Showing posts with label rome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rome. Show all posts

7 Feb 2024

28mm Imitation Legionaries (aka Aventine Thorakitai)

 A key part of many of the Later Successor armies are the "imitation" Legionaries, where Alexander's marshalls decided to copy Rome's successful pilum+sword+shield formula, and have a tentative go at moving beyond the Greek-originated spear+shield approach. This is pretty neat, and adds variety to a wall of pikes or spears, so adding a couple of units of Imitation Legionaries to my Successor collection has always been a bit of a must. 

Other than knowing that these guys were copying Roman tactics however, there's not a massive amount of evidence for where they sit on the "Look like Romans <-> Look like Greeks" spectrum, giving a reasonable amount of leeway for choosing figures for them. 

And, in the end, I actually didn't even "choose" which figures, instead finding a couple of packs of Aventine guys in the collection of a late clubmate which seemed to fit the bill. 

It turns out on closer examination of the Aventine website that they are techically Thorakitai, but I felt that the spears that they come with were short enough (and chunky enough) to pass for pilum-style heavy throwing spears.

The other consideration (apart from "I had these already") was that having a "Greek" flavour to the figures might actually be better than having "Roman" style armour and helmets - after all, it would surely have been the style of fighting that the Successor generals would have wanted these guys to emulate, not their fashions and haberdashery?   


Adding in some head swaps from the same pack of Aventine heads that I'd used earlier on some of the Phalanx greatly increased their variety.

When combined with gluing the shields on at a variety of heights, and posing them at different angles I ended up creating a couple of units where you really have to look twice to notice that there is only one figure pose for the non-officer infantry.


The shield patterns are simple Roman-style black transfers from Veni Vidi Vici - both sets of shields are done with Contrast paints over a white base, which I have found gives a great gradient of texture on a flat surface like a shield, as the paint pools at one side of the flat surface as it dries. 

For the "Blue" unit I also did a pale blue (normal paint) background patch where the transfer would go before applying the transfer. This was because the Contrast paint was too dark to really work well with a black transfer. I had considered white transfers, but thought they might look a bit bland compared to black.

I also added in a plastic flag - I'm not entirely sure which set it was from, but it's big, and it has an LBMS transfer in the middle of it that I had to blend in by mixing paint to match the small postage-stamp bit of the transfer. 


So, that's pretty much all of the Heavy Infantry for my Successors completed - other than another couple of Phalanxes, which I'm putting off for the time being, as the thought of all that hand-drilling is rather intimidating. 

And, of course, being rather lovely Aventine metal figures, these are the "heaviest" of the Heavy Infantry in the army by quite some margin!

Hopefully these guys will make their debut at Beachhead in the ADLG competition this coming weekend (unless I end up playing in the 15mm pool to help even up numbers!)   


  

7 Oct 2023

Roman Army Museum & the Vindolanda Fort

 The final tranche of photos from the epic trip to (and from) the Sighian Dubh competition in Irvine are now up and posted on this website, and feature a run-through of some of the key Hadrians Wall-adjacent history sites in the north of England

In plain english that means the Roman Army History Museum, and the nearby Vindolanda archeological site and museum on the northern border of the Roman Empire.

All of the photos we took are online on my website here , but hhere is a small smattering of them as well to give you a taster of the site.













You've already seen the "How big is that ballista" photos, so now is a chance to immerse yourself in the rest of Rome's northern border's history !

19 Jul 2023

How big is that ballista again?

On a recent gaming trip to Scotland, Dave ("from the podcast") and I dropped into the Roman Army Museum, which is near the Vindolanda fort and is part of the same group of museums allowing entry with a single ticket.

There's a fair bit of stuff to go through from this trip, most if not all of which will make it to this site eventually - but I thought these reconstructued ballistae were pretty interesting in wargaming terms, mainly due to their (small) size.


The one on the left is apparently a millimeter-perfect reconstruction based on an actual ballista frame discovered at Xanten-Wardt in North West Germany in 1999 - and it is very clearly man-portable and designed to fold up, to the extent that you could almost imagine Roman soldiers using it in pairs with one offering his shoudler as a tripod as if they were a WW2 German MG34 team! 


