Achilles & The Myrmidions in 15mm

 Having been reasonably succesful with a Mycenean army at Warfare in 2022, and then getting my hands on a proper Trojan Horse at the Alicante event some months later I am now of course tempted to wheel out the Myceneans again at a future event.

At Warfare one of the star units in my army was Achilles and his Myrmidions - but to be honest the figures were not especially "Myrmidion", being mostly these old-style Museum swordsmen sculpts with fairly generic shields.

 So, when Museum came out with a range of Myrmidions, and also Trojan hero figures in their new Z-Sculpts that suddenly seemed like a must-have addition to give me two new units of spiffy Myrmidions with very obvious Included Generals (aka Achilles) leading one of them. 

And here they are - most of the Heroes of the Trojan Age are clustered on the stand on the left, with standard Myrmidions on the right. 

The Heroes are slightly, but noticably bigger than the normal rather slim Myrmidions, and all have unique poses and equipment.

This front-on shot shows the size difference clearly. 

They are nice figures, but I did find them harder to paint than I had hoped as the detail on the figures is really very shallow, which makes spotting which areas to paint, and painting with washes and speedpaints much harder than it really should be.  

There are also some hard to understand elements in the design, especially the "woolly hats" which seem to have horns projecting though them - which to my mind would surely sit better on a metal helmet? 

Perhaps though I've not done enough research and the Myceneans actually had tea cosies over their helmets? 

Here they are from the rear - you can see where I have had to use layered shading to get some texture into the clothing as the figures didn't really do much for the Holy White ArmyPainter speedpaint on their own. 

So, all in all I think they have come out OK - but perhaps not as well as I initially hoped, partly as the detail on the figures isn't as deep as I would ideally have liked, and partly as I found that lack of detail frustrating and as such maybe didn't try as hard as I needed to to adopt the right painting approach for these guys. 

Having painted up a fair few of the Museum Z Sculpts in the last few years I am actually starting to look more critically at them in general, as my experience with these figures is starting to feel like a common thread across all of the others I've painted before now as well. 

Museums Z Ranges look great in the renders, they are nice poses, there's a whole lot to like about them, the price is good, the metal they use has a great pewter-like good quality too - but with so many of us increasingly relying on washes, Contrast and Speed paints to paint our figures, deeper slightly exaggerated details such as those seen on Xyston, or Forged in Battles' ranges are much easier to paint. Their deep details really do come up a treat - whereas some of the details on these Museum Z Sculpts almost seems to disappear even with just an undercoat. 

If only the raised details and undercuts on the figures could just somehow be (I guess digitally?) "dialled up" a little, and perhaps some of the spears thickened too then the Z Range would be as good after people like me have finished painting them as they look in the 3D renders on the Museum site ! 

A Printed Wooden Horse

 At the recent ADLG competition in Alicante, all competitors received a free gift of a 3D-printed Trojan Horse (following on from the little fort given out last year).

Having used a Mycenean army only a few months ago at Warfare, such an accessory was very welcome and so I've managed to give it a very quick paint job and base it up on a 40x80mm ADLG baggage base. 

  And here it is - in the first picture shown next to a base of Museum "pre-Z" Mycenean warriors in Dendra armour, and in the second shown next to the mess on my painting desk. 

A few grass tufts and it'll be ready to take the field next time I use the Myceneans.

Homeric Poetry in Linear Motion - Warfare 2022

 After freezing our nads off at the Ascot racecourse last year, the 2022 edition of Warfare turned up the heating significantly with a trip to the desert in a Biblical-themed competition at the all-new Farnborough venue. 

That meant the Linear B tactics of an improved and enhanced Mycenean army got to have a run out in five games of L'Art de la Guerre, all laced with dreadful poetry, terribly inappropriate speech-bubble captions, almost no tactics and even a smattering of your best quality American Ska-Punk in a series of reports punningly now known as Homer's The Silly-iad.

Rounding out (literally) the Myceneans

After a quiet few weeks on the website here's a couple of bits and pieces to round out the Mycenean army that appeared a few months ago

First up is the near-obligatory 25/8mm Genius Commander on a 40mm round ADLG commander base.

He is from Redoubt Enterprises Trojan Wars range, selected as much for his big cowhide double-bass shield as any other reason.

The figure is code TX4, representing Achilles, hero and leader of the Myrmidons on foot in bronze armour with bronze helmet, figure of eight shield

He comes accompanied by shield bearer (who didn't make it onto the base).

Next up are some "Barker Marker" 40x40 bases, featuring 'shrunken' photos of my own chariots taken from directly overhead together with a push-pin handle.  Very simple do to - an overhead photo of a chariot, cropped and resized to fit on a 40x40 MDF base.
 

They function primarily as a ZOC marker, but also as you can see here my Chariots are deeper than the regulation 40x40 and so there may be times when it could be useful to have a 40x40 substitute base to drop in, perhaps when they are turning or in a congested part of the table where the extra 10mm on their bases would get in the way. These markers fulfil that role - and also act as Ambush Markers too for 3 uses from one base.

Finally, some Mycenean-specific hit markers using - again - the textbook cowhide shields.

There are from Magister Militum - £2 for 8.  They also have other shields, and my upcoming Assyrian army will probably feature a similar idea. 

Mounted on 18mm round bases, with the edges colour-coded for the number of hits they are small enough to fit in behind each unit without being too distracting.   Since doing these it's been suggested to me that possibly doing a similar thing with single archer figures could be a neat way of identifying the units with integral archer support.

The Myceneans are done..

Only 6 months after buying them in the Museum Miniatures January sale (for only around £50) a full L'Art de la Guerre army of Myceneans (including units I will probably never use) is now finished and on the tabletop already!

There are plenty of pictures and also a video (of the pictures) on Madaxeman.com right now

This lot fits on an A4 sized piece of paper - not bad for a full army !

Myceneans

I bought a Mycenean (and Assyrian) army earlier this year in the Museum Miniatures sale (25% off every January!), and after spraying most of them in a flesh-coloured undercoat I finally got round to doing a couple of test bases to see how the planned colour scheme works out. 

With flesh undercoat they are very quick to paint - so they could all be on the table very soon.

I'm a big fan of Museum for the Biblical period, as the slightly over-stylized look and limited number of poses seems to work really well in this theme.