Rounding out (literally) the Myceneans

After a quiet few weeks on the website here's a couple of bits and pieces to round out the Mycenean army that appeared a few months ago

First up is the near-obligatory 25/8mm Genius Commander on a 40mm round ADLG commander base.

He is from Redoubt Enterprises Trojan Wars range, selected as much for his big cowhide double-bass shield as any other reason.

The figure is code TX4, representing Achilles, hero and leader of the Myrmidons on foot in bronze armour with bronze helmet, figure of eight shield

He comes accompanied by shield bearer (who didn't make it onto the base).

Next up are some "Barker Marker" 40x40 bases, featuring 'shrunken' photos of my own chariots taken from directly overhead together with a push-pin handle.  Very simple do to - an overhead photo of a chariot, cropped and resized to fit on a 40x40 MDF base.
 

They function primarily as a ZOC marker, but also as you can see here my Chariots are deeper than the regulation 40x40 and so there may be times when it could be useful to have a 40x40 substitute base to drop in, perhaps when they are turning or in a congested part of the table where the extra 10mm on their bases would get in the way. These markers fulfil that role - and also act as Ambush Markers too for 3 uses from one base.

Finally, some Mycenean-specific hit markers using - again - the textbook cowhide shields.

There are from Magister Militum - £2 for 8.  They also have other shields, and my upcoming Assyrian army will probably feature a similar idea. 

Mounted on 18mm round bases, with the edges colour-coded for the number of hits they are small enough to fit in behind each unit without being too distracting.   Since doing these it's been suggested to me that possibly doing a similar thing with single archer figures could be a neat way of identifying the units with integral archer support.

The Myceneans are done..

Only 6 months after buying them in the Museum Miniatures January sale (for only around £50) a full L'Art de la Guerre army of Myceneans (including units I will probably never use) is now finished and on the tabletop already!

There are plenty of pictures and also a video (of the pictures) on Madaxeman.com right now

This lot fits on an A4 sized piece of paper - not bad for a full army !

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.

Nikephorian 15mm Cavalry Conversion

Inspired by the rather lovely Nikephorian armies which were on display in Patras, and realising that I have far too many early-ish Byzantine cavalry to ever use in one army I was recently inspired to convert some of them to later Nikephorian Byzantines.

Or, to be more accurate, I;

• sliced off the Essex Thematic (?) Byzantine Cavalrymen's small round shields with a scalpel, 
• replaced the too-thin, too-bendy Essex lancers with cheap sewing pins bought from eBay while I was at it
• cadged some kite and heater shields from a clubmate and glued them onto the now-sliced-off bits on the figures bodies.

After a bit of a go at painting overly-complicated shield patterns copied badly from other websites later, here you go - 6 units of Nikephorian Byzantine Lance & Bow armed Heavy Cavalry ready for the table!

The unit with the General in the centre has brass rod for its spears - I then realised that they are clearly just too thick for these chaps though, so I did the rest with cut-off sewing pins .

They won't win any awards, but not too shabby for a bit of recycling methinks.

On a similar basis, I also re-painted the shields on some almost-never-used Skoutatoi and glued the bases together to make ADLG units. Here's the slightly less impressive result.

The Icon standard is just downloaded off a Google search for Byzantine Icons, printed out and stuck on.

Maybe an army to use at Cry Havoc later this summer? 

Greece is the Word, and the Word is ADLG !

The recent international upsurge in the popularity of ADLG around the world has now lapped up against the sun-kissed shores of Greece, finding fertile soil in a local wargaming population who it turns out were both deeply steeped in the ancient DBx tradition, and also very happy about adopting an internationally-played ruleset that only requires you to paint and collect relatively small numbers of figures to put a new army on the table.

As soon as the first ever Greek ADLG competition was announced, attending therefore became something of a no-brainer and Greece was added to the list of ticked-off international competition venues that already included France, Belgium, England, Wales and Spain - especially after the epic time that was had by Team Central London at the last Patras event (in the days of DBM would you believe it?!) way back in 2003.

The following reports of the epic trek across Europe to get to the venue, and the even more epic competition itself contain dangerous amounts of pictures of food, some terrible Greek puns, amazing 15mm figure painting (mostly by my opponents) and a surprising number of positive results for a Ghaznavid army small enough to fit in the kind of biscuit tin you'd be somewhat disappointed to get as Christmas gift.

Hold the Halloumi, On With The Reports!!

The rest of the Chinese Crossbowmen

With 48 figures to play with, the Chinese Crossbow Painting Marathon has created lots of opportunities to pad out a number of armies (of course that does mean working on the old "WRG 6th" principle that there is kinda only one Chinese army, and that clothing styles changes little in over a thousand years, but hey...) and here are the full results to follow up on the previous blog post:

Two ADLG units with Pavise on the left, and then a handful of single-based crossbows painted up to match the uniforms of existing single-based halberd and spear armed infantry I already had, allowing them to be deployed together as mixed units, or for these chaps to be used in pairs as crossbow-only units that are colour coded to match the swordsmen-only units in the same army.

Yes, that  lurid dayglow green is a colour scheme on some of my troops - it's donkey's years old, and has even been on table before in some match reports. If I were painting the halberdiers these chaps go with now I probably wouldn't go with it again though...

I've had a load of these pavises lying around in the bits box for years, so finally they get some use. The designs are not wildly inspiring, but after toying with the idea of trying to go for a dragons face for all of, oh, half a second I opted for something easy.

With 48 men to paint, there were spares for a couple of Light Infantry units

Here's the full lineup of double-based Warring States and Han infantry, with Essex in front and Museum behind.

And, finally, from the rear... 

All of these pictures and more are to be found amongst the 3,273 photos of 15mm troops which are currently to be found in the fully-searchable 15mm Figure gallery on my website

15mm Samurai - and Samurai Terrain as well

A near-unique event today, as I post pictures of an army that I haven't painted myself... but don't worry, the usual bog-standard finishing is then in evidence with some bodged-together and over ambitious terrain !

The army is a 15mm Samurai force for L'Art de la Guerre. Mostly composed of Old Glory figures from Timecast, they are supplemented with a handful of Baueda Emeshi cavalry and a Dixon 28mm Great Commander.

All of them have been painted by Lurkio

The Samurai Village has already been posted online but this time there is also a self-made "ADLG Waterway" Samurai Castle wall to marvel at the amount of spare time I have to do stuff other than paint figures !

 The Walls come with a walk-through construction guide as well.