Dismounted Companions - or Hypaspists? Figures too nice not to use..

A rather lightweight painting session to share this time, as a set of the rather lovely Xyston Theban Generals and Leaders pack finally makes it onto the internet, based up here as some close formation infantry for various non-Theban armies.

These figures are really animated nicely, and having swapped them with Dave from The Podcast some time ago I'd been trying to work out what to do with them as I was reluctant to lose them in a wall of hoplites.  Eventually I settled on basing them as close formation infantry to act both as dismounted Companions, or as Alexanders Hypaspists (both in their Heavy Spearmen incarnation in ADLG).

This did also allow me to justify using a couple of Xyston mounted officer figures I had kicking around too, and, more importantly, to have yet another go at a multi-layer, grey base + white top layer "triad" type paint scheme to see if I could make white look, well, "interesting".   

And here they are, replete in their white cloaks and petruges.

I've yet to matt varnish the shields, which are gloss to take the VVV waterslide transfers, as it's been too cold to spray outside and anyway spraying 2 bases is a bit of a waste!

Here's the back view that shows the white layering. It's sort of there, but a bit less distinct than I had hoped. Somehow the lighter layers seem to blend into the base layers when I paint them, as if the darker paint bleeds into the lighter ones as I apply them - maybe I need to matt varnish between coats?

Anyway, they do look like boss-level dudes, so I'm happy with them!

Madaxeman.com meets The God's Own Scale Podcast

This week I've made an appearance as a guest on the (increasingly scale-agnostic) Gods Own Scale Podcast, spending about an hour and a half chatting to Sean about all manner of things "madaxeman" and "ancients competition gaming"-related - and great fun it was too.

Sean is an exceedingly amiable host, and in the course of our chat we covered the dim and distant origins of Madaxeman.com (and how cobbled together it actually all is), the back story of how the Madaxeman Podcast came to be, some of my own personal wargaming history, and finally managed a bit of a shallow dive into the hoary old subject of "competition wargaming" - which, given both Sean and Ken "Yarkshire Gamer" Reilly had both put competition gaming into their own "Wargaming Room 101" on Kens last podcast, was kinda interesting to chew over to say the least.

Sean even managed to spring an "I'm Sorry I Think You're An Arse" topic on me at short notice, so that feature can now claim to have been syndicated to another podcast

You can listen to the episode on the Gods Own Scale Podcast on Podbean, or search for it through your regular podcast provider.

More refurbished Medievals

 Finally... the end of my refurb project for Medieval infantry! 

These are a mix of mostly Mirliton figures, with some Essex added in. All of the shields are pinted designs glued onto glued-together double-thickness business card paper and then varnished to seal them. 

There are even some Two Dragons in here as well as a Museum dismounted knight - the eye however is drawn to the shields so the differences in style and bulk are barely noticable (i think)

I trimmed down the cast-on shields for some of the figures to glue on the card shields - looking at the backs of the shields they are less than perfect, but that isn't really visible at all when they are packed together like this.

These are downloaded designs printed onto paper, glued onto the Mirliton metal shields. I didn;t do these as well as some, as I cut the patterns a little too small but the designs are quite bold so it isn't too bad. 

And all of the three sets of designs for the mixed units.  This will mean I can field the rather underwhelming but pretty Medieval Scandinavian army, or a number of Italian medieval armies with all sorts of different (invented!) cities heraldry.

Museum Z-range Camel Baggage Guards

As a mark of how much my pace of painting has slowed, here's a couple of bases (or packs) of Museum Z-range camel archers I must have bought in the Museum sale back in January! 

These guys are the type who appear as baggage guards for a number of Hellenistic and other Roman-era desert dwelling armies, which I picked up as the Essex camels I had are a little uninspiring (to say the least). 

These were undercoated in white and painted mostly in GW Contrast paints with some other colours added for the details.

This shot shows a Light Camel unit using Essex figures alongside the Museum camels. 

The Essex camels are a little smaller, but viewed from wargaming distances and angles the difference is barely noticable 

This shot shows the "old" Museum double-crewed Biblical Bedouin Giant Camel - still a monster casting, towering over the new Museum figures

 

And here are all three in a procession! 

This pair of Mediocre Medium and Light Camels will be guarding the baggage and frightening enemy Light Horse on a table near you in the near future !

Refurbished Medievals in 15mm

 Another project to suddenly stagger to fruition in the last week has been a load of stripped and repainted Mirliton 15mm Medievals - lovely figures that my previous paint job really didn't do justsice to.

This time around they have all been done with white undercoat (Halfords matt white car undercoat) and the main colours have been added with GW Contrast paints for a bit more "ping".

I've also done printed shields - some stuck onto the Mirliton shields, and some just made out of cardboard and cut to shape. These are the results:

All of these designs were found on Pinterest - the "fish" one on the right in particular is way too detailed for me (or I imagine anyone..) to paint in 15mm, however the other two also come out really strongly too. 

The ones on the left are Mirliton shields, with designs just printed on our home printer, glued on with PVA, trimmed with a very sharp scalpel (new blade time!) and then gloss varnished after painting in the edges.  The ones on the right are glued onto cardboard and cut to shape.

These are two bases of Polearm men - the printed out designs are probably a bit too large for the shields here I think in retrospect,.

The pavises on the left here are a mix of pictures of real pavises in museums, and re-enactors designs I found on Pinterest.

I still have a few more to do, but this is starting to creep towards enough mixed units to field a  Medieval Scandinavian army !

