Yet more Xyston Persians - this time some cavalry

 As part of the same purchase as the Xyston Persin Bowmen, I also picked up some PSC rubbery Persian cavalry. 

I'd actually not checked the packdetails properly, and thought they were a mixed set but it turns out there were half a dozen armoured cavalry and half a dozen unarmoured horse archer types. I already have a couple of units of the armoured cavalry which I use as the Satrapal Guard, so - so instead of cooking up two different formations I intermingled the riders a little to make a rather more random mix of shooting and spear-using figures in different levels of armour. 

As usual with Contrasts, they have come out pretty brightly - even if my painting on these has been somewhat sloppier than for some recent projects given that they will appear infrequently as part of an all-cavalry Persian army composition. 

I have a lot of these units already from Xyston, and so I wanted this lot to have a colour palette that will allow me to differentiate them from the others so they can be used as part of a coherent command. This led to these guys having a lot of oranges, reds and yellows in the mix without being "uniformed" in any way. 

 For a bit of a bish bash bosh job I'm actually quite pleased with how they have turned out. 

Xyston Persian Bowmen

 Being unable to resist a bargain, I picked up these Xyston bowmen in a tabletop sale at the recent 1-day ADLG event in Reading.   

They are from the time when PSC were re-casting Xyston figures in Siocast rubbery resin (an experiment which by all accounts seems to have now run its course FWIW).

I reckon that Persians and other "Eastern" armies are perfect to get the best out of Contrast Paints, and these chaps have certainly come out pretty well both in terms of the vibrant "silk-like" colours and also with how the paint has flowed into the deep lines cast into the design of the figures 

Its most noticable from the back, where the leather armour comes up a real treat with a coat of Aggaros Dunes on a white undercoat base layer

With ADLG units being 6/base, this set of 16 also allowed me to eke out two units of light foot archers too

Looking at the army list I'm now not entirely sure where these guys will fit in, but I believe that some of the Successor armies get the odd Persian peasant archer unit too so I'm sure they will make an appearance some day. 

Lots of big moustaches!

My existing Persian infantry are Museum Z-Sculpts, which look great when ranked up in a dense formation but actually don't really stand up especially well when compared directly to the equivalent Xyston sculpts one-to-one

The Museum chaps are at the front, and are noticably slighter in build

More significantly however, the level of detail on the Museum castings is far shallower than on the Xyston sculpts, such that after even a thin layer of sprayed-on white base coat the detail on the Museum figures struggles to take the Contrast paints - whereas the exaggerated depths of the Xyston figures really allow this style of painting to "ping" 

It's not terminal - I'll still happily mix these in the same army, and same unit as well - but it is a reminder that different styles of sculpting work better with different paint techniques.

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!!)

Persians at the Tagus : ADLG in Lisbon

 Lisbon, and the Lusitania Challenge - a 4 person team event held in the Military Museum in Portugal's capital on the banks of the Tagus which I'd last been to all the way back in 2012.

In recent years the Lusitania Challenge has been reinvented and reinvigorated by the adoption of L'Art de la Guerre as its Ancient ruleset of choice, putting the event firmly on the map of the pan-European ADLG event circuit. 

This time around a staggering 24 teams (96 players) had assembled in the gun-infested bowels of the Lisbon Military Museum to do tabletop ancients battle together (and, also, eat sardines from tins as often as possible).

In terms of the actual gaming this was a competition with 4 players in each team, each playing a themed period roughly analogous to the 4 classic DBM Army List Books - and I was in Period 2, Roman & Classical. having decided that this prestigious international event was the ideal opportunity to put on table the wheeled Persian Archery Towers for the first time in competitive action as part of an Achaemenid army.

The general theory of the army was to use a combination of infantry archers (Sparabara and Immortals) together with good quality Satrapal and Guard cavalry on each wing to overwhelm any opponents mounted troops, and use the Archery Towers, some low-grade mercenary spearmen and a small force of mostly light horse in the centre to block and distract the enemy's capital troops and keep them from reinforcing what I hoped would be their by-then heavily embattled wings.

Over the course of 5 games and 2 days the Persians took on the Sassanid Empire, two lots of Early Imperial Romans, an Alexandrian Macedonian army and then ventured Eastwards to fight the Classical Indians, giving a wide range of opposing armies and troop types for the Achaemenid plan to be tested against. 

All 5 battle reports are now available on the Madaxeman website, complete with the usual mix of irrelevant captions, post-game analysis and insults from Hannibal, in-detail reporting of our culinary  and beverage related exploits in and around Lisbon, and links to how I cooked up the wallpaper for the towers and the pavises of the Persian army.

Read the 5 reports and the culinary analysis here 

Museum Z-Sculpt Persian Sparabara and Immortals

 With the Cyrus' Mobile Tower having languished in the drawer since before Xmas last year, and with plenty of cavalry and ancilliary troops all done, finally the Early Persian army gets the core of it's troops - the Immortals and Sparabara:

For these guys I have managed to fit between 12-14 figures on each 40x40mm ADLG infantry unit base, leaving a gap at the front as well so the rear ranks are really crowded with archers 

I also followed up on my numerous "wallpaper" experiments with wallpapering the pavises of the Sparabara to make them more colourful and personalised - as usual just ssearching for "Persian Patterns" on Pinterest and Google 

My theory was that no-one really knows what they looked like, so why wouldn't they go personalised on the designs?

From the rear you can really see how they have been crammed in, using a variety of the Museum poses and equipment sets

There are cuirasses, petruges, no armour at all, helmets, hoods, all sorts really... 

I needed two bases to act as Immortals, and dithered about with how to represent them, finally chooing a unique, pointed-top spara and a common, 'posh-looking' design - after I stumbled on the design online.

I also added the standard bearers and musicians to the bases to make them even more obvious from the back as well

Each of the units has someone poking through the wall of pavises - these have a kneeling archer and a officer bloke with a small axe checking that the coast is clear

From the back you can see the real mix of Contrast and normal paints I used, as well as some of the very basic "spots and lines" patterns - with the figures this densely packed it is all about the mass effect, even though many of the patterns are not ones that would stand up to independent scrutiny! 

 

The cuirass-wearers were done with white undercoat, a wash with Skeleton Contrast, then the blocks of armour and petruges painted in Ivory.  

It's all about the figure density

The second tranche of 'normal' Sparabara

Another spotty mass of humanity. 

Hopefully this is the view I will see most often! 

Here are some of them with Cyrus' 10mm Pendraken Siege Tower 

And all in a row

And, all the colours from the back!