Ten Kingdoms 3D printed Sung Chinese

 In my ongoing dabbling with 3D printed figures the latest test batch is a sample set of cavalry and a few infantry from Ten Kingdoms, as produced under license in the UK by eBay seller Micks Bits.

These chaps are - as printed - slightly large for 15mm, but Mick seems to have found a very good quality resin, robust but with just enough flex not to be as snap-liable as some of the earlier 3D prints I've tested the waters (or resins..) with in the past. 

They are really, really crisp figures, seemingly with more detail emerging the more time you spend trying to paint them properly (!) - another sign that 3D printing even for small scale miniatures continues to come on in leaps and bounds. 

The cavalry even come with pre-printed 3D shields (only one design I think) which you can ink wash and add a bit of paint to and come up with a classic Chinese dragon-face thingy fairly easily.

There is a hard-to-pin-down difference between these CAD-designed sculpts and "normal" sculptor-carved figures, which is perhaps best articulated as these being somehow "cleaner" - but this range at least seems to have managed to get in quite a bit of the artistic elements of "character", with even facial expressions being visibly different on the individual figures. 

Here are the archer and crossbowman stood next to some Lurkio metal castings I bought and painted up at the same time. 

At tabletop distances they are not noticably different in height, but the 3D prints are more well-fed and the difference in amount and sharpness of detail is very noticable. 

I'm working through a fairly major pile of "undercoat these figures outside before the weather turns" at the moment, so quite when I will get around to turning this sample-sized initial purchase into a full army is anyone's guess, but the more time I spend looking at these guys the more convinced I am that I will end up with a Song / Ming / Khitan army using Ten Kingdoms sculpts (designs?) at some point in the near future,. 

 

EBay Incoming!

 With Spring very much in the air, I've realised that I need to free up a few Bisley drawers for some of the stuff I've painted during Lockdown, and so I will be doing a bit of a mini-flurry of eBay sales in the next week or so. 

All my eBay listings can be seen on the listings page for "the_lithuanian" 

On sale this week are: 

15mm Chinese Handgunners / arquebusiers (actually Boxer Rebellion figures!)

15mm Essex Chinese handgunners

15mm Arab musketeers / arquebusiers

More 15mm Arab / Afghan musketeers or riflemen 

15mm Byzantine Crossbowmen

Unpainted but undercoated 15mm Arab Musketeers

Blue Moon American Indians 15/18mm undercoated only

And.. last but not least a large 15mm True North Miniatures WW2 Belgian Army, perfect for playing O Group, the new WW2 ruleset from TFL, or Peter Pig's PBI WW2 rules.

All my eBay listings can be seen on the listings page for "the_lithuanian"  and all end on Tuesday 27th April around 7pm BST.

Lockdown Podcast #9

As the landmark of a double-figure number of Lockdown Podcast Episodes rapidly approaches, and with almost 1,400 Podcast downloads in the last month under our belts the 9th Lockdown Podcast is now out on Podbean, iTunes, Spotify and (soon) the Madaxeman Youtube Channel. 

This week the team of intrepid wannabe gamers and by-now-obsessive painters luxuriate yet again in the riches of a combined painting queue that stretches all the way from the pyramids of Ancient Egypt to the tower stacks of Mega City One.

In the fleeting moments of the podcast that take place before we reach Andy's Quiz Music a wide variety of debates take place - the best board games for feuding siblings, using the type of garden feature which would raise eyebrows in a parliamentary expenses committee for tabletop terrain, genetic similarities between Vikings and Saxons, whether treatments for 10mm addiction could be made available on the NHS, how to sneak lead through domestic customs inspections, and in a newly trimmed version of the ADLG list discussion we all take a vote on who we think would win in a Jurchen Ch'in-Jurchen Ch'in face-off (hint - the Song Chinese always come off worst...).

There's also a whole load of discussion about how Tabletop Simulator (available on Steam) might actually be the solution we all didn't realise we were looking for to get some (virtual) lead on a (virtual) table in the near future - all of which gets crammed in before Andy's Quiz. 

(I promise I'll have some actual picture-led painting and gaming stuff out this weekend as well!) 

Lockdown Podcast VI

This week the regular crew mark a double-triple podcast milestone (or, more prosaically, this is the 6th Lockdown Podcast) in their ongoing rambling discussion.

Subjects covered this week in the paint-chat include Chinese Chariotry Umbrellas, whether a reasonably close encounter with a tin of white spray paint counts as "fully painted" when it comes to Austrian Napoleonic infantry, Gnomepoleon's leadership qualities, would Steve McQueen have cleared that fence on a Harley rather than a Triumph, how long the 7 Years War ran for, if double-depth basing has led to the end of monopose units, digital photography techniques for toy soldiers, opportunities for Buddhist monks on tortoises in contemporary tabletop warfare and the vexed question of how many simultaneous painting projects is too many?

There is also a special feature on the Later T'ang Army (ADLG list 169) in which all 6 contributors throw a list on the table for critique and discussion, and the return yet again of Andy's Quiz.

As usual the Podcast is available from Podbean, or by searching for the Madaxeman.com Podcast on iTunes.

(The T'ang lists we discuss are all published on the ADLG Wiki on the Madaxeman.com website).

Roll Call lists on the ADLG Wiki

The lists from the top five placed players in the 2019 15mm Roll Call period have now been added to the ADLG Wiki, along with my 25mm Medieval list, the lists of my 5 opponents over the weekend and a couple more.