OK, that may be pushing it a bit, but bottom line is this is a pretty small weapon, which got me thinking as to whether we wargamers have been somehow hypnotized into thinking ballistae were all much bigger than this simply because the many small-scale metal castings we own of ballistae are, well, 'bigger' than this too.

Looking at how small and delicate the real thing looks however, I started to wonder if a 15mm sculptor and caster might struggle to make something with these proportions - the legs look almost too spindly to confidently reproduce in metal at that scale for starters - so instead might end up designing and casting a bigger, cruder version that actually works on the tabletop without breaking at first contact with a wargamers thumb and forefinger. 

So, taking this train of thought further, are our wargamers mental images of tactical ballistae are in fact much bigger than they actually were because of the technical limits of 20th Century spin-casting technology - not the limits of 1st Century wood and metalworking?   


Looking at such a small and portable device it was also very easy to imagine a Roman legion or auxiliary unit setting up a few of these and pinging off a sustained barrage of bolts at a distant enemy, either encamped or even just gesticulating angrily at them from the top of a nearby hill. 

In terms of a "mass battle" of many thousands that we wargamers often simulate the effect of this still may not have been all that significant, but walking through the countryside near Hadrians Wall, and seeing the size of the garrison at Vindolanda you can easily imagine that the norm would have been much smaller actions - where a sustained volley of well-aimed long range bolts may indeed have had a quite dramatic effect on the morale of a tribal warband numbering in the dozens, rather than the tens of thousands.

So, some idle speculation to accompany these pictures of torsion artillery - but, even if its nonsense it did make me think, and make me also realise that no matter how well read you may be, it's still always useful to get out there and walk the course occasionally!

2 Jul 2023

And now for something a smidge different : The Battle of Trebbia

 This website is unashamedly a bit competition-gaming orientated (no sh-- Sherlock!) but occasionally I do play other sorts of games, and with Dan H from the US putting out a series of Punic Wars scenarios on the ADLG Facebook group using pretty standard sized armies, the opportunity to do a club-night refight using some little-seen classic Roman figures was too good to miss out on.

Just to prove it happened as much as anything else, I also brought along my camera and took a load of photos to cook up a battle report as well.

The battle features a Roman army with lacklustre leadership and questionable morale against Hannibal, who has the advantage of choosing his ground, laying an ambush, and having a full head of thick luxurious hair (resulting in a post-match analysis from him delivered in the style of a Pulp Fiction era Samuel L Jackson).

In this game I commanded the inexperienced, wet and tired Roman legions in a game where setup was entirely pre-scripted and the first turn saw both sides pictched straight into battle - meaning I was hoping from the off that the martial skills of the Legions would help me change history and confound Hannibals cunning plan!

Read on for the report 


5 Jun 2023

The Gauls at Roll Call - 5 new ADLG match reports

 Having wheeled out (see what I did there..?) the Assyrians in a 25mm period at last year's Roll Call tournament, this time around I had resolved to dive into the somewhat deeper and more murky 15mm pool to give yet another rarely-seen army a proper outing post-Covid.

The theme was a somewhat intriguing "Roman Pond" - armies who might have been able to go paddling in the Med in the timeline encompassed by any of the Roman Republic or Empire armies in the ADLG book, which cut off most of the Cataphract-heavy options from a more traditional Roman themed period, making players armychoices rather different (aka altering the "meta") as a result too. 

With that in mind, and a wish to continue to test some of the less fancied armies and new v4 rules, I settled eventually on the often overlooked but in theory quite popular Gauls.

The outcome was the following 5 extremely verbose battle reports full of the usual nonsense of speech bubbles, laboured metaphors, hyperbollix language and out of place references to local foodstuffs - but this time with post-game analysis from Asterix & Obelix (as well as Hannibal)!  

Pull up a baguette, put a pot of Magic Potion on the stove and get ready to read all 5 of these Gallic Battle Reports at your leisure !

