Showing posts with label Persian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Persian. Show all posts

20 Sept 2022

Persians at the Tagus : ADLG in Lisbon

 Lisbon, and the Lusitania Challenge - a 4 person team event held in the Military Museum in Portugal's capital on the banks of the Tagus which I'd last been to all the way back in 2012.

In recent years the Lusitania Challenge has been reinvented and reinvigorated by the adoption of L'Art de la Guerre as its Ancient ruleset of choice, putting the event firmly on the map of the pan-European ADLG event circuit. 

This time around a staggering 24 teams (96 players) had assembled in the gun-infested bowels of the Lisbon Military Museum to do tabletop ancients battle together (and, also, eat sardines from tins as often as possible).

In terms of the actual gaming this was a competition with 4 players in each team, each playing a themed period roughly analogous to the 4 classic DBM Army List Books - and I was in Period 2, Roman & Classical. having decided that this prestigious international event was the ideal opportunity to put on table the wheeled Persian Archery Towers for the first time in competitive action as part of an Achaemenid army.

The general theory of the army was to use a combination of infantry archers (Sparabara and Immortals) together with good quality Satrapal and Guard cavalry on each wing to overwhelm any opponents mounted troops, and use the Archery Towers, some low-grade mercenary spearmen and a small force of mostly light horse in the centre to block and distract the enemy's capital troops and keep them from reinforcing what I hoped would be their by-then heavily embattled wings.

Over the course of 5 games and 2 days the Persians took on the Sassanid Empire, two lots of Early Imperial Romans, an Alexandrian Macedonian army and then ventured Eastwards to fight the Classical Indians, giving a wide range of opposing armies and troop types for the Achaemenid plan to be tested against. 

All 5 battle reports are now available on the Madaxeman website, complete with the usual mix of irrelevant captions, post-game analysis and insults from Hannibal, in-detail reporting of our culinary  and beverage related exploits in and around Lisbon, and links to how I cooked up the wallpaper for the towers and the pavises of the Persian army.


Read the 5 reports and the culinary analysis here 



7 Apr 2021

Museum Z-Sculpt Persian Sparabara and Immortals

 With the Cyrus' Mobile Tower having languished in the drawer since before Xmas last year, and with plenty of cavalry and ancilliary troops all done, finally the Early Persian army gets the core of it's troops - the Immortals and Sparabara:


For these guys I have managed to fit between 12-14 figures on each 40x40mm ADLG infantry unit base, leaving a gap at the front as well so the rear ranks are really crowded with archers 


I also followed up on my numerous "wallpaper" experiments with wallpapering the pavises of the Sparabara to make them more colourful and personalised - as usual just ssearching for "Persian Patterns" on Pinterest and Google 


My theory was that no-one really knows what they looked like, so why wouldn't they go personalised on the designs?


From the rear you can really see how they have been crammed in, using a variety of the Museum poses and equipment sets


There are cuirasses, petruges, no armour at all, helmets, hoods, all sorts really... 


I needed two bases to act as Immortals, and dithered about with how to represent them, finally chooing a unique, pointed-top spara and a common, 'posh-looking' design - after I stumbled on the design online.


I also added the standard bearers and musicians to the bases to make them even more obvious from the back as well


Each of the units has someone poking through the wall of pavises - these have a kneeling archer and a officer bloke with a small axe checking that the coast is clear

From the back you can see the real mix of Contrast and normal paints I used, as well as some of the very basic "spots and lines" patterns - with the figures this densely packed it is all about the mass effect, even though many of the patterns are not ones that would stand up to independent scrutiny! 
 

The cuirass-wearers were done with white undercoat, a wash with Skeleton Contrast, then the blocks of armour and petruges painted in Ivory.  


It's all about the figure density


The second tranche of 'normal' Sparabara




Another spotty mass of humanity. 

Hopefully this is the view I will see most often! 


Here are some of them with Cyrus' 10mm Pendraken Siege Tower 



And all in a row


And, all the colours from the back!


14 Mar 2021

Persians, Thracians and ...10mm Barons War?

The last week has seen a bit of a flurry of activity as a few purchases from the Museum Miniatures sale have made it to the top of the pile, together with some more Xyston Persians to go with the Cyrus' Mobile Towers of last year.


These are sold by Museum as Scythian horse archers, from their recent "Z" range of releases.


I'm using them as Thracians, by painting them in a similar style to some rather venerable Xyston Thracian infantry which were bought as a couple of FoG AM units, but which I have recently worked out could almost make up an entire ADLG army with a bit of extra stuff added to them.


