War & Empire Sassanid cataphracts

As well as picking up some Numidians at Britcon from West Wind's war & Empire range I also added a set of 12 of their Sassanid cataphracts to my collection.

OK, I do have lots of cataphracts already, but none which were overtly Sassanid - so a blister pack of a dozen seemed like a good chance to add 3 units to my mostly Legio Heroica ADLG army, and to get some size comparison photos of the W&E cavalry as well.

Here are the full dozen from the blister pack. The pack has (well, mine did have) more riders than horses, with a few officers and standard bearers to include if you want - which of course I chose to do.

Cataphracts are a decent host for a Sub General in ADLG, so the standard and sword-waving chaps in the middle may well be an embedded Sub General with some regularity.

Here are 8 of the W&E guys, with a textbook Essex cataphract unit in the middle of the line.

The proportions are a tad different, with the Essex ones looking bulkier and having stumpier horses but bigger bodies for the men, but they are basically the same height at the end of the day.

This shot has the Legio Heroica Sassanid Asarvan cavalry in the line. Again, not a great match in terms of stature but a decent one in terms of overall height.

The W&E Cataphracts are from their first range of releases, which seem to have fairly slight and short cavalry riders so perhaps later ranges will be a bit chunkier.

Here's the General and standard bearer. I wanted a fairly colourful mix of figures with different types of barding to match the look and feel of my existing Asarvan.

From the rear you can also see they have a fair selection of cloaks, allowing a more irregular look as well.

The size comparison shots for the Numidian foot can be seen here

Improving Some (rather) Old Pikemen

My Classical pikemen date back many years, and are some speed-painted Minifigs figures designed to be shoved together in multiple ranks and viewed from a distance..

Rebasing them from DBx to 40x40mm ADLG bases has given me a chance to tart some of them up a little however.

This has seen some given more colourful uniforms and boldly-painted shields - and others given Veni Vidi Vici shield transfers.

They can all be seen in more detail here

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.

Saga - > ADLG, the Light Foot Sabot Basing Trick

With a mostly-plastic Gripping Beast 25mm Arab army in the planning phases, I've been toying with what to do with my 25mm Saga Arab army.

After dithering about rebasing them all into an ADLG force, the new edition of Saga persuaded me to keep them as a Saga army and duplicate quite a few of the figures for the new ADLG army - after all, plastic figures are pretty cheap and paint up easily too.

But, even so, having so many duplicates is still a little irritation, so I have been casting around for some 60x30mm sabot bases to at least get dual-use out of some of the "based on a new, magentizable 2p piece" Saga figures to use them as Light Foot in ADLG as well.

After emailing Warbases they pointed me to the ideal thing, a "2x1 Regiment Tray (2p)" which was hidden away on their site and listed without dimensions (erm...why do that for rectangular bases?)

And here they are, together with Rare Earth magnets (the bases come with pre-drilled holes for them) to hold the figures in place, and some sand/wood stain/drybrush & static grass to match the rest of my basing scheme.

These are the rather wonderful Perry Miniatures metal Naffatun figures (much nicer than the GB or Footsore ones I think, but they do come in a 6-pack which is quite a few more than you need..)

You can see just how strong the rare earth magnet is, as I'm able to hold them up by just one figure (but shaking them around is probably out...). For plastic figures like the GB bowmen and javelin-armed infantry I will use for other Arab Light Foot they will be even better.

Having ordered these I'm now considering whether a similar 60mm x 60mm base would work for holding 4 infantry as a "Javelinmen" unit in ADLG - perhaps I should have thought of that sooner and saved on postage!

15mm Han Mixed Units for L'Art de la Guerre

With Han Chinese coming out as the most popular army for the 15mm L'Art de la Guerre competition at the upcoming Roll Call event, and with a bag of 48 Museum Miniatures Chinese crossbowmen bought second hand from a clubmate burning a hole in the lead pile I decided to have a go at cooking up some double-based  crossbow/swordsman units for a variety of my Chinese armies.