20 Apr 2023

Roman Clibanarii

At Warfare last year I accidentally placed in the 15mm ADLG competition, for which part of the prize package was a blister of Forged in Battle 15mm Roman cavalry.

These chaps were Clibanarii on half armoured horses and armed with Kontos, bow & shield, from the Early Imperial era - a troop type I rather unusually didn't really own (unless you count my repeated and shameless morphing of Early Byzantine cavalry to fulfil that role when and if they were called upon to do so!).

So, I decided to paint these guys up, and to do so with ADLG specifically in mind, as in I painted all 4 bases in slightly different liveries so they could be used as units that would be easy to tell apart if they were in different commands. 

With the EIR and LIR armies only having a couple of these in each list the round dozen were also slightly overkill, so I managed to find some spare unarmoured horses to make one base up without horse armour to play the role of an Average unit, two as standard half-armoured Clibanari and one as a half-armoured unit with a commander figure for an embedded General.  

FiD do seem to throw in extra figures to each pack so I also have 2 spares left over, which are being baked into a separate Commander's base as we speak. 




They were done mostly in Contrast paints on a white base, using Snakebite Leather for the really visible shoulder and skirt leather armour, and (of course) drybrushed Gunmetal on a black base for the actual armour. I spent extra time with a magnifying glass doing some of the detail on their straps and uniforms (if you note the reins for example, they even have two layered colours of leather brown on them for extra depth), which I think has paid off pretty well given it's a level of committment I rarely approach with 15mm figures !

These also look a little more spiffy than usual in these photos as I took the pictures before matt varnishing them, so they still quite literally have a little more sparkle. 

I'm really pleased as to how they have come out, as these FiB figures really do take paint extremely well. The shields are the only "meh" bit, as I was lacking in inspiration and they are so small that it seemed like it would be both too hard to put any design on them. I also feared that any design I did conjure up might just look odd at that small a scale and size anyway.

The set is listed on the FiB site as a Random mix of 12 cavalry, including command. Figure code WE-RM09 Roman Clibanarii, 3rd century

30 Jan 2023

I'm Spartacus!

 I've finally given into the inevitable and started painting a Spartacus Slave Revolt army that I won (in a raffle) at a competition in Rome way back in the summer of 2019 

They are 15mm, mostly Strategia et Tactica figures from Italy supplemented by some Forged in Battle chaps and no doubt all sorts of odds and ends from the bits box too by the time the army is done.


My intention was to do mostof them with a black undercoat and then try a zenithal (ie from above) white spray to try and pick up highlights before actually painting. 

The zenithal spray didn't really work as planned, I suspect because a can of spray paint doesnt eject the paint fast enough to "miss" the undercuts. This meant that they ended up part highlighted and partly undercoated in grey - probably an airbrush would have been better.

To compensate I added a white drybrush to them to really pick up the highlights so I could then aim for a mostly Contrast Paints approach


This is the first test batch taken to completion - I think I have (at last!) managed to make a half-decent job of putting faces on the little blighters as well, with a Darkoath Flesh undercoat and picking out the noses, chins, cheekbones and brows of these well-cast figures with a normal Vallejo skin tone flesh paint.

There are however many more to do... so watch out for them over the next few weeks and months!



20 Jun 2022

Italia '22 - The Worlds in Rome

 Yes, competitive international ADLG yet again, this time with a flight rather than a drive (and so a shorter set of reports) as the Khurasanians take another tilt at the World Championships!



See the Persio-Afghani soldiery revel in 6 games of 15mm L'Art de la Guerre, against two sets of Almughavars, a pair of Indians, a Byzantino and the army of Wallander, sorry, Henry V (a lame Kenneth Brannagh joke in case you missed it) with the usual captions, analysis and in-game hints and commentary.




And, of course, being Italy, there are pictures of prosecco instead of beer!






9 May 2022

3D printed miniatures - the future has arrived (in the post..)

 So... first off I'm nowhere near even thinking about getting a 3D printer. I have far too many armies already, and I have no inclination to pick up what I suspect would be an entirely new additional geeky OCD-generating hobby to complement those I already have! 

