Showing posts with label medieval. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medieval. Show all posts

15 Nov 2023

Charlemagne in a Shed: The Carolingians at Warfare 2023

In a near-miraculously quick turnaround I've now conjured up all 5 battle reports from last weekend's Warfare 15mm L'Art de la Guerre competition, featuring the on-table debut of a post-lockdown-painted Carolingian army under the command of the one and only Charlemagne himself.

The reports all feature a wildly aggressive approach to gameplay, hurling lancer-armed almost-Knightly Caballeri against pretty much anything that stands in their path and sitting back to watch the results unfold in the usual full-contact cinemascope fashion.

The reports as usual come complete with army lists, commentary from Hannibal, random speech bubbles which bear little if any relationships to the action going on at the time, dreadful cod-French, and some tenuously connected music videos too (including one from Christoper Lee - yes, that one!).


You can also see some close-ups of the Baueda and Forged in Battle figures themselves, and find links to all of the army lists of my 5 gracious opponents too.


Read on to see how Charlemagne's campaign of conquest ended up !   


 

28 Oct 2023

Anglo-Irish Sardine Fiesta!

Once again the team based highlight of the global ADLG year comes around, with yet another trip to the tile-clad temperate oasis of sardines and port, Lisbon ! 

After a stunning bout of mid table mediocrity last year, the same 4-person Anglo-Irish team had been reassembled for another go at joining in the 100-strong contingent of ADLG players from around the world all congregating in Lisbon's Military Museum on the banks of the Mighty Tagus for the second September in a row - although this time we had shuffled the pack a little and all 4 of us had swapped themes around.

This saw me occupy the Dark Ages & Early Feudal slot, allowing me to use Feudal Anglo-Irish, featuring a load of figures that had't really been put on table before, but most importantly was the only Anglo-Irish list available! 

Read on to find out how this eclectic collection of Norman feudal knights, javelin-throwing Irish Kerns, English colonist yeomen with spears and longbows, Ostmen descended from Viking stock, and an allied contingent of axe-weilding Irish warriers fared in all 5 games from Lisbon 2023

You will find all the usual nonsense, as well as unique post-match commentary from Hannibal and the Anglo Irish Commander, who turns out to have been a rather strange hybrid of the very Irish Father Jack (from Father Ted) and the very English Jeeves (of PG Wodehouse fame). 



11 Jun 2023

3D printed Knights

 My adventures in 3D printing continue to slowly gather pace, although not by any stretch of the imagination at a pace which will see me take up 3D printing as a hobby anytime soon!

No, instead of that I've just gone onto eBay and bought some 3D printed "15mm" Knights designed by Eskice Miniatures and sold on eBay UK by Hoplite Miniatures

I did sort of want some of these Knights (full armour, no horse barding) but the purchase was as much to see what 3D printing could deliver today, a year after buying some very definately "scaled up 10mm" dollies for an Etruscan army. And, also, these were very cheap indeed at just £12+ P&P  for 24 cavalry figures.  


These are the figures that arrived in the post shortly afterwards - the pictures are taken on a half-inch grid (that's not because I'm an old Imperial-measurementalist, its just that the metric side of this double-sides cutting board is by now totally f---ed).  

They are big chunky models, and are (as scaled by Hoplite Miniatures) pretty big for "15mm", being a chunky 18mm if you are generous, or a fat 19mm if you are not so inclined. 

There were 7 different knights in a few different poses, and as you can see they are pretty clean with only a few little nubs of support still left on that I was easily able to snip off with sprue cutters. 

The horses though were very well-fed wolf-ish, and at this stage I was a little concerned that they might not really cut it, both in terms of style and scale against other 15mm metal and plastic figures I already have. 


But, painted up I think they have come out surprisingly well given that rather lumpy looking start.
 

With paint, shading and washes the horses have largely (but not entirely..) lost that "giant racing lemming" look, with the detail really picking up the Army Painter wash (and in some cases GW Contrast Paint main colour) quite well.  


I deliberately did the shields in simple geometric designs to keep them in the style of the Corvus Belli 100YW knights I painted earlier this year,  ducking the opportunity to add papper printed designs to them. Some of the shields (the round ones) wouldn't take a sticker anyway, but I do wonder if more detailed shields wouldlift these guys even more? 


