Video Reports from Beachhead 2025

 This year's event at Beachhead 2025 L'Art de la Guerre 28mm competition allowed me to wheel out yet another Successor/Macedonian army from the collection, as this time my generic 28mm mostly-Victrix guys would be appearing as the Lysimachid Successors.

The event was a 5-game themed event in which everyone had to use at least 2 of Elephants, Camels or War Wagons - hence this rather odd AI-generated image of camels, elephants and a Victorian Bathing Machine seemingly converted into a War Wagon, posed by an English seaside resort pier!

Anyways, my choice was to take 2 Elephants, with some newly minted Victrix plastic kit elephants raring to get on table and a lack of either war wagons or camels in my 28mm collection also contributing significantly to my decision-making process.

I also wanted to use all 6 units of these 28mm Victrix Successor Pikemen figures I had gone through the effort and pain of assembling, and then painting - having only managed to field armies with 4 Pikemen units up until now. 

Add in a vague plan to use all of the different Successor armies at some point in time and I ended up with the Early Successor Lysimachid list from the Battle of Ipsos.

After surviving the trip down to Bournemouth, and also a night in a rather cheaper-than-we-had-hoped hotel, Beachhead 2025 played host to the Lysimachid Successors in 5 different battles against the Carthaginians (elephants), Italian Communes (war wagons), Phyrrus of Epirus (elephants), the Classical Indians (take a wild stab in the dark why don't you?) and the Hussites of Jan Zizka (war wagons again, of course)!

The full set of 5 YouTube Video Battle reports from this fiesta of 28mm action, plus an accompanying episode of the Madaxeman Podcast are now all posted online for you to watch and listen to in various formats:

• On YouTube as a "playlist" to watch all videos in sequence
• On Madaxeman.com, with all of the videos embedded in a single page

Enjoy reliving early February at the English seaside !

Newline Designs "Hittite" Chariots

Newline Designs make some of the best value (and actually, "best" by any criteria) 28mm Biblical figures out there IMO, and I have previously bought a near-full Later Assyrian army from them which has taken to the competitive tabletop on several occasions.

With a couple more events coming up this year where the Assyrians could potentially appear I have been looking at adding some 2-horse chariots to my army in order to repurpose it as an "Early" Assyrian force, getting some more usage out of the many infantry, cavalry and chariots who have done such sterling service as Later Assyrians/Sargonids over the last few years. 

Unfortunately Newline don't make "Assyrian" two horse chariots, and their 4-horse ones are so hefty that it's impossible to imagine two horses pulling them at all, never mind at speed over a battlefield... so a bit of morphing and imagination was needed as I bought a set of three "Hittite" chariots for the princely sum of just £24 to repurpose as Assyrians.

And here they are - well, almost.. 

As you can see I have used some "wallpaper" on the fronts of the cabs to make them look a bit more like my existing Assyrian troops. 

These chariots come with three crew, a driver and two spearmen. In ADLG the crew for Assyrian chariots are archers, so I have some Assyrian bowmen on order to slot into these cabs at a later date.

I elected to use Contrast paints for part of the colour scheme for these - my Assyrians are in block colours, but I do like the more washed out effect for wood grain which is cast onto the model - it reallt picks out the grain nicely.

Here you can just about see where I have magnetized the javelin-armed crew members either to the base of the chariot, or in some cases to the side walls.

The idea is to allow them to be swapped out for the Assyrian archers when they arrive, and also to use up some of the large number of rare earth mini magnets I seem to have acquired with no real plan as to how to use them over the years! 

Of course, doing it this way opens up the oppotyunity for these three to become the nucleus of a Hittite army in future as well.. which with Newline's annual sale knocking 25% off of these beasties, making them a ridiculous £6 each (compared to Foundry's eye-watering £18 per single chariot!) is a real possibility in future!

This slightly darker, more solid-paint model seems to have had some frosting on the wallpaper when the matt varnish was being sprayed, which I didn't notice as I rushed them to the lightbox. 

 

Another coat of brush-on matt varnish should hopefully fix it. 

Some very nice models indeed, and amazing value to boot!

The Roman Road Heads Down South

2025's PAW competition in deepest Devon (aka The South West's 2nd biggest Festival of ADLG & Pastys) provided me the opportunity to put the recently painted 28mm Triumverate / post Marian Reform Roman army on table in a Roman-themed event. 

This would see as many of the figures I've been painting and trailling on my blog in the past few months being shoehorned into a single army list, with maximum inclusivity trumping potential effectiveness by some margin!

The end result is these four 28mm video battle reports from PAW in Plymouth which you can watch in a YouTube playlist, or embedded on a single page on madaxeman.com.

The embedded video page also has a post-event summary from Nasty Hannibal.

The "placed" lists from Beachhead 2025's ADLG events

Having just gotten back from plating ADLG at Beachhead (where I somehow ended up 2nd in the 28mm pool with 3 wins and 2 defeats - go figure!), I have managed to quickly upload the "top 3" lists from the 15mm and 28mm competitions to the ADLG Wiki on this site.

They are:

15mm

• Classical Indian
• Sahelian Empire
• Seljuk Turk

28mm

• Burmese
• Early Successor 
• Seleucid

There will be some reports - eventually - of my 5 games too, but here's a few tasters to get you started...

Roman Cavalry (not quite a choir!)

