Sarmatian Medium Cavalry

 These FiB lancers have been painted with leather armour instead of metal - the figures are the same as some of the "heavy cavalry" I posted last week, just the paint is different! 

I also adopted a mostly-blue palette for the cloaks, again to help make them more easily distinguished from the other riders in what is most probably going to be a mostly "Heavy Cavalry" army.

These are pretty much all lance-only riders. 

They also have a swordsman on each base too - FiB are more than generous with command figures in their packs, such that I often end up with too many. 

That allows me to use the sword-armed guys to provide a little more unique (and easily seen) character to some of the units. 

Victrix Spanish - 28mm Roman-era warriors

The Republican Roman army I built a couple of years ago using mostly Foundry legionaries has always been whingeing away in its Really Useful Box asking me to get it some more interesting and colourful subject, mercenary and allied troops.. 

..and, amazingly, a few sprues of Victrix Spanish warriors somehow found their way into my eBay basket and voila, the Romans have some Iberian mercenaries!

In my continuing attempts to try as many painting styles as possible, I initially painted these with a matt white undercoat, and then applied Army Painter Holy White to the, erm, "white" ones, GW Aggaros Dunes to the "yellow" ones and did the "red" ones in Army Painter Blood Red.

I then painted over most of these "contrast" base coats with block colours, leaving the folds in the tunics as the lowlights - the contrast all bleed slightly into the top layers (not as much as the ArmyPainter first generation of these paints did though!) which also helps soften the distinction between shading and block colours.

The "experiment" bit of this process came as I opted to use AK paint pens to do most of the block colouring - the "white" ones using AK RCM034 Flat White, the "yellow" ones using AK RCM012 Wood Base and the "red" ones with AK RCM003 Signal Red. 

The pens have a "felt tip" nib that is fairly broad even though it comes to a point, so they actually worked quite well on these figures as the nib is way too big to go into the creases of the tunics, leaving the darker underlights (?) pretty much intact whilst skimming over the topmost layers.

The white in particular needed a few coats and run-overs with the pen to get decent coverage, with the yellow having more opacity but still needing a couple of goes. 

Annoyingly I managed somehow to break one of the spears, and also one of the swords when I was taking them outside to spray varnish (both in the back row). These have - as is usual with Victrix - very thin spears, and there will be casualties, such that I'm not even sure I will repair these two as it's very hard to see unless I point it out!  

The pens are sadly not sharp enough to do the patterns on the tunics, so those had to be done with a regular brush and paint - I managed to do the "darker narrow inner, lighter wider outer" type of stripes on some of the tunics, and got two narrow stripes on others.

They (of course) have LBMS transfers, which I found fitted really well for these figures. I painted the edges of the shields with ArmyPainter Enchanted Steel and/or Fanatic Bronze before applying the transfers, with the Enchanted Steel in particular being very flow-ey (..?) so it just runs nicely into the edges of the embossed edges and bosses to save on the need for all that much blacklining and infilling later on after the transfers are on. 

You can just about see a bit of proper blacklining on some of these shields, but as I've said before, these  transfers seem to fit absolutely perfectly on this set.

I now have 3 bases of swordsmen/javelineers to fight alongside my Roman Legions. 

Frankly I'm astonished how good these look - even if I say so myself! 

There are also a couple of javelin armed skirmishers, as the sprues I had seemed to make up 20 figures somehow - seems like an odd number, but hey! 

 

No LBMS transfers for these shields on the sheet though ! 

Here they are next to my Foundry "Classic Legionaries" 

They are a bit taller, but nothing to worry about at all on the tabletop. 

And here is a Nauk Nauk animation of the guys in action !

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!

Tlaxcalan Skirmishers

 Every army needs some hapless peasants to screen the main body of warriors, and lurk around in the bushes taking nasty little pot shots at any enemy troops unwary enough to venture too close - and the Taxcallans are no exception with both slingers and archers in the roster. 

These slingers are pretty basic troops, and could easily come from the Biblical ranges from the same designer - which is not to disparage them in any way, as they are great, animated little figures. 

The musculature really takes contrast paints very well - the two layers of Darkoath Flesh work very well indeed on them IMO

I made the skirmisher bowmen out of the non-headdress-wearing bowmen in the pack from F15's, on the assumption that the massed formations of bowmen would be better dressed than the skirmishers.

There are only 2 poses of these, but adding the odd shield in as well gives a bit more variety.

Brightly coloured (parrot?) feathers for the arrow fletchings adds a splash of extra colour too.

A few more Tlaxcalan Warriors

 Running alongside the "red flower on the base" Tlaxcalan Warriors are these sets of "purple flower" and "yellow flower" chaps:

On these it's really easy to see how I have made the shields ping a little by blacklining the bands and areas of bold colour on them. I did this with a fibre tip fine marker, which thankfully didn't then bleed into the paint underneath even when varnished (rather scary moment doing the varnishing though...)

The Army Painter Fanatic paints have such great coverage, and that is absolutely what is needed for making Meso-American armies really look vibrant and bold. 

There are quite a few guys in all-over onsies, but I have saved those with headgear as well for the Suit Wearers - coming soon !