The Sarmatians Ride !

Just after FiB's rather chunky price increase (1/3 reduction in figures per pack, but no price change) hit the shelves, I managed to find a seller on eBay who was offering "full size" Forged in Battle Army Packs with the "old" numbers of figures per pack as well  - effectively making them 1/3 cheaper than buying from FiB direct. 

Having sold a rather old Khurasan Avar army on eBay earlier this year I had been meaning to replace such an army in my "Steppe tribes" collection anyway, so the combination of this and the FiB price hike/cheap deal ended up being the trigger moment for what has turned out to be a substantial purchase of 4-legged lance and bow armed Steppe tribesmen.

And here is the first tranche of a LOT of cavalry !! 

Having picked up a few extra packets of cavalry at Entoyment too (also at the old prices) I somehow ended up with well over 100 cavalry .. which meant I defaulted to production-line painting of the horses so I could bash through a load of them before even starting on the riders. 

These FiB sculpts are both great (in that they are pretty varied and dynamic) yet also they are starting to look a little tired, with some exhibiting casting lines, flash and occasionally twisted legs too. 

This however ended up being something I managed to turn to my advantege when painting so many horses in a batch, as it allowed me to adopt a technique that means I could be sloppy with the fiddly bits - the reins. 

Initially all the horses were undercoated in white, after which they were done in variety of GW contrasts (Aggaros Dunes, Gore Grunta Fur, Skeleton Horde, Temnplar Black Cygor Brown), with some greys in Army Painter Holy White - all whist trying to leave the (often hard to see) reins unpainted wherever I could. 

I then went back over all of them with a thin brush and standard white paint to vaguely (ie not all that accurately) pick out some more of the reins where they could be easily seen (not always easy on these castings), and then used either Army Painter Hardened Leather, or (for the "brown" horses) GW Contrast Miltarum Green to go over and pick out the now-white straps and reins, using these two paints to also "blackline" the reins and make them stand out against what was usually some variation of tan or brown horse flesh. 

This (I think) looks effective, and is pretty easy to do quickly - unlike, say, Essex horses where the straps and really well defined and stand out some way from the horses themselves, which requires more careful painting to not look messy.

 I also did a lot of variation in the saddle cloths - of course this is mostly hidden when the riders are on, but it is not hard to do and gives them that little bit extra pzazz if you do look closely at the finish figures.

 And here are some of them now:

These are "included commanders" - a mix of all sorts of packs of figures really.

 

My "system" for these has been to put at least one "armoured" horse on each base to denote "Elite Heavy Cavalry".

Pretty much  all of these riders have metal armour using ArmyPainter Enchanted Steel, which for this army I then toned down with a wash of ArmyPainter Dark Tone on the metalwork, as for some reason the Enchanted Steel was coming out more pale grey than usual (perhaps the heat of the last few weeks?) 

I've not gone for striped windsocks, mostly as I find they can easily ends up looking like a refugees from Finding Nemo. 

These are two bases of Medium Cavalry Archers - the lack of metal armour on the riders bodies, all three horses being unarmoured, and having a firing, bareheaded bowman on each base being the visual clues for myself and my opponents.

On the far set of horses the "self-blacklining" effect of the ArmyPainter Leather on the straps can clearly be seen. The fronts of the horses are where the casting of the reins seems to go most awry, but luckily most of the horses are "head down" so on the tabletop it's barely visible if at all. 

I've also tried to keep to a muted palette on these - mostly tans and khaki-greens with the occasional splashes of colour with a blue cloak or ed tunic here and there.

Many more to come ! 
 

Forged in Battle Late Romans

 It was only fairly recently that I realised that I didn't actually own any proper "Late Roman" legionaries. 

I've got Lorica Segmenta guys with square shields, Republican mail-clad chaps, Middle Roman half-way curved shield dudes, and some early Byzantine spearmen who have stood in for very late Romans in the past.. but none of the actual Late Roman/Patrician guys at all. 

So rectifying that became a bit of a mission, especially after I somehow acquired some Forged in Battle LBMS transfers for Late Roman Legionaries - that I of course could not bear to waste!

And, after a bit of painting and purchasing, here is the finished result:

I now have some Legionaries who, thanks to LBMS, look exactly like everyone elses!

These are mostly from the mail-clad set from FiB, with a couple of leather-cuirass guys in there - most notably the chap at the front leaning on his shield, who is IMO by far and away the best figure in any of the FiB Late Roman packs. 

I have squeezed a couple more leather guys in the rear rank, so as to get 4 bases (32 figures) of "quality" legionaries and then 16 figures of all-leather "2nd string" ones out of the two packs I bought. 

Top down view.

Here is a more simple shield - easier to blend in the transfer from a brushstroke POV, but still a little challenging in terms of paint matching, as the transfer is really very, very vibrant and none of my collection of Reds quite managed to match it perfectly.  

Once the figures have been matt varnished it looks a lot better, but if you look closely you can see the painted in edges.

These are the leather-only chaps, with a less inspiring (or less "real-looking") shield design too. They also got black crests to make them even more less imposing. 