The lances are surprisingly flexible, with quite a lot of "give" in them, making these much more robust  for such narrow bits of printing than some of the other printed resins I've seen, so from that I suspect materials technology is moving on apace in the 3D printing world.


Having said all that, I did manage to snap two of the lances off when I was taking these photos having done no damage to any of them at all in the preceeding painting and basing stages - they did however glue back on pretty easily with superglue, as the breaks were very clean. 


I only did barber pole stripes on a few of them, not wanting the units to look like a fairground ride with too many striped poles. 


The running horses are actually too long (when printed at this scale) to fit on a 30mm deep base, but I did manage to find some 35mm deep bases I had lying around and they managed to fit pretty well on those. 

So, all in all these are very nice, while also not really being all that close to the standards of good 15mm metal-cast figures from established sculptors. they are however leaps and bounds better than the "Playmobil" figures I bought last year, and are more than perfectly servicable for one-table usage.

The oversized impression from the raw prints seemed to be greatly mitigated by a count of paint and standardized basing - and I imagine that it would in any case be perfectly possible to print them slightly smaller just by changing some settings on the machine anyway.

So, the 3D future is almost here - not quite, but certainly getting closer every day. It will just take a few more folks to pick up their mouse (?) and noodle away at designing figure ranges, presumably just like whoever is designing stuff under the Eskice brand banner and suddenly there will be enough interest and enough competition for design to reach that next level - and if (OK, "when") that is matched with advances in materials tech too it'll not be too long until the choice between printed and cast ranges is a very difficult one to call indeed. 

I plan to take some size comparison photos and post them up in the next few days as well.

(Here's an affiliate link to Hoplite MIniatures eBay store: https://ebay.us/NbWnTW)



17 May 2023

More Plastic Medievals - this time some cavalry

 In my continuing quest to buy up what seems like the entire Corvus Belli medieval 100YW range in Siocast, the third installment was a pack of mounted sergeants that I actually paid full price for (!!) at Warfare last year (unlike the bring and buy bargain that made up the initial purchase). 

This gave me 18 mounted figures to act as the lance-armed cavalry who support the proper Knights in a host of Medieval armies, these guys being sufficiently generic (for me...!) to work in almost any western -ish (I say that because I might try them as Hussite cavalry one day) European Medieval army.


These guys seemed to be made with plastic that was a smidge harder (aka less "Airfix 1/72nd scale"-style) than the other Siocast figures I picked up and painted earlier in the year. 

I've not seen anything from PSC to say they are now using a newer version of the Siocast resin, but on the basis that Warlord Games have made exactly such an announcement recently it's not an unreasonable guess that PSC have also migrated (or been migrated by the Siocast people?) to a new formulation too.


I used a black spray undercoat on these, in order to give me the sort of deep shadows that make the padded leather jerkins really pop - the best thing about these figures IMO, and well worth making the effort to paint them carefully so they stand out. 


To get some colour into them I did 2 bases with blue jerkins, 2 with red, one with green and one in a more plain brown leather. 


The white bit is a set of diagonal stripes, which were cleanly cast onto the models and pretty easy to pick out with a small brush


I also continued my run of doing 4-spot faces on these guys too - some of them had pretty small faces under those helmets but at wargaming distances they look OK IMO. 
 

From the back the striped, blacklined effect on the jerkins comes out really clearly


You'll note that these two sets of guys in red do have slightly different coloured reins - again allowing me to differentiate these as separate units or drop them itno different commands in an ADLG army if needed, or to keep them together as well.
 

Some of the spears were bent, and some others seemed to bend out of shape quite markedly after I undercoated them - which was weird - but they do seem mostly to have bent back into shape with just a little manual encouragement with no need to heat them in hot water or anything. They can't be made dead straight, but they are break-proof so swings and roundabouts there I guess. 


I did try and drill out one chaps hand to take a plastic broom bristle spear, but much to my surprise I found it really tricky to do. 

This was because the arm of the figure wobbled alarmingly (being plastic rather than metal of course) when I was drilling into the hand/gauntlet, meaning I ended up with a pretty ragged and messy hole even when using my Dremel with the uppy-downey lever thing contraption. As a result I basically gave up on drilling any more and left them as they were.  
 

