Artillery!

After having a challenging experience at the Dorset Dodderers against an army with a Heavy Artillery unit in it, I decided to bite the bullet (or "large stone" I guess?) and pick up a proper Roman/Greek stone thrower unit to add to my collection.

This also meant having an opportunity to use some more of Donnington's excellent Roman artillery crew - great little characterful figures that I have already utillized for the "artillery on carts" (which appear in the  ADLG rulebook on page 137) - but the question then became where to source the engine itself?

In the end, after some debate with the CLWC massif I plumped for Xyston's Heavy Stone Thrower - which comes with some Greek-looking crew, giving me the dilemma of potentially wasting some figures (Yoiks!!!).

The solution to this issue was...magnets, or more specifically, some very thin magnets I'd had kicking around for ages, most probably bought to hold the turrets on resin-cast tanks (before hard plastic kits totally replaced them in the wargamers pantheon.. before being replaced by 3D prints in turn..). 

This allowed me to base up two sets of crew, and repurpose the artillery piece itself to be used by either.

 Add in a small ballista that I found kicking around in the bits box (in 15mm scale - not the full size one I saw at Vindolana) and suddenly I have two sets of interchangeable Heavy and Light artillery. 

Here's the rather over-crewed Light Ballista version of the Roman artillery base.

And the same tiny engine with Xyston Greek crew. The chap holding up a stone missile must be rather dissappointed...

Here you can see the magnets embedded in the two bases, and the corresponding magnet glued to the bottom of the large engine.

This Xyston piece is incredibly crisply cast. 

The Greek crew are simply painted with my current go-to "white" technique of Army Painter "speedpaint" Holy White with a top layer of Army Painter Matt White semi-drybrushed on top, leaving the shading that the Holy White generates visible in places.

The metal elements are Enchanted Steel, again from Army Painter, and the engine itself is ArmyPainter Hardened Leather speedpaint on a white undercoat.

Same engine, different crew from Donnington. 

Ready to ping !

Making 28mm Victrix elephants multi-national

 As heralded last week, I used some magnets to allow the two Victrix elephants in their kit to be used with interchangeable crew and accoutrements (OK, shields clipped to the sides of the howdahs), giving me Successor, Numidian and Roman elephants, just not all at the same time..

This is the full set of clip-on shields and glued-together crew for the two elephants.

You can (just about) see how rare earth magnets have been glued in place between the feet of the guys, so they can connect to a small patch of steel paper that I have glued down inside the base of each howdah to hold the crew in place firmly enough for gaming use.

Here's the "Red & Green" elephant with Successor shields and crew attached - you can see this as a Numidian elephant in an earlier blog post.

I spent quite some time carefully doing the crew as they are the most visual and visible part of the model. 

The elephant is quite a nice model and looks realistically proportioned and animated.

I copied the "bit in the middle" of the pike from the style I did for my Victrix pikemen - but for this figure that bit was included in the casting (moulding?) whereas for the pikemen I had to add it with rolled up paper!

The shield is attached with 2 magnets, as is the spear case at the back. I glued the magnets on the outside of the howdah for the shields, and then realised that they were strong enough to magnetize to another magnet through the walls of the howdah, so the spear case only has 1 maget outside and one on the inside wall of the howdah.

The "blue" elephant with blue crew. 

The shield pattern was a transfer which I blended in with mixed paint to reach the rim of the shield. 

Alwys worth adding eyes to elephants IMO - make sure to add dark black eyebrows too though or it just looks weird. 

I snuck in a couple of 15mm shield transfers as a small bit of decoration on the blanket. 

Here are both elephants togther in Successor kit.

 

And the Blue elephant with a very non-historical "Roman" shield and Roman crew.

I had these LBMS transfers going spare from a much older project, and while I know they are nowhere near the right period for a Republican Roman elephant they do have the advantage of being very "Roman", and also using up some shields and transfers I would otherwise have no need for!

They are now ready to take the field ...once I paint up the 100 or so Foundry legionaries !

It's all Greek To Me!

 Back in February of this year, when the weather was chilly and damp (unlike this balmy almost-May Springtime we're getting in the UK right now...?) I headed off to Athens to take in some local gastronomy, hit a few museums, drink some local beer and wine, attend a Greek Super League football match ... oh, and play a bit of ADLG at a "Crusades" themed event held by the Strategikon Club in Athens too!

The gaming parts of this epic weekend saw a rather unusual Later Crusader army take to the field, based around the army commanded by Richard The Lionheart ("Coeur du Lion") at Arsuf and other rather defensive battles, taking on a variety of Feudal opponents across 5 games over 2 days. 

This saw a wall of well protected Crusader spearmen, supported by crossbows attempt to lure successive opponents either to their doom in a vain and futile charge, or to stunning success as the enemy rode down the quivering Crusader sergeants at lance point!

In all cases the action was epic and brutal, and (of course...) the post-game criticism from Hannibal was even more so! 

In a post-event coda, these reports also feature a video walk-through of the Athens Archeological Museum (with some stunning Mycenean stuff), the Greek Military Museum (from antiquity to the near-present day) and a pop-up museum with relics and remains from the decisive battle of Charonea, where Philip established Macedonian control over the Greek peninsula with his defeat of the other Theban-led City States. 

All of the reports, including the usual captions and nonsense are now posted on Madaxeman.com