The poses in these sets are a little underwhelming TBH, and I also found the faces to be very small, often on many of them a little too small to do my latest "blob for the nose, cheekbones and chin" face painting style - however the GW Darkoath Flesh base coat seems to pick them out almost well enough anyway. 

As there was so much Hardened Leather Army Painter Speedpaint on these, the straps were done in GW Militarum Green contrast so it would stand out against the leather armour. 

So, I now own 48 Very Late Imperial / Patrician Legionaries !

Forged in Battle Palmyrans - on printed horses!

 A trawl through the bits box recently unearthed a large number of riderless horses, and an almost-equal number of horseless riders... so what else to do other than cobble together some Frankenstein-like mixups of stuff I had clearly decided not to bother painting at some point in the past! 

Leading the way were these 6 FiB riders, which a bit of detective work revealed were from their Palmyran range. 

To be honest they are so generic that they went into my "Roman" drawer, and may appear as Romans, Palmyrans, Byzantines or anything else with a uniform look and a javelin in hand. 

In my current spirit of trying different painting techniques I've also done some very unsubtle "highlighting" on the blue cloaks to try and give them a "works at tabletop distances but looks weird close up" style...  and I think I've certainly nailed at least 50% of that target with these guys! 

The two horses nearest the camera in this shot are almost certainly Essex "generic" types, but the front 4 are all from the 3D Breed Numidians I painted up a while back, where my eBay purchase contained more horses than riders. 

These are some of the nicest horses I think I've seen in 15mm, but they are a tad brittle - so hopefully they can take the weight of the metal Forged in Battle riders!

15mm Arab Light Horsemen

 My 15mm Arab armies have been chugging along for many years, making do with some Lancashire Games Light Horse Javelinmen from their Sudan / Mahdist range. 

They have done sterling service but are not the best figures out there, and also suffer from rather spindly spears and swords, so I have finally decided to replace them with some Forged in Battle Arab cavalry. 

These are pretty straightforward figures, typical FiB which take contrast paints very well - especially on the horses - and have robust metal spears (aka arguably a bit too thick but they are very unlikely to break in action)

The pack of 12 (old sizes pre Dec 2025!) had a mix of 6 short spears, 3 commanders and 5 long spear riders plus 12 horses. These are the short spear guys.

And these are the "lancers" with a commander figure too.

I've done most of them with a simple paint job, using contrast paints on the horses, ArmyPainter Leather Speedpaint on the reins (as I find it both works and sort of self-blacklines too).

The white is a white base coat, a layer of Army Painter Holy White, and then normal white paint that leaves bits ofthe Holy White (aka grey wash) visible in places underneath that are folds in the cloth. 

All in all an upgrade on my old horsemen, and a simple but effective set of figures for tabletop use.

  

Finally.. The Warfare 2025 Battle Reports

 Way back in the mists of time, a sort-of newly-minted Numidian army took to the tabletop to try and perform acceptably in a "Late Roman" period in the 15mm ADLG competition at Warfare 2025. 

The main aim was to get on table these 3D printed Numidian horsemen who were sadly printed in a resin which made them too brittle to ever take abroad (where they'd need to be held in place in a tin by  a layer of foam on top of the figures - which would have broken their javelins).

It was also to use these War & Empire Numidian Imitation Legionaries - again recently painted - and give my venerable and now sadly OOP Numidian Elephants a run out too. 

I ended up being the only player to take Numidians - a very good or a very bad sign usually - and faced 3 Late Roman armies, the Ancient Brits and the Bosporans over the course of the weekend. 

All 5 batreps are now ready and fully posted, which in a rare doubling-up of effort include both the traditional text & photo versions and also YouTube summaries of the games you can watch after wading through my turgid prose and cheesy speech bubbles in each of the standard reports.

If you just want to dive into the video, you can follow the action in the 6 videos in the Warfare 2025 Playlist on my YouTube Channel as well - the 6th video is a run-through of how I constructued the army list I used. 

  

Byzantine Cavalry - the never ending army!

 I now seem to be almost there with collecting countless legions of Byzantine Cavalry to allow me to make up almost all of the Byzantine lists in ADLG - this time it's some "kite shielded" very late ones which I think of as being Nikephorian types, but which Forged in Battle seem to have decided are Thematics. 

The product code on their website for these chaps is a bit of a mix of WE-BT03 Middle Byzantine (Thematic) - Kavallarioi EHC bow which provides the archers and horses, and some lance-armed riders from the pack of WE-BT02 Middle Byzantine (Thematic) - Kavallarioi EHC (which look to be exactly the same riders as those in WE-BT04).

Mixing the two packs gives me cavalry units with both bows and lances, which matches their capabilities in the ADLG army lists.  

 Kite shields began appearing in Byzantine art and military texts around the mid-10th to mid-12th centuries, placing them very much in the Nikephorian period, and its those which give these chaps their distinctive look.

These are again using the LBMS shield transfers from Forged in Battle, which have also appeared on some of the Skoutatoi I painted up some time ago. 