One thing I did find was that the riders sat a little "wide" on the horses, and being plastic its simply not possible to squeeze the riders legs together to grip their mounts more tightly as you can do with metal figures. 

That means you are relying entirely on the glue to make a good bond between buttock and saddle, as the riders legs are permanently set a bit wider than the horse's backs. 



All in all I'm very pleased by how they have come out, and now I'm frantically flicking through army list books to find an excuse to use them!



25 Mar 2023

Corvus Belli 15mm Knights

 As well as the Pavise infantry that I posted a few days ago, the main reason for buying the PSC Corvus Belli stuff was to get a new refreshed set of knights for the 100YW period, as my existing set of knights were starting to look rather tired and jaded. 

I'd also seen some of what I think were Corvus Belli castings in Chris Tofalos' army at the Northern League event in Manchester at the end of last year, and really liked the bold and simple painting style, so wanted to see if I could emulate it.


The really weird thing was being able to paint the figures "on the sprue" - not something I'd really done in years, and of course not with 15mm Ancients. The sprue seemed to be cast and connected in "invisible" places on the figure, so that was a good start.


And here they are assembled and based, waiting final touching up (after I spotted the details I'd missed in this photo!)


And here are the finished figures - I've gone for bold, generally single colour quarters for the horse barding, and (slightly counter-intuitively) have chosen not to co-ordinate the shield patterns with the barding. Sharp-eyed viewers will also note the reins are sometimes in colours that clash with the rest of the barding.


Many of the riders and horses are sort of tied together colour-wise, but by mixing it up a bit it I was able to introduce a bit more variety and colour into the unit - sometimes a same-colour shield, barding and tabard combination can look a bit of a wall of a single colour, especially on such small scale figures as these.
 

A couple of the lances were a bit bendy, but I didn't bother with the "straighten them in hot water" thing as frankly any metal lance will bend a bit anyway and none of these were too far off the mark to make trying something as faffy-abouty as straighteneing them in hot water worth even  trying IMO. 


I did use a couple of waterslide transfers I had kicking around in the spares box on some of them - but only on panels that are visible when the unit is together. The horse at the rear here doesn't have a corresponding transfer on its front right panel for example.


They have - as with the spearmen - come out identical to metal figures, with the only takeaway from putting these figures together being that in retrospect I wish I'd based them all a little closer together on each base, such that I could then have glued the three adjacent knight models together into a solid mutually supporting block. 

This is because they do bend and flex quite unnervingly when you pick them up, especially the horses that are only attached to the base by one or two hooves, so I have a slight concern that this may lead to paint flaking or possibly some of the legs breaking off over time. 

That may be unfounded worry on my part, but if all three Knights on each base were glued together it would make it more of a solid lump to pick up and use on the tabletop without any detrimental visual effect as they are pretty closely packed already. 

So, I now have 7 bases of brightly coloured knights looking for a chance to hit the table!


22 Mar 2023

Corvus Belli / Plastic Soldier Medieval Infantry

At SELWG last year I picked up a box set of PSC's plastic re-casts of Corvus Belli's Medieval range - a set of figures I'd long admired but which had been OOP for quite some time. 

My main interest was in the mounted knights, but the box set on the Bring & Buy I saw was nominally a full 100YW French army, but the composition was a bit limited being about 20 mounted knights, 20-odd foot knights and the rest being a mix of pavise-holding spearmen and a LOT of crossbwmen - which I already had far too many of in metals. 

Whoever had originally owned them clearly didn't fancy the Siocast figures all that much once they'd opened the box though, as this £45 RRP set was on offer for just a tenner - so at that price I snapped it up as I could just use even a few of the knights and get decent value from it!  


Of course, once I got started I decided to have a dabble at painting up some (but not all) of the others too, starting with these Pavise/Spear/Crossbow infantry units.

And here they are finished, in a pavise pattern inspired by the 28mm figures of Tony Rodwell that I faced at the PAW competition in January 2023. 

Once painted they (of course...) look no different to metal figures. These have always been a nice range IMO, and I'm happy to finally have gotten hold of some. 