As is usual with these new Museum figures, whilst the 15mm scale castings aren't (of course) quite as sharp as the 3D renders on their website would suggest, they do paint up nicely and have a pleasing amount of variety in the poses and clothing of the figures in each set too. 
 

Here I've mixed in a pack of Greek Light Horse (the javelin-armed figures) with mounted Scythian-style archers to create some Thracian cavalry who could serve both as Getae horse archers or as normal Thracians.
 

I've also complete another 4 units of Persian cavalry, with the eventual aim of making up a "loads of poor quality mounted" Achaemenid Persian list for ADLG.


These are Xyston castings, superbly detailed which I have painted up in a rather irregular paint scheme.
 

Most of these figures have some sort of scale armour, so I've done a few with metal and the rest with leather effect on the scales.


These are Thracian light horse javelinmen gain from Museum - the bear-headed Greek Light Horse from Museum making up much of the unit, with some hand-made shields added cut out from stiff card to "Thracian-ize" them.


Again they come with a good variety of poses even within each pack.


This is a head-on comparison photo showing the Xyston cavalry on the left and the Museum Z range ones on the right. The Xystons are two-piece castings and here it really shows how this allows their figures to be "wider" whereas the one piece casting Museum ones are a little "linear" by comparison, with the rider's pose very much in line with the horse. 


Another comparison shot, this time with the Museum figures on the left.


This weekend I also got a parcel through from Ryan McKnight (admin of the very useful Wargames  Events and Shows page on Facebook) who is producing them through a kickstarter at the moment under the banner of Apocalypse Miniatures 


It's many years since I painted up any 10mm medievals, but these look really sharp (and I'm a sucker for a freebie!) so when I was offered some I couldn't resist! 




This coming week I'll be divvying up the sample pack Ryan sent across and arranging a clandestine meeting (probably at the Hangar Lane Gyratory System) with Dave from the Madaxeman Podcast (Frumentarius23 on Instagram) so I can share them with him, and we will both have a go at painting them and see how they come out in the next few weeks.  


 

24 Dec 2020

Festive Persian Siege Towers...? OK, it's a stretch, but...

 OK, maybe not - but if you are prepared to stretch to a bit of Old Testament nonsense and have an Early Achaemenid Persian army you'll probably have wondered what to use for 15mm scale "Cyrus Mobile Towers" at some point in the past... and now, I may have found the answer!

Very recently Pendraken announced an MDF Siege Tower in 10mm scale, which a quick email to Leon revealed was less than 40mm wide, and so would fit on a standard DBx basing frontage - the key challenge for other towers I'd looked at in the past. 

At only a fiver a pop, I quickly ordered a couple and then set to with the wood glue to assemble the two of them. 

With Museum Miniatures releasing some new Persian Sparabara, my own Essex Persian infantry were already slated to be replaced in the new year anyway, but this project meant that some of them won a last-minute reprieve from eBay as I instead upcycled a few bases of mixed bow / pavise infantry for tower crew. 

I then added on some re-purposed Essex War Wagon horses to pull the towers (because I had them lying around with ADLG needing less wagons than previous rulesets), otherwise Museum's Draught Oxen might have been the ideal choice (although it looks like Essex "might" sell the wagon horses separately if you ask nicely too), and with the application of some printed-off "wallpaper" patterns (repeating the idea from my Assyrian Chariots of a few years ago) to give the towers a more detailed look than I could ever hope to paint and, well, Cyrus is your uncle! 


There's about a dozen crew inside each tower, and a couple on the base as well to keep the enemy away from the horses!


You can fit 2 standing Essex infantry on each of the three internal levels. I used the wallpaper on the pavises as well. 


This pattern is one of a number I've made available to download as a pdf from my site, but there are loads of images on Pinterest if you search for Persian or Assyrian Graphics.



The tower is painted in Citadel Magragge Blue - not sure if its still available but it is a nice strong dense dark blue. 


I glued the drop-down "bridge" in the open position to fit more crew in. I may add one of the Museum kneeling archers here too once I get round to buying them. 



Adding a different image on one of the front panels just about stops making the tower look like it's wearing pyjamas. I think.... 


The second tower I did in yellow, trying to blend in the yellow borders on this graphic from Pinterest. 


Here I used much more of a mix of graphics - not sure it's as effective though as the blue one. 


Part of the reason for using a mix of graphics was that the main one didn't scale down well to the smaller panels at the top of the tower.


Again, space on the drop-down bit for a kneeling archer.  


Even the 10mm ladders internally don't look too out of scale. 


This is a standard 40mm wide and 80mm deep DBx "war wagon" base.



Happy Christmas! 




  

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