Building the Lancastrians in 25mm for ADLG

Following on from the battle reports of the surprisingly effective Lancastrian ADLG army, I thought it might be interesting to share how the army was put together in terms of figures and basing, and the thought behind the list design as well.

Most - but not all - of them are Perry plastics, making this a very cost-effective army to build. There is now a summary of the figures I used,  how the army was designed and was supposed to work (in theory and then in practice) and also some ideas as to how I painted them up on the main website now. If you wish you can buy yourself a set of the whole lot for under £100!

Full details of the figures are on madaxeman.com

Lambs to the Slaughter! The Assyrians invade Patras in 5 new battle reports!

The much-trailed Assyrian army has finally made it not only onto the table, but onto a plane, and into a 5-round competition in sunny (and rainy) Greece at the 2019 Patras Challenge.

The Winged Lion of Assyria takes on three very different Roman armies, a Classical Indian and finally the Han Chinese in a series of battles fitted carefully in between bouts of extreme eating and drinking across a swathe of the Patrene nightlife's top venues.

Watch as the the newly minted chariots and infantry, supported by archer cavalry do their very best on a number of different playing surfaces to dodge between the cakes, biscuits and pieces of lamb which attempt to prove more problematic than their enemies

 Even goats occasionally get a look in.

Its all there in glorious sunshine, so roll up your Gyros, sizzle up some Spanakopita and chuck a halloumi slice on the bbq to enjoy these 5 consecutive reports !

There Be Gunnes!

As is always the case, despite having far too many figures I managed to pick a list for Roll Call last weekend which meant I needed to buy and paint up some more figures.

This time it was a 25mm artillery piece for my WOTR Lancastrian army, which with all my 25mm artillery being decidedly TYW was just too much of a stretch to morph across from stuff I already had.

A quick peruse of the various manufacturers threw up Front Rank Figurines, who I haven't actually bought anything from before (that I can remember...). They have a very nice set of 100YW and WOTR ranges, and a special-buy pack of gunners and crew with both a heavy and lighter gun included.

This ended up being what I bought, and I'm pleased to say both that it arrived quickly and the figures looked as good in the metal as they did in the professionally painted photos from their website.

This chap in the foreground has ended up with more of a casting line that I'd have ideally liked. It would have been easy enough to scrape off with the edge of a craft knife, but it appears that I missed it in my hurry to get them painted.

So, this team were ready in double-quick time to take to the table for the first time last weekend.

How did they do? You'll find out soon enough once the reports are posted I guess...!

I Sea People!

After being somewhat impressed with a Sea People army last year at a competition in Ireland I've added a few more of the excellent ex-Gladiator Black Hat figures now sold by Fighting 15's  to my New Kingdom Egyptian army such that I can now also field a full Sea People force.

For the Medium Foot I've kept all of the similarly-hatted guys together to give some vague impression of different tribal sub-groupings fighting as pseudo "units"

I didn't really buy enough figures though to make that work for the close formation units, especially as I added in a load of random spare Egyptians and other biblical and loincloth-clad waifs and strays from the parts box to make up the numbers, so the Heavy Foot are a bit more of a mysterious rabble.

Having originally bought the first half of this lot many years ago I'm actually quite pleased that I still had the same flesh wash (GW) to make the new figures look consistent with the old ones as well.

I even picked up some tribes that I didn't have any of first time around.

The colours are entirely speculative - but these are really well animated and easy to paint figures so they may well be sweeping across a table at you sooner than you think!

Oi! You! Peasants!

The last (for now) iteration of the Great Biblical Army Painting Frenzy is three units of levy.

They fit naturally in the Assyrian army, where the high quality (and cost) of many of the line troops means that adding in some levy occasionally may well be a good idea, but there are other armies than can also use some. too.

With that in mind I chose to use Museum's Minoan and Mycenean range as the basis for these units, making them up out of naked spearmen and bowmen, together with a couple of slinger figures - as how much more generic can you get if you haven't got a uniform at all?

The paint job is kinda simple!

I guess if I ever try and run more than he 9 proper Mycenean spear units I own I could even press-gang these to serve as extra (ill-equipped) spearmen!