Everything here is done with a white base coat, using GW Contrast paints for the brown and black horses, and Army Painter Speedpaint Holy White for the greys as well as a "2nd undercoat" for the one white horse too. 

I may use these as "medium" cavalry, and so I used Army Painter Hardened Leather Speedpaint on the shoulder and body armour that looks like it could be designed to be leather, although there is still quite  a lot of gunmetal - in this case Enchanted Steel Army Painter Speedpaint, which I am becoming a bit of a convert to as it doesn't need a base coat of black to work (unlike my more traditional drybrushed gunmetal approach).

The cavalrymen have base-specific colours on their tunics - this allows me in theory to mix them up across different commands and tell them apart, without being too intrusive or jarring. 

I am still somewhat puzzled by this shield transfer - it looks like it's missing a shield boss or something, but it is a specific transfer for this range and the shields don't have bosses, so perhaps its just a design that I don't quite understand!

The Army Painter Speedpaint Hardened Leather really pings when seen from the back - I also used it for the horses straps and reins, as it self-blacklines really effectively for minimal effort. 

 

Numidian "Imitation Legionaries"

I've been accidentally collecting a Numidian army for many years now, with the most recent addition being some 3D printed cavalry who entered the collection earlier this year. 

With a possible opportunity to use the army in a competition at Warfare 2025, I recently decided that I really did need to add some "imitation legionaries" to the mix to make the army a little more viable - and with Forged in Battle being easy to buy in quantity, and compatible with the rest of my FiB infantry in the army it was their Numidian heavy infantry who got bought. 

These troops were recruited and fielded in the later Punic Wars period, when the Numidians began to adopt Roman military formations and equipment, such as a pilum and shield, and even trained under Roman instructors - or sons of Gladiators if you believe the 2nd installment of Ridley Scott's opus! 

Either way, troops who were trained to fight in a more resilient close-combat style that imitated Roman tactics and capabilities sounded like a good complement to the Numidians' traditional light cavalry and skirmishing types, and here they all are: 

Buying two packs of infantry and basing many of them 7 to a base allowed me to eke out 7 units from the nominally 2x24 FiB blisters, due to the presence of a couple of extra figures. 

As they are not-quite Romans, I wanted to paint them in a non-Roman (ie "not red") palette, so I went with a white undercoat, with Yanden Yellow GW Contrast as the main colour for their tunics. 

The straps were left white, and then done with Army Painter Leather Speedpaint, which I find gives an interesting colour texture, but more importantly pretty much self-blacklines (or "brown-lines"?) on these deeply sculpted FiB figures. 

  

The 2 blisters had a set each of trumpeter, officer and standard bearer, which you can see at the front of this block of all 7 units. 

For shields I wanted to be a bit Roman, but still retain a tribal feel that would match my existing Numidian skirmisher types, all of whom have brown hide-like shields. The compromise I settled on was to paint the shields in a dusty brown (a bit of a mix of various browns) and then add either "tribal" patterns or a knock-off "Roman-style" laurel wreath in a random selection, suggesting that whilst these were still tribal warriors, some of them had made at least a passing effort to impersonate the "Romans " their commanders aspired them to become.

 

The laurel wreath is pretty effective IMO, and even better, remarkably easy to do as its a series of green blobs and half-moons, each half-moon then having a second layer in a lighter shade of green added on top for contrast. 

The Yanden Yellow works really well on these figures too, almost uniform but also very "in the desert" 

 

Here's an officer unit close up - showing how I failed to clean off the static grass before photographing them! 

There are more Numidian figures on this blog / website you can see here:

• Numidan Light Horse in 15mm 
• 28mm Infantry 
• 28mm cavalry
• 15mm Numidian Infantry - Traditional Skirmishers
• More 15mm Infantry
• Numidians in the Photo Gallery

Top Tier Nikephorians

 In what may possibly be the final Byzantine Cavalry installment, here are the "Elite" Nikephorian (and perhaps a little later too) mixed bow/lance cavalry all from Forged in Battle.

As with the previous set, these are a mix of archer figures from one pack, and lance armed guys from another, both in the "Thematic" range.

Being half-armoured marks them out on the tabletop as being either "Elite", or "Heavy cavalry" - or indeed perhaps both. 

The colours are the same as for the previous set, although on this picture you can also see some of the bow cases, which are - for no scientific or historical reason - GWs Contrast Akhelion Green, which pools nicely to give a real depth of colour to help pick out the small details of bowcases on these figures. 

I had 8 remaining LBMS kite shield transfers when I did this set, which looked idea - but having cut them all out and stuck them on I suddenly noticed that the trumpeter with the Commander had a hidden shield slung on his back - which meant that this set of 8 was in fact a set of 9 ! 

Mustering all my bravery, a new paint brush, and secure in the knowledge that a shield on the back of a cavalryman would only ever really be seen by me (and from a distance of a couple of feet at best), I attempted to create a "trompe l'oeil" impression of the LBMS design for the vacant shield.

This close up it's clearly not the same, but in all honesty I'm pretty dammed prooud of even being able to get this close - and at tabletop distances with my eyesight its as close to perfect as you can hope for!