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In this rather large batch of cavalry you will already have spotted a bit of mix-and-match going on in order to make up various types of lance and bow armed horsemen.
That process, of maxing out the "cavalry", did still leave me with a handful of spare figures to create some actual "light cavalry" - with any shortfall I may need in army design terms being made up by repurposing some of my old Essex Late Roman horse archers if required.
So, here are the dregs, sorry, the Light Horse Skirmishers and Scouts for the Byzantines!
One of the bonuses of ADLG (or indeed any DBX set) is not having to paint up "units" of lots of identical figures, and so I have gone with 3 different uniforms for these chaps to allow them to be clearly identified as beelonging to different commands on-table.
There are various figures from WE-BE05 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Hyperkerastai (Bow), again using the same paints as in the first post in this set of 6.
Hopefully these photos, and my witterings about painting them have been of use - if you want to look at more Byzantines these, and many other photos of other ranges, can be browsed in the 15mm Gallery on the Madaxeman website.
With teeny-tiny shields, and then slightly larger shields having been ticked off, its now time for the larger almost-Roman-era shields to appear in this ongoing series of Forged in Battle Byzantine cavalry.
The lance-armed amongst the following chaps are from WE-BE03 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Kavallarioi Lancers, with paints etc being done as per the information in the first post in this sequence.
FiB tend to include more riders than horses in their packs, so typically you get 12 horses but 2-3 extra riders, in the shape of officer / commander types. This means a lot of included commanders !
This shield has come out pretty well IMO - it is a flat white base coat with Yanden Yellow sloshed all over it, and a red rim applied in real paint - possibly Vallejo Scarlet? The fairly half-hearted shield design was done using a red AK paint pen
The archers are from WE-BE04 Early Byzantine (Justinian) - Kavallarioi Bow
Pretty much all of the shield "patterns" were done with the AK paint pens - worth noting how well and how clearly the yellow design on a red background at the back left of this formation (as you look at them) has some out, as often yellows do fare away on a darker background.
The final trache of cavalry from this painting batch is up in a few days time.
The video is pretty straightforward (OK, "basic") and takes you stepwise through a set of simple techniques for quickly and effectively rebasing 15mm (or any scale really) figures that would work for any change from one ruleset to another.
Rebasing can often seem such a huge PITA that any ruleset that requires rebasing is instantly discarded, but I've now come to accept that it can be necessary, isn't that painful to do, and does actually leave me with better looking bases than the ones I was making 20-odd (or more!) years ago.
If you are baulking at the thought of rebasing troops for ADLG-R then hopefully this video will give you some confidence that it's not a life-threatening operation, and instead can be done quickly and easily to generate good end results.
And let's face it, these single units on 80mm x 40mm bases look really cool, and if you are honest with yourself you already have far too many 15mm Renaissance Pike and Shot based for other systems, so changing just a handful of 'other system' units will give you the half-dozen or so Pike & Shotte units you will need to play pretty much any nationality in ADLG-R (if you slot different flags onto the pikes)
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!
A few years ago (2019 to be exact) I won an unpainted army in a raffle at the L'Art de la Guerre Worlds in Rome. The figures were from Italian manufacturer Strategia Nova, and the prize was actually an Arab army, however as I have Arab figures in abundance I asked the guy who'd provided them if I could swap for a different army.
And, of the ones he had, the Slave Revolt army of Spartacus looked like the best bet!
