Yet more Assyrians...

Finalising (I hope...) the Assyrian project, and having actually looked at what might be a viable list before buying the figures this time I've added some Heavy Swordsmen and Javelinmen to my Assyrian army.

All of these figures are still from Museum Miniatures - it does mean I only have round shields rather than a mix of tower shields and round ones, but hey, I still like them !

For ADLG I'm basing Javelinmen in 5's to a base. These are listed as "Aramaean Infantry Auxiliary spear" on the Museum site, and have an actual Assyrian soldier in the middle of the base as getting two sets of 5 figures out of a single pack of 8 Arameans was sadly beyond me!

These guys count as Swordsmen in the rules, so I've tried to keep the number of upright-held-spear spearmen down somewhat and use a lot of swordsmen in the front rank.

The guy in the second rank with a crested helmet is an Urartian Infantryman according to Museum, but his shield is the same size as the Assyrian figures so he can sneak in as a second ranker pretty easily. Painting the crest black also means it doesn't jump out at you as being different.

The blue shields will mostly be used as the Elite units, with red as the default colour for normal line infantry.

Mahoosive Camels!

Whats that coming over the hill? Is it a Monster ?

Or is it a Museum Miniatures Midianite Bedouin Camel?

Having bought a dozen of the aforementioned creatures recently to flesh out an allied contingent for my Assyrians my plan was to use some old Essex bow-armed camel riders I had kicking about as the Light Camels and use the double-crewed Midianite ones as the Medium Camelry with bows in the core Early Bedouin ally.

Museum figures are made of a really strong but pliable metal compound, so tweaking one of the bowmen's arms and cutting off his bow to turn him into a flag holder to create a Commander/General figure was fairly easy to do;

But just have a look how these beasts compare size-wise to the Essex camels !

They are great figures, even allowing for the single pose - but boy are they huge!

Rug-a-dub-dub

Here's another refurbished Ghaznavid/Arab elephant, this time with an added printed rug:

The print quality isn't perhaps as good as it could be as I printed it with a relatively low resolution printer but as a test of concept I am still quite pleased with it.

The rugs can be found on my Pinterest page

Clogging Hell - We're all going Dutch!

A recent one-day event in Oxford gave me a chance to wheel out some almost forgotten FoG:Renaissance troops in 15mm scale to take part in a tightly themed C16 competition for the armies involved in the Great Rebellions of that era - the French Wars of Religion, the 80 Years War of Dutch Independence and the many Peasant Revolts across Europe.

Given the multitude of choices - and because no-one had bitten at my incredibly well crafted attempt at a joke on the FoGR Forum along the lines of..

• "How big is your army?"

• "It's Huguenot.."

..I ended up taking the 80YW Dutch, with a vague plan to batter my opponents senseless with artillery whilst reducing my opportunity to make the sorts of mistakes that someone who hasn't played these rules for ages might do by having a plan that didn't really involve moving my troops at all. 

The armies duly swept back and forth across the tabletops in textbook checker board formations and much Dutch courage was taken by all sides. And I used a ship! 

Read on for the usual rubbish-packed and ship-tastic reports to see how the Cloggers managed to do in these 3 FoGR battle reports