 Chris Martin may have sung about Roman Cavalry Choirs singing, but in most sets of wargaming rules the Roman Cavalry are, well, a bit "out of tune" with what it takes to be actually all that good, at least in the Republican period.  They aren't equipped with cool lances, they aren't especially decent quality, and they aren't numerous enough to have "quantity as a quality all of it's own" either

However in ADLG, again as in most rules, there are always a couple of mandatory units of Roman Cavalry in most of the Marian/Republican era lists, so I was obliged to get some for my Roman army. 

These are the finished article:

They are all from the "much cheaper than Foundry" Crusader range from North Star.

The horses are a tad on the skinny side if I'm being picky, but that does at least mean they all fit together well on this 60mm wide base.

The riders are cast with saddles which didn't really fit all that snugly on the backs of the horses, so it was not entirely straighforward to mount them up. 

After a bit of consideration I ended up deciding to snip off some parts of of the horses manes, where the mane joins the back of the horse.

 Doing this creates enough of a long, flat patch along the back of the horse to mount the riders properly - if they had been left to sit "beind" the original mane they would have ended up being pitched forward  quite notably as the saddle would have say partly on the horses buttocks, which are are higher than the middle of their backs. 

These are the inevitable LBMS transfers, sized very well for these specific figures. 

I did do a bit of blending in around the edges, although the one on the right of this photo does still seem to have been left with a visible line showing the edge of the transfer, which is a bit ofa PITA in this photo but will not be seen on-table 

I bought one pack of 3 armoured horsemen / officers and one of unarmoured cavalry, giving me the potential to field them as visibly different, perhaps as Elite & Ordinary, or as a Heavy Cavalry unit and a Medium Cavalry unit - the unarmoured chaps also get the less glamorous brown cloaks so I can tell from the back too! 

They don't come with spears, so these are slightly bendy (break proof!) plastic broom bristles.

 

Once I get the legions (and Gladiators) done these guys will be mooching about ineffectually at the back of the army in no time at all ! 

Medieval Baggage

 I can never resist a chance to get some more baggage elements, and my 28mm armies are now starting to be the main recipients of this habit (as I honestly have way too much army baggage in 15mm!).

Earlier this year at the PAW show in Plymouth I picked up these couple of vignette sets from John at Athena Miniatures - as a trade for a Russian hat I had originally planned to sell on the Bring & Buy. 

They are "Vignette 7 Nobles and Merchants" and "Vignette 8 Drunk Soldiers" on the Athena website - I  did however mix one of the Merchants into the Drunkards base to give the happy fellows some context and dissapproval.

"You bring shame on our army with your drunkenness  - especially you Sire, a Priest!" 

The figures are a tad stylized compared to some ranges, but the animation and entertainment value of these little sets is still top notch IMO!

Begging for alms...  or perhaps just begging ?

All done in Contrast Paints, based up on 60x60mm square MDF with tufts from Warpaint Miniatures. 

 

28mm Imitation Legionaries (aka Aventine Thorakitai)

 A key part of many of the Later Successor armies are the "imitation" Legionaries, where Alexander's marshalls decided to copy Rome's successful pilum+sword+shield formula, and have a tentative go at moving beyond the Greek-originated spear+shield approach. This is pretty neat, and adds variety to a wall of pikes or spears, so adding a couple of units of Imitation Legionaries to my Successor collection has always been a bit of a must. 

Other than knowing that these guys were copying Roman tactics however, there's not a massive amount of evidence for where they sit on the "Look like Romans <-> Look like Greeks" spectrum, giving a reasonable amount of leeway for choosing figures for them. 

And, in the end, I actually didn't even "choose" which figures, instead finding a couple of packs of Aventine guys in the collection of a late clubmate which seemed to fit the bill. 

It turns out on closer examination of the Aventine website that they are techically Thorakitai, but I felt that the spears that they come with were short enough (and chunky enough) to pass for pilum-style heavy throwing spears.

The other consideration (apart from "I had these already") was that having a "Greek" flavour to the figures might actually be better than having "Roman" style armour and helmets - after all, it would surely have been the style of fighting that the Successor generals would have wanted these guys to emulate, not their fashions and haberdashery?   

Adding in some head swaps from the same pack of Aventine heads that I'd used earlier on some of the Phalanx greatly increased their variety.

When combined with gluing the shields on at a variety of heights, and posing them at different angles I ended up creating a couple of units where you really have to look twice to notice that there is only one figure pose for the non-officer infantry.

The shield patterns are simple Roman-style black transfers from Veni Vidi Vici - both sets of shields are done with Contrast paints over a white base, which I have found gives a great gradient of texture on a flat surface like a shield, as the paint pools at one side of the flat surface as it dries. 

For the "Blue" unit I also did a pale blue (normal paint) background patch where the transfer would go before applying the transfer. This was because the Contrast paint was too dark to really work well with a black transfer. I had considered white transfers, but thought they might look a bit bland compared to black.

I also added in a plastic flag - I'm not entirely sure which set it was from, but it's big, and it has an LBMS transfer in the middle of it that I had to blend in by mixing paint to match the small postage-stamp bit of the transfer. 

So, that's pretty much all of the Heavy Infantry for my Successors completed - other than another couple of Phalanxes, which I'm putting off for the time being, as the thought of all that hand-drilling is rather intimidating. 

And, of course, being rather lovely Aventine metal figures, these are the "heaviest" of the Heavy Infantry in the army by quite some margin!

Hopefully these guys will make their debut at Beachhead in the ADLG competition this coming weekend (unless I end up playing in the 15mm pool to help even up numbers!)