Devizes 2024 - the Battle Reports !

In a truly surprising development, 4 "traditional format" read-along battle reports are now available for anyone who wishes to follow the varied exploits of a deeply smelly and unwashed Ilkhanid Mongol army in stunning hyper-colour  and (mostly) 28mm plastic, as they take on the Samurai, the Ghaznavids, the Burmese and finally the Mongols of Timur the Lame down in the heart of the West Country at Attack! 2024's ADLG competition.

Thrill as the Armenian-supported Ilkhanids send waves of fragrant dancing cavalry, eager unwashed knights and reluctant yet deeply sweaty spearmen out to fight a variety of almost equally colourful foes, including Mighty Shrew Elephants dressed in patchwork duvets ...

 

..bare-chested Burmese jungle dwelling tribesmen who can wiggle all of their toes independently, and...

.. the "I can't believe it's not Seleucid" Elephant Corps of Tamerland the Great and his horde of partly undead warriors and cannon fodder. 

Yes, this is a possibly welcome (YVMV) return to the old-school of battle report blogging, with rubbish captions, a probably unhealthy focus on the Mongol's poor personal hygenine, ridiculously OTT descriptive sentence structures, and the musings of both the Ilkhanid Khan and (of course) Nasty Hannibal himself  to reconsider all of the action at the end of each game. 

These battle reports are accompanied by the "Melksham, Don't Mind if I do!" edition of the Madaxeman (Video) Podcast.

 

28mm Cataphracts for the Successor project

 The Successor army moves on apace, with the latest addition being 3 units of Cataphracts, making the later version of the Seleucids an option to use at a future event. 

I already have some Gripping Beast fully armoured horse troops, which I painted up as Arab Ghilmen cavalry quite some time ago - however those figures were very wide, with the horse armour making it impossible to do the "wargames-standard" 4 figures to a base.  

It was therefore with some trepidation that I picked up a box of GB's new Roman Cataphracts, only to be pleasantly surprised to find that they appear to have thinned-down the horses so it is almost - with caveats - possible to squeeze 4 of them together on a standard DBx-style 60mm wide base. 

This feat of engineering was achieved with a bit of careful arrangement, slightly deeper than usual (50mm) bases, and some judicious use of the sprue clipper to remove any lower legs that were keeping the horses in the middle of each block too far apart.

It's surprisingly hard to notice the missing legs in this solid mass of metal.

Where I had cut the legs too high up the thigh, I also filled in some of the gaps with wood filler, painted it black and then drybrushed it to match the rest of the guys - which made an already hard to spot thing even harder. 

This happy chap is yet to find a suitable shield transfer to go onto his standard. I have a feeling I may end up buying a sheet of white 25mm Successor shield "stars" from Veni Vidi Vici just to drop one on this standard (so if anyone has a spare please let me know!). 

If you look really closely you can see that the standard bearer's demeanour appears not to be adversely impacted by the loss of one of his legs just above the knee, which is rather reminiscent of the legendary Peter Cook & Dudley Moore "Tarzan Audition" sketch!

I also used a lot of head swaps from the bits box for these - leaving the "Roman" heads out and adding in very "Greek" ones from Phalangites, Hoplites and Companion cavalry to emphasise their Greekness. 

The second rate unit will be this one in bronze - the painting is a simple black spray base coat and drybrish with Vallejo Weapon Bronze, with the spears and faces undercoated in white before painting the colurs onto them. 

The spears have a barbership sort of effect which is enhanced considerably IMO by the fairly simple addition of extra "rings" that break up the blocks of colour. 

These are a dark brown initial ring around the lance, with a ring of ochre brown then painted inside it. 

This breaks up the bit between the blocks of colour nicely, and also gives you a bit of leeway to even up the lengths of the blocks of colour when you've painted them by painting the dark brown ring over a bit more of one colour or the other in each case ! 

There is also a barely-visible coloured bit of cloth at the bottom of the horse armour - this too adds some subtle hinits of colour to the units

The final bit was to do some colour on the joiny-bit at the back of the horse armour (which may just be there ot hide the join line in the two halves of the horse !).  

This also adds more subtle colour on what is an otherwise potentially rather one-tone figure.

So, 1 dozen cataphracts, all of which actually fit together in a solid block on 60mm frontages, and all for a very decent price too!

 

Here's those Arabs... for the last time (for a while)

 Yep, finally the mega-project is done and dusted. Or, matt varnished more accurately. 

That means an "all options" ADLG Generic Arab Dynasties army in 25/8mm plastic and metal is now ready to be used, whenever that may be. 

Here are the final set of full-army photos;

There are plenty more photos of the individual figures on the following pages on Madaxeman.com:

• The Black Guard
• Lots of infantry 
• WiP on Contrast Paints
• All The Cavalry - Part 1
• All the Cavalry - Part 2
• All the Infantry 

 

Arab Infantry... the Spearmen Arrive

 That project that's "nearly" done... we all have one, and mine is the interminable Arab 28mm army which continued to threaten to last into next year. 

The latest non-self-inflicted delay is an inability to get outside to do some matt varnishing, so I've just taken some photos anyway of the infantry who are waiting on a bit of Testors and thrown them online with pics of all the other infantry I've done so far. 

Artizan Designs commanders with mandatory LBMS flag

Mostly Perry Spearmen

More eclectic spearmen (GB, Footsore, Perry, possibly even BTD ?)

Serious contrast paint action !

Mostly Perry

There is a more complete set of photos - and some video - of these and the other infantry already finished online on the website.

Some more stuff from the painting queue

With the Arab Infantry currently proving to be too much of a task to get started on finishing right now I've been diverted by some small-scale painting tasks that had been hanging around for a while waiting to force their way intro the queue. 

I also bought a small turntable from eBay (affiliate link to eBay here), which shipped from China incredibly quickly and (after getting 3 rechargeable batteries) seems to be working fine and gives a different option for showing off figures when I'm taking photos with my lightbox. 

The end result is this eclectic collection of models and videos :

1/300th T55's from Butlers Printed Models

Dr Andrei Sokolov - a Special Edition Malifaux figure

"New" Victrix 1/144th scale Sherman 

15mm Essex Sparabara, rebased and refurbished a little. 

I've got too many bases of these for what I need to field the army in ADLG, so I decided to rebase in an effort to pack the rear ranks with a lot more archers than the usual 3 or 4 in a "second rank" to give a more "biblical horde" effect.

You may also remember these Perry plastic Afghan warriors being made up a while ago - well, they are now painted and make absolutely fantastic Arabs !

The shield design at the front is a waterslide transfer made from a downloaded image of a real Indian shield in a museum somewhere!

These are the Kings of Kitbash - Fireforge Mongols, Perry Afghans and Wargames Atlantic Persians with some Fireforge Russian heads and a few Gripping Beast Arab bits as well.

I've ended up using the large pavise-like shields to give me a few bases of mixed spear/bow Arab troops for the handful of armies that have these formations. 

A very colourful bunch in their contrast paints!

And, to wrap up, a few more videos of the 28mm Arabs, including the second elephant from Gripping Beast in all it's glory