The Siocast debate does chunter on though, and having painted some up now I am starting to think that it might well be a case of over-selling the features and benefits of the material rather than anything else. 

Flash is the thing that does keep being mentioned, and there was a little bit of flash on these figures, but there is on metals too - because this is a soft (actually surprisingly soft - almost Airfix-esque) material it is a little more tricky to scrape off any flash, especially in hard to reach areas as you are walking a bit of a tightrope between scraping the flash and cutting into the soft material of the figure. 

However on reflection I suspect there's a different technique for removing flash from soft plastic figures to the one for scraping it off metals, so it may be "user error" here as much as anything else - again if this was made clearer then perhaps it's not a "mistake" I'd have made?   

I also primed them in black before painting - I have seen suggestions you can get away without doing so, but honestly why would you want to (or more to the point, why would anyone suggest that this is a selling point of the material)?   

You can of course paint metals with no primer too - it'll work, the paint will almost always stick onto the figure, but a primer coat is just, well, better - for paint adhesion, and for giving a base colour as well, and that's going to be as true for these guys as it is for any metal or resin range. 

Here are some foot knights, again a figure range I have wanted to have in my collection for a while. All these figures have fairly short spears and I didn't seen any of the bendy spear stuff I have read about elsewhere as a result. 

So, all in all once painted (sensibly, with a primer) they end up looking the same as metals - which is no real surprise I guess. 

But perhaps that's the issue - they are "the same" models, but because they are made in a different material we somehow expect them to be "different" (or have at least been led to believe this by some over-enthusiastic marketing). 

I'm very happy with how these guys came out, but there is still a small niggle in that I was surprised how soft the SioCast material actually was - and so for a material that feels "only a little more resilient than 1/72md scale Airfix" it's hard not to feel that they should somehow be on sale at a much cheaper price point than the current "pretty close to the price of metals", no matter how nonsensical that thought might be given the huge differences in production methods and sales volumes between a niche 15mm medieval figure range and a box of Airfix 8th Army.


 

19 Aug 2022

Another unit of 28mm Spanish

 Yes, in my gradual and partly accidental attempt to create a 28mm Feudal Spanish/Sicilian Norman type army, the next unit on the testing line is some Fireforge Almughavars


I bought these from Dave Thomas up at Britcon last weekend, and quickly put together a unit/base from 6 of the 24 figures in the box, undercoated them in black, did a bit of highlighting in white (a cheapskates Azimuth Spray I guess) then set to work with normal paints and some Army Painter washes.


They have gone together very neatly - every set of arms is mail-clad, which makes joining them to some of the torsos a bit easier as you don't have to get a perfect match with the cloth/tabard guys shoulders.  

Dave From The Podcast keeps telling me Almughavars didn't have shields, but there weren't quite enough left arms on a sprue to do all 6 guys without shields, so maybe I am reflecting the balance of academic views on this (if its about 83% of scholars think they were unshielded, 17% think they were shielded). 


The figures look a bit cartoonish on the box art, but having painted and based them I suspect that impression is down to Foreforge's painters style rather than anything inherent in the figures. 

They came with square plastic bases, but I didn't want to have to build up the baseplate with filler to hide these, so instead pinned a leg on each dude to the MDF base - being hard plastic they were very easy to drill with a pin vise. 


They are also normal sized - some Fireforge stuff is a bit big - and their spears have been made to a sensible non-easily-breaking thickness too, unlike some of Fireforge's earlier Arab cavalry bows, which I have already.


They come with glue-on swords, scabbards, pouches etc allowing them to be well customized 


These were (of course) given the Army Painter effect to leave them with a dirty Middle Ages feel. 


Taking the photos I realised I'd not gone back to do their helmet nose-guards in gunmetal, so that's now been done - just squint and I'm sure you can imagine it in metallic silver!


I also then remembered I had a turntable as well that I bought ages ago - so managed to dig it out and do a few spinning around videos too. Not sure how well Blogger will render it though - so apologies if its a bit crappy.


All in all I am very happy with them, and once the other 18 are done I will have a very nice (and if anything more "realistic" than the box art and unpainted figures might suggest) set of 24 Catalan Almughavars. 


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