15mm Corvus Belli (plus others..) Spanish infantry

 I've owned a DBA army pack sized force of Corvus Belli 15mm Ancient Spanish for many years, and they have from time to time served as an allied command to the Carthaginians - but I always harboured an ambition to extend it to a full army.

With the demise of Corvus Belli as a casting company for many years this was never really possible, but recently I managed to pick up a second DBA army box from a clubmate (thanks Mike!), add in a few more figures from the bits box and some odd figures from Clive's collection that didn't really fit into any other armies, and end up with what is hopefully going to be a viable Ancient Spanish army for ADLG.

These are the new guys:

6 bases of Impetuous Medium Swordsmen

The colour scheme is a bit random, but I've generally tried to get a lot of red, white and yellow as the dominant colours to make them look, well, "Spanish"-ish.

The central unit here is mostly Xyston figures, which look way bigger than the CB guys in the metal, but are not so bad when based up like this.

These guys have been based in 5's to represent Javelinmen and differentiate them from the Warband -types

These are the find from Clive's collection - they look like old Donnington figures, from both the Spanish and the (sort of) Etruscan type ranges.  

The shields are great - far better than I could manage these days - so much so that they distract from the rather old school statically posed figures. These will be the Celtiberian Internal Allied Tribe Heavy Infantry Swordsmen. 

 

Airfix Time for the LVT

 Having just realised that it's been quite a while since I posted anything on my site, here's some shots of (gasps!) an Airfix kit build (!!) and some other WW2 bits and pieces. 

Yes, a classic Airfix kit picked up at the IPMS Avon show a couple of months ago which I bought and built for a bit of Chain of Command action with the USMC/Japanese island hopping campaign which I've just started playing with a clubmate. 

After a mildly taxing build (I suspect I'm better at building kits than when I was in my teens, but this is a pretty old kit, quite fiddly and also needed a bit of filling... which I'm blaming on the kit rather than my skills!), a spray with Army Painter Army Green, and a heavy dip with Army Painter Soft Tone finished with some drybrushing, this is the result:

Even the stapled together rubber tracks aren’t as obvious as they were last time I think I made this kit back when I was a teenager.!

I was particularly pleased with the Microsol/Microset finished transfers which have ended up with no visible transfer edging at all. 

Here's a shot of the LVT with some 20mm infantry from Plastic Soldier Comany, on "1p" multi-bases from Warbases.

I also bought (on eBay) a sort of tank-like LVT. This is a die-cast pre-paint model which was actually cheaper than the Airfix kit - and didn't need building!  

I again hit this with the Army Painter and then matt varnished it to finish. 

Finally, this is also a die-cast Stuart, resprayed with Army Painter green again, and with some bits-box transfers including the "SQUIRREL" name from the Victrix 1/144th scale Sherman tank set. 

Of course, as soon as it got on table the Airfix kit got shot at once, and then my opponent rolled enough hits to force it to fall back off table immediately! 

  

The only upside was that the Chain of Command rules are so (ahem) randomly organised that we weren't able to find the section that explained what happens in that situation, so I managed to get away without rolling a morale test for losing it!

Line Up, Line Up.. for some Egypto-Greek ADLG action at the Seaside!

The second full set of post-Lockdown match reports hit the South Coast this time in 5 games of Egypto-Greek linear nonsense as a lockdown-repainted set of Hoplites meets some lockdown-rebased Egyptians to cobble together a podcast-busting Saitic Egyptian army to take on all comers in a Greek & Roman World themed event.

Marvel as possibly the most one-dimensional army to hit the table in years attempts to outfox, out play but much more often simply outlast its varied opponents as they take on the Graeco-Indians, Seleucids, Late Romans, Ch'in Chinese and Classical Indians in these 5 ADLG match reports.

As usual they feature all of the nonsense you have by now grown to expect, including comments on local wildlife, restaurant reviews, beer analysis, very bad puns, randomly generated Egyptian curses, priapic wooden war wagons, a smattering of Greek and Egypto-Arabic swearwords and buckets of pictures with somewhat inappropriate captions and speech bubbles.

The reports are online and available to peruse now ! 

Chain of Command 20mm Yanks

 Having languished in a drawer for many years since being bought and painted on a whim way back in 2013 with no real plan as to how they might be used, I've recently liberated a load of 20mm mostly-PSC WW2 Americans from deep storage and used them in some initial forays into Chain of Command.

The first couple of games quickly taught me that my single-based figures really needed to be deployed in teams, and also that I definately needed to make sure I had enough Garand teams (of 3), scout teams (of 2) and support weapons (5-6 guys). 

With a load of 3mm rare earth magnets already in hand, and the figures based on new 1p pieces, Warbases ended up getting a decent little order from me for their "1p" small group bases. With a few metal 20mm figures and a gun added from SHQ, the end result are these teams.

The 6pdr/57mm gun is also on a penny so it can be taken out of the tray, and the tray can be used for other weapons teams.

Some of the PSC HMG teams are too close to put each man on a separate penny, so a couple of the teams have 4 slots, and 3 guys on one slot. By the time the team is reduced to 2 guys it's dead anyway so it doesn't matter than much that they can't all be taken out individually. 

Likewise with this mortar team, where the mortar is attached to one of the team

And the same with this HMG - 5 people, one of whom has the gun. 

This is a 4-slot, 5 man team base

Bazooka team with PSC Sherman

The officer is from a Matchbox 1/76th range of GIs. Great little figure for a leader.