Here are the Warring States/Han versions:

What I've done here is glue together 2 bases worth of Essex Medium Foot Warring States halberdiers, originally on 40x20's but now on a single 40x40 base.

I've then "dug out" the halberdiers from the base at the back, and replaced them by dropping Museum crossbowmen into the "pits" in the rear base that the Essex halberdiers have been dug out of. 

The Essex halberdiers have exceptionally tiny bases, so it's not that tricky to dig out new "pits" in amongst the existing 3 halberdiers on the front base and drop in (well, glue in) the other 3 guys into a new, denser front rank. 

These halberdiers were painted some years ago now, so I had to mix up a paint to sort of match them as I couldn't find (or remember) the originals.

The newly settled-in figures are then bedded in with a few more dabs of the woodfiller I use for basing, as well as doing the same for the join between the 2 original bases.

Wood Glue on cardboard and wood filler if very, very strong, but for added insurance to make sure the 2 bases stick together I shave off the magnabase from the bottom of each one, spin it through 90 degrees and then glue it back onto the base. This poor unit has some particularly skanky offcuts of magnabase for some reason, but at least you can see that it is at right angles to the bases.

 And Voila (if that's what they say in China) - a tidy little mixed unit, with a wall of spearmen at the front and some rear rank crossbows as well.

The basing isn't as perfect as doing it from scratch I freely admit - but it does save time and work and basing material in totally rebasing everything.

These are WiP shots showing the unpainted guys being dropped in the back rank. 

Sometimes you need to tidy up the extra basing material - see the feet of the chap at thee front 

The Museum Miniatures guys are a little taller, but you can't see it unless you are looking for it. Their bases are also a lot bigger than the Essex guys, so I did cut them down a bit with pliers to fit them in. 

 And this is what the Halberdiers look like on their own.

15mm Indian allied contingent for ADLG

Having flirted with the idea of actually using my Classical Era Greek Successor States armies on many occasions, and now discovering that the Indians (in their Kushan incarnation) also work well with the Sassanids I decided to refurbish a Classical Indian allied contingent.

These are troops who had been languishing in a drawer for many years, so they were delighted to be brought out into the light and converted into L'Art de la Guerre DBE double based elements to make up an allied contingent with essentially all of the useful options.

You can see the finished collection here

The Sassanids are almost here..!

A Bank holiday weekend and a mixed forecast meant I accelerated the basing and finishing of the Sassanid ADLG army in order to take advantage of the warm dry weather for dullcote-ing the troops.

Normally I like to add the static grass before matt varnishing, but in this case the weather was just too good to miss, so here are the "before" and "after" dullcote shots for your delectation.

 The whole lot...

Essex Ghaznavid infantry stand in - as I am sure they do for many wargamers - as Dailami infantry. I have added a couple of random arab-looking archers to the 40x40 base so they can have integral support (a nice-to-have in ADLG if you have spare points).

 The Legio Heroica infantry command with Irregular mounted command. The shield ended up a bit 'FC Barcelona', but that's still pretty cool, right?

 The Donnington elephants tower over the rest of the men

Very simple sun-themed banners. No LBMS transfers for me today, more's the pity!

I have used some new colour palettes for these troops, in particular Vallejo ESMERALDA (071) and MAGENTA (042) together with Army Painter Hydra Turquoise. I've never used such vibrant colours before but for this army they do sort of work.

I went with different schemes on all of the Clibanarii - they are nobles after all.

The still-shiny levy spear in serried ranks...

I might go back later and add more design to the Generals horse barding.

Banners and pennants are another thing I'm still considering...probably out of metal foil.

Each of the three elephants has a consistent colour scheme

Two types of LH from 2 manufacturers - Legio Heroica and Irregular. The Irregular ones can be javelin or bow armed as they have both.

Plenty of blue Lightbulb hats on display

This is the whole thing - add in a couple of Cataphracts from another army and maybe some slingers and I'm good to go  

Being able to do the photography in full sunlight is a nice bonus

The static grass and some drybrushing of the bases is all that is left...