15mm Lists:

1. Mike Bennett Sui & Tang Chinese
2. Hubert Bretagne Mérovingian Franks
3. Paul Johnston Christian Nubian
4. Peter Webb Christian Nubian
5. Clive McLeod Maurikian Byzantine

25mm lists 

• My WOTR Lancastrians (1st)
• Jurchen Chin 
• Swiss (4th)
• Burgundian Ordonnance
• Italian Condotta (2nd)
• Samurai (5th)
• Serbian (3rd)

Limerick 2018 - The Emerald Isle's first ever ADLG competition!

There once was a man with an axe,
Who played ADLG to relax.
A comp in Limerick Town,
Would see much Guinness go down,
On the plane was a Chinese army he'd packed.

That Keith Duffy bloke was nowhere to be seen,
But the chap from the Hobbit - yes, he'd been!
The Emerald Isle suits this game,
You can drink as yer' playin',
Which in Limerick makes everyone keen!

There were five games that went down in two days,
Although hangovers made most just a haze,
Many dice they were rolled,
And when the final bell tolled,
Well.. you must read on to see what Hannibal says!

(if that all makes no sense, there are 5 new ADLG battle reports now on Madaxeman.com featuring Han Chinese in action in Ireland!)

Dogs of War 2018 Game 2

And, in quick succession, here's the video of the second game in which the small but imperfectly formed Byzantines attempt a double envelopment against the Southern Dynasties Chinese

The rest of the Chinese Crossbowmen

With 48 figures to play with, the Chinese Crossbow Painting Marathon has created lots of opportunities to pad out a number of armies (of course that does mean working on the old "WRG 6th" principle that there is kinda only one Chinese army, and that clothing styles changes little in over a thousand years, but hey...) and here are the full results to follow up on the previous blog post:

Two ADLG units with Pavise on the left, and then a handful of single-based crossbows painted up to match the uniforms of existing single-based halberd and spear armed infantry I already had, allowing them to be deployed together as mixed units, or for these chaps to be used in pairs as crossbow-only units that are colour coded to match the swordsmen-only units in the same army.

Yes, that  lurid dayglow green is a colour scheme on some of my troops - it's donkey's years old, and has even been on table before in some match reports. If I were painting the halberdiers these chaps go with now I probably wouldn't go with it again though...

I've had a load of these pavises lying around in the bits box for years, so finally they get some use. The designs are not wildly inspiring, but after toying with the idea of trying to go for a dragons face for all of, oh, half a second I opted for something easy.

With 48 men to paint, there were spares for a couple of Light Infantry units

Here's the full lineup of double-based Warring States and Han infantry, with Essex in front and Museum behind.

And, finally, from the rear... 

All of these pictures and more are to be found amongst the 3,273 photos of 15mm troops which are currently to be found in the fully-searchable 15mm Figure gallery on my website

15mm Han Mixed Units for L'Art de la Guerre

With Han Chinese coming out as the most popular army for the 15mm L'Art de la Guerre competition at the upcoming Roll Call event, and with a bag of 48 Museum Miniatures Chinese crossbowmen bought second hand from a clubmate burning a hole in the lead pile I decided to have a go at cooking up some double-based  crossbow/swordsman units for a variety of my Chinese armies.

Here are the Warring States/Han versions:

What I've done here is glue together 2 bases worth of Essex Medium Foot Warring States halberdiers, originally on 40x20's but now on a single 40x40 base.

I've then "dug out" the halberdiers from the base at the back, and replaced them by dropping Museum crossbowmen into the "pits" in the rear base that the Essex halberdiers have been dug out of. 

The Essex halberdiers have exceptionally tiny bases, so it's not that tricky to dig out new "pits" in amongst the existing 3 halberdiers on the front base and drop in (well, glue in) the other 3 guys into a new, denser front rank. 

These halberdiers were painted some years ago now, so I had to mix up a paint to sort of match them as I couldn't find (or remember) the originals.

The newly settled-in figures are then bedded in with a few more dabs of the woodfiller I use for basing, as well as doing the same for the join between the 2 original bases.

Wood Glue on cardboard and wood filler if very, very strong, but for added insurance to make sure the 2 bases stick together I shave off the magnabase from the bottom of each one, spin it through 90 degrees and then glue it back onto the base. This poor unit has some particularly skanky offcuts of magnabase for some reason, but at least you can see that it is at right angles to the bases.

 And Voila (if that's what they say in China) - a tidy little mixed unit, with a wall of spearmen at the front and some rear rank crossbows as well.

The basing isn't as perfect as doing it from scratch I freely admit - but it does save time and work and basing material in totally rebasing everything.

These are WiP shots showing the unpainted guys being dropped in the back rank. 

Sometimes you need to tidy up the extra basing material - see the feet of the chap at thee front 

The Museum Miniatures guys are a little taller, but you can't see it unless you are looking for it. Their bases are also a lot bigger than the Essex guys, so I did cut them down a bit with pliers to fit them in. 

 And this is what the Halberdiers look like on their own.

No More Turkey - it's time for Chinese!

Appearing shortly after the festive break, the perfect antidote to too much turkey, stuffing and the inevitable but somehow unwanted cheese course are these FIVE battle reports from Warfare 2016, featuring a Spring and Autumn Chinese army in brutal combat against a range of Biblical-era foes...

Watch in amazement as an order of L'Art de la Guerre appears on the table in Reading for the very first time, and a long-unused biblical era chariot force is taken out of the deep freeze to rumble across the battlefield and poke it's chopsticks at the enemy from close range.

The Chinese take on the Babylonians, Assyrians, Omanis, Carthaginians and the always difficult to spell Aechemenid Persians in 5 brutal tabletop conflicts, all of which have been certified MSG-free, (but which may contain nuts).

The reports are then wrapped up in lettuce leaves and dipped in some classical analysis from Hannibal to counteract the Communist speechifying and propaganda of the Chinese General... so dig in, as you know you'll want some more in half an hour anyway.