spanish Succession collection puts that coalition on the table exactly as it fought, British, Dutch, Bavarian, and Prussian regiments alongside the French and their own Bavarian allies, and the rules reveal how much further battlefield doctrine had matured since the Civil War. Dutch, British, and Prussian infantry drilled in platoon fire, a rotating system of volleys that kept a battalion's musketry almost continuous rather than delivered in one ragged blast, a direct descendant of the countermarch techniques Swedish and Dutch drill sergeants had spent the previous century perfecting. Cavalry doctrine had finally settled the argument the Renaissance Reiter never quite resolved: French horsemen still fired pistols just before contact, a habit that blunted their own charge, while British and Dutch cavalry had learned to trust cold steel and hit home at full speed, a tactic Callan's rules reward with a straightforward charge bonus. Gunpowder had not replaced the sword. It had simply taken a hundred and fifty years to work out which weapon belonged in which hand.
The 18mm War of the Spanish Succession Starter Pack arms both sides with three infantry battalions, three cavalry squadrons, and two artillery companies each, the same advance guard scale Callan uses throughout this series, while the 18mm Full Pack scales that all the way up to 2,270 figurines across 31 sprues, comfortably the largest of the three collections in this cluster. Grenadiers, Cuirassiers, Dragoons able to fight mounted or dismounted, and the household regiments of the Maison du Roi sit alongside line infantry drawn from six different nations, a roster that only a state with genuinely continental reach and financing could have assembled and kept in the field for over a decade.
The Case Against a Revolution
Not every historian accepts that any of this adds up to one clean revolution. Critics such as Jeremy Black and David Parrott have argued for decades that Roberts and Parker's timeline is too tidy: army sizes grew unevenly across different regions and different decades rather than following one continuous curve, and a good deal of the state capacity supposedly built up to fund these wars was actually supplied by private military entrepreneurs and contractors, the same sort of mercenary captains, Stradiots and Landsknechts among them, whose business had always been renting out trained soldiers to whichever prince could pay. On that reading, European rulers were not so much constructing permanent bureaucracies as getting steadily better at borrowing, contracting, and improvising their way through one war at a time, with the state that eventually resulted looking less like a deliberate design and more like a byproduct nobody had quite intended. Clifford Rogers has proposed a different objection again, arguing for several distinct military revolutions spread across centuries, including an earlier infantry revolution in the fourteenth century, rather than one single upheaval arriving neatly between 1560 and 1660.
That same disagreement over cause and effect runs directly through the German lands during these same decades, and it is the subject of our piece on the Thirty Years' War, which follows the pike and shot system into its most destructive test and asks what, if anything, it left behind in the way the German states governed themselves afterward. Read alongside that piece, the Renaissance, Civil War, and Spanish Succession collections trace one continuous argument about whether gunpowder built the modern state, or the state simply learned, slowly and at enormous expense, to carry an army it had already been forced to raise.
Fighting the Argument Yourself
None of this has to stay academic. Field a tercio against a Swiss pike block and you will feel exactly why the ratio of gunners to pikemen mattered enough for historians to still be arguing about it five hundred years later. Put a Royalist and a Parliamentarian army on the table with nothing more than what an act of Parliament could pay for, and you are recreating the exact administrative gap the revolution debate is about. Bring out the full scale of a War of the Spanish Succession army and you will need most of a normal sized table just to deploy it, which is as direct a piece of evidence as anyone could ask for that something had genuinely changed since Pavia.
You can build any side of this argument for yourself. Start with The Renaissance - PD to field the tercios and pike blocks that opened the debate, move on to English Civil War - PD for the moment an improvised war produced a permanent army, and finish with War of the Spanish Succession - PD to see exactly how large, and how expensive, that argument had become by 1704.