Having said that, I have bought a handful of printed 10mm vehicles in the past, some of decidedly "mixed" quality and I have also been watching with interest various discussions online (and even in our own Madaxeman Podcast) about when 3D printing will, seemingly inevitably, start to impact the traditional world of metal (and plastic) production casting of wargames figures.

It was with that investigative mindset that I recently bought a set of 3D printed figures from a seller on Etsy (Small Scale Prints), from the Hannibal vs Rome range designed by Warprinter from Germany. paying a rather remarkable £12 + P&P for some 60 figures.

The range was originally designed for printing at 10mm scale, but the helpful chap at Small Scale Prints was happy to scale them up and print them for me at 15mm size


And these are the models that arrived in the post - printed on strips of 5 in a grey plasticy and rigid material
.  

I'd ordered a mix of the Etruscans and Samnites, planning to use them to bulk out some of my existing Early Roman armies into other Latin states of that era - armies that I was unlikely to use all that often, but which the completist in me fancied trying anyway a couple of times. 

For that sort of thing I wasn't ever going to spend a fortune on, say, Mirliton minis just to leave them in a drawer after a couple of outings, but the idea of having an excuse to take a look at what 3D printing could offer at the moment, and picking up a load of simple to paint minis to bang out quickly was exactly what I was needed to prompt me to buy on in there.    


I went for a white (Halfords spray) undercoat, which took really well - I didn't clean the minis before spraying at all, and then started blocking in the flesh areas, and also putting a black undercoat on the  spots which would end up as metallic.

The material (resin?) used really impressed me - it's light, but very robust, and has just a little flex in it without actually being bendy, and it seems to take paint really well as well.    


The "quick and easy" plan meant that my limited stock of Contrast Paints got the majority vote, so most of the chaps ended up in pastel colours from the GW range. 

The exceptions are the "grey" ones (2nd from right in the row nearest the camera and a fe win the 2nd row too) who are done in a Warlord Games Speedpaint called Holy White, that I quite like the effect of.


From the front they still look pretty chubby and cartoonish at this stage - sort of like Lamming figures of old, but scaled down to 15mm from 25's.


Adding a few more colours - and the inevitable shield transfers of course - has however really made a big difference, and they are really starting to develop some character at this stage. 


The close-up shows a little more shading is still needed


Here they are next to some 15mm Hoplites from Essex and Magister Militum, which I had swapped out the spears from and replaced by broom bristles. The contrast makes the 3D printed spears look huge (and to be fair they are over-sized), but the original Essex metal spears woudl have been much closer visually to the 3D ones. 


From the back they are still "different", but not as much as they looked when they started off. 
 

Here's the almost-finished guys next to some Old Glory Romans - their most likely allies and opponets on the tabletop. I still needed to do a few more think washes on the feathers and faces at this stage


And ta-dah - the finished article, fully based and painted up ready to go to war in ancient Italy! 


Yes, they do still have an air of “Lego” men about them for sure, but I think in some ways that also makes them kinda cute and gives them a real likability factor too (reminscent in some ways of the Lamming 25mm range from back in the day). Stood next to Old Glory 15mm Romans, and at wargaming distances they don't - to me - look all that out of place at all. 

Maybe the best summary is to say that "They are what they are" - simply-designed, low cost figures sculpted for 10mm and scaled up to 15mm, and on that basis I think they succeed admirably. 

I'm really happy with how they have come out, however almost the more interesting thing for me is that having these guys in-hand, I've begun to see just how easy it is soon going to be for gamers - even using fairly basic 3D design skills - to begin to start playing around in 3D, mixing and matching even simplistic "lego-style" body parts to suddenly cook up entirely new, bespoke, limited run armies and figures to add to their collections. 

And, I wil stress again, these guys are not trying or claiming to be anatomically accurate works of art - they are just cheap and cheerful "get em on the table" figures. Other 3D printed options out there, such as the March to Hell armies from 3D Breed , and the 28mm Caballero figures too (of which I have a few in the painting queue as well bought from Fenland Miniatures..) look to be a whole different kettle of fish 

Interesting times indeed!


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