I've been accidentally collecting a Numidian army for many years now, with the most recent addition being some 3D printed cavalry who entered the collection earlier this year.
With a possible opportunity to use the army in a competition at Warfare 2025, I recently decided that I really did need to add some "imitation legionaries" to the mix to make the army a little more viable - and with Forged in Battle being easy to buy in quantity, and compatible with the rest of my FiB infantry in the army it was their Numidian heavy infantry who got bought.
These troops were recruited and fielded in the later Punic Wars period, when the Numidians began to adopt Roman military formations and equipment, such as a pilum and shield, and even trained under Roman instructors - or sons of Gladiators if you believe the 2nd installment of Ridley Scott's opus!
Either way, troops were trained to fight in a more resilient close-combat style that imitate Roman tactics and capabilities sounded like a good complement to the Numidians' traditional light cavalry and skirmishing types, and here they all are:
Buying two packs of infantry and basing many of them 7 to a base allowed me to eke out 7 units from the nominally 2x24
FiB blisters, due to the presence of a couple of extra figures.
As they are not-quite Romans, I wanted to paint them in a non-Roman (ie "not red") palette, so I went with a white undercoat, with
Yanden Yellow GW Contrast as the main colour for their tunics.
The straps were left white, and then done with
Army Painter Leather Speedpaint, which I find gives an interesting colour texture, but more importantly pretty much self-blacklines (or "brown-lines"?) on these deeply sculpted FiB figures.
For shields I wanted to be a bit Roman, but still retain a tribal feel that would match my existing
Numidian skirmisher types, all of whom have brown hide-like shields. The compromise I settled on was to paint the shields in a dusty brown (a bit of a mix of various browns) and then add either "tribal" patterns or a knock-off "Roman-style" laurel wreath in a random selection, suggesting that whilst these were still tribal warriors, some of them had made at least a passing effort to impersonate the "Romans " their commanders aspired them to become.
The laurel wreath is pretty effective IMO, and even better, remarkably easy to do as its a series of green blobs and half-moons, each half-moon then having a second layer in a lighter shade of green added on top for contrast.
The
Yanden Yellow works really well on these figures too, almost uniform but also very "in the desert"
Here's an officer unit close up - showing how I failed to clean off the static grass before photographing them!
There are more Numidian figures on this blog / website you can see here:
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