Roll Call 2024 - The Hittites and their opponents

 This weekend I took part in the 15mm L'Art de la Guerre competition at Roll Call, finishing in a creditable 7th place with a Hittite army which was salvaged from the last knockings of Clive McLeods' collection. 

The army was painted pretty well originally, but had suffered a LOT of battle damage so the end result I think was somewhat of a demonstration of the power of repairing and especially rebasing. More of them can be seen here on this site in an article from a few years ago.  

Over the weekend I played against:

• New Kingdom Egyptians (won)
• Assyrian & Sargonid (won)
• North American Forest Indians (mutual break)
• Mayans (mutual break)
• Achaemenid Persians (narrow loss)

and all the army lists are posted on the ADLG Wiki, so just follow the links to see them there.

My Hittite list was rather driven by what figures I had ended up with, and was:

Strategist

3 Hittite Guard Chariots Heavy Chariot Impact Elite

1 Syro-Canannite Chariot Light Chariot Armour Bow ------

1 Hittite Warriors Medium Spearmen ------

1 Guardsmen Medium Spearmen Elite

1 Archers Bowmen Mediocre

1 Syro-Canaanite & Bedouin Light Infantry Javelin ----

==

Competent Unreliable

1 Hittite Guard Chariots Heavy Chariot Impact Elite

2 Ugarit Chariots Heavy Chariot impetuous ------

2 Hittite Warriors Medium Spearmen ------

1 Slingers Light Infantry Sling ----

1 Bowmen Bowmen Mediocre

1 Levy Levy ------

==

Competent

1 Scout Light Cavalry Bow Mediocre

3 Gasgans Medium Swordsmen Impetuous ------

1 Hittite Warriors Medium Swordsmen ------

1 Syro-Canannite Chariot Light Chariot Armour Javelin ------

1 Syro-Canannite Chariot Light Chariot Armour Bow ----

1 Syro-Canaanite & Bedouin Light Infantry Javelin ----

This list worked essentially an HCh delivery system, with support from the Light Chariots (ie HCv with wheels). 

My theory was that 3 Gasgans are as good as anything else they are likely to come across in terrain in a Biblical period so they would at worst always manage to fight their opponents to a standstill while the Chariots got into contact, and on occasions they would also be able to scare the bejeezus out of any mixed spear or mixed swordsmen they might hunt down and find. 

The Mediocre Bow are cheap and always sat between the 2 Spearmen in each command, keeping any enemy mounted honest with the whole mini block acting as flank guards for each set of Chariots, and doing a bit of long range shooting too in the meantime. 

Medium Spear are a fairly rare troop type usually, but they are decent enough in a Biblical period at standing up to most things, especially the Elite Guard unit. Standing to receive they even have half a chance against Heavy Chariots with Impact, and they widen the two blocks of Chariots considerably for anything facing them. 

I used the Armoured LCh to support the archers shooting, go into any MF alongside the Heavy Chariots, and I found in conjunction with the Gascans the 2 LCh in that command could often charge enemy infantry shooters who had been careful to stay just out of range of the Gasgan infantrymen but had missed the Chariots as a result. 

I was always prepared to commit the troops at evens or sometimes worse odds to pin an enemy in place so the Chariot strike force had enough time to arrive. With only 4 skirmishers in an army of 24, there is more staying power than it looks.

There was no real logic behind not having the Strategist with at one of the groups of Impetuous troops, bit was just a list I had cobbled together a couple of years ago to use these figures at the club a few times to give clubmates Biblical practice games - and as it had seemed to do OK, I hadn't really looked at it properly before submitting it. 

However in all honesty the Ugarit Chariots always wanted to go down the middle and were happy to charge anything anyway, and the MF Gasgans often found they were not Impetuous due to the presence of enemy mounted, so it didn't seem to matter much - and having extra pips for the Strategist command meant it could really motor across the table in wide flanking moves if needed. 

There won't be any reports from this one however - I have a lot of stuff in the hopper right now and I didn't think I could do this one justice so I only took a couple of photos... which are in this post. 

(and when I say I "nearly" beat the Persians, this is what I mean - the only time I've ever seen an army squeeze itself into such a tight space before this has been when their general has been packing them up  into the biscuit tin to take them home at  the end of an event!!)

Line Up, Line Up.. for some Egypto-Greek ADLG action at the Seaside!

The second full set of post-Lockdown match reports hit the South Coast this time in 5 games of Egypto-Greek linear nonsense as a lockdown-repainted set of Hoplites meets some lockdown-rebased Egyptians to cobble together a podcast-busting Saitic Egyptian army to take on all comers in a Greek & Roman World themed event.

Marvel as possibly the most one-dimensional army to hit the table in years attempts to outfox, out play but much more often simply outlast its varied opponents as they take on the Graeco-Indians, Seleucids, Late Romans, Ch'in Chinese and Classical Indians in these 5 ADLG match reports.

As usual they feature all of the nonsense you have by now grown to expect, including comments on local wildlife, restaurant reviews, beer analysis, very bad puns, randomly generated Egyptian curses, priapic wooden war wagons, a smattering of Greek and Egypto-Arabic swearwords and buckets of pictures with somewhat inappropriate captions and speech bubbles.

The reports are online and available to peruse now ! 

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!) 

A Flurry of Podcasts

Over the last couple of weeks I've been busy chatting online with some of my CLWC cubmates, and the result is a positive flurry of podcasts which are all now available on Podbean, on iTunes and now also on Spotify to be background chatter to yoru weekend of painting. 

First up is a one-off special ADLG 'cast looking at some of the ways to design a New Kingdom Egyptian army list to get the best out of this historically popular, but hard to run army. The 'pod had input from Richard Case, who's previous podcast on the Sassanid Persian army proved very popular.  This podcast is also available to watch and listen to on YouTube with some pictures of NKE figures and match report photos as well.

There are also now two special bonus episodes of the Madaxeman Podcast online, each addressing a very specific topics. The first bonus episode on the vexed subject of how to choose a paintbrush (and how much to spend on it) has been out for a week or so already and has been downloaded almost 100 times so far. A follow-up episode in which the subject of different types of Glue is discussed was also released earlier this week.

Finally, just in time for your weekend of painting the 8th "Lockdown Special" has been released today covering a broad range of important yet strangely rarely discussed topics such as what colour should rigging be on a 1/240th scale 19th Century Ironclad, do Gnomes still have a place in modern warfare, can a camel get a tan if it stands out in the desert too long, is the Austrian army a painters dream or simply a signifier of laziness, if a Grenzer joined the cast of Eastenders would he become a Geezer, is it still legal to resist buying 10mm Napoleonics and does getting your children to paint Perry plastics fall under the remit of the Modern Day Slavery act?

There is also a phenomenally long discussion on how to assemble and use Hannibals Carthaginian army under ADLG (and instructions on how to skip over it if you're not interested in ADLG list building), and a new feature on what games we have actually played in the last week. Oh, and Andy's Quiz returns - cue the music!  

These and all previous episodes are now available on Podbean, on iTunes and now also on Spotify

What's for Desert? The Egyptians @ Campaign 2019

The Campaign team event has become a bit of a regular feature on the ADLG circuit, and this year I ended up driving a newly-rebased and refurbished New Kingdom Egyptian army in a tightly themed competition against 6 other extremely similar armies.

The Egyptians fought Bedouin Camels! 

They fought an artistically licensed army of Egyptian Undead ! 

And, most of all, they fought Egyptian Civil Wars

These 6 match reports chronicle the complete biblically epic weekend for the NKE, in a widescreen spectacular that only the presence of Charlton Heston could possibly improve!