Yet more Assyrians...

Finalising (I hope...) the Assyrian project, and having actually looked at what might be a viable list before buying the figures this time I've added some Heavy Swordsmen and Javelinmen to my Assyrian army.

All of these figures are still from Museum Miniatures - it does mean I only have round shields rather than a mix of tower shields and round ones, but hey, I still like them !

For ADLG I'm basing Javelinmen in 5's to a base. These are listed as "Aramaean Infantry Auxiliary spear" on the Museum site, and have an actual Assyrian soldier in the middle of the base as getting two sets of 5 figures out of a single pack of 8 Arameans was sadly beyond me!

These guys count as Swordsmen in the rules, so I've tried to keep the number of upright-held-spear spearmen down somewhat and use a lot of swordsmen in the front rank.

The guy in the second rank with a crested helmet is an Urartian Infantryman according to Museum, but his shield is the same size as the Assyrian figures so he can sneak in as a second ranker pretty easily. Painting the crest black also means it doesn't jump out at you as being different.

The blue shields will mostly be used as the Elite units, with red as the default colour for normal line infantry.

Mahoosive Camels!

Whats that coming over the hill? Is it a Monster ?

Or is it a Museum Miniatures Midianite Bedouin Camel?

Having bought a dozen of the aforementioned creatures recently to flesh out an allied contingent for my Assyrians my plan was to use some old Essex bow-armed camel riders I had kicking about as the Light Camels and use the double-crewed Midianite ones as the Medium Camelry with bows in the core Early Bedouin ally.

Museum figures are made of a really strong but pliable metal compound, so tweaking one of the bowmen's arms and cutting off his bow to turn him into a flag holder to create a Commander/General figure was fairly easy to do;

But just have a look how these beasts compare size-wise to the Essex camels !

They are great figures, even allowing for the single pose - but boy are they huge!

The Paphlagonians survive a varnish experience

Much to my relief, the ink-washed Xyston figures did come through a spray varnish this morning unscathed.

If anything it seems to have helped highlight the definition and texture of their silk-effect uniforms.

As you can see from the left shoulder of the chap in the front left corner of this base, there has still been some colour-bleed between the different inked colours, but whether it's something which is worth (or even possible) to touch up without making it look worse is questionable.

Now all I need to do is steel myself to grab a very fine brush and paint in their headbands...

15mm Xyston Paphlagonians & Takabara

There's plenty of early classical era armies which have a handful of "Persian Takabara", "Paphlagonian", "Arachosian" or other "Generic Eastern-ish Minor Nation" Medium Infantry, armed either with javelins or spears.  These guys are never vital, but often "nice to have" - especially as Javelinmen in L'Art de la Guerre to give an army a nice little anti-elephant force.

In the same Attack! purchase from Damian at Donnington as the recently-finished Egyptian Marines now come some Xyston Takabara and Paphlagonian infantry to fill that particular gap.

These figures have Thracian-style shields which need to be glued onto the figures (using my standard 2-part epoxy liquid metal).

The shields were close enough in shape that I was able to dig out some unused LBMS Thracian transfers - sadly I only had 4 left, meaning I had to actually paint the other ones myself (nightmare!)

The uniforms are done almost entirely in inks - not even washes, proper Windsor and Newton ink (amazon affilate link) on a white base coat.

This is a technique I've used on Persians in the past, as it gives a distinctive "silks" effect. There are only a handful of colours in use, namely Blue, Vridian, Deep Red and Peat Brown (the latter being on the leather gilets some of the guys are wearing, which were painted either leather brown or Skeleton Bone as a base colour).

The end result is a pretty bright and cheery set of unit, and with shields which don't look too badly out of place even with a few LBMS ones in the front rank as well.

The challenge with using ink as a main colour is that it doesn't fully dry - painting anything next to an inked area leads to the ink bleeding into the new, liquid colour.

That also makes applying varnish by brush almost impossible too - hence these not (yet) being matt varnished, and also not (yet) having painted leather straps as headbands on some of the figures.

My aim is to use a spray varnish instead of trying to brush one on, but at the moment it's too cold outside to risk spraying them.  After that they will look more matt, and be easier to handle.