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!
20 Jun 2022
Italia '22 - The Worlds in Rome
10 Jun 2022
Drive to the Rhine - An ADLG Beer n'Castles German mini break
With ADLG taking vigorous root in Germany's Ancients competition scene, Two Daves and a Madaxeman took a road (and rail) trip across France, Belgium and Germany and on the way ended up in a variety of castles, museums, cathedrals and of course schitzel-serving bierkellers - all of which you can now share in too!
Sandwiched inbetween two epic travelogues are 5 Madaxeman Match reports as the Palmyran army of the ever-feisty Zenobia takes on Arabs, Byzantines (twice), the Might of Imperial China, and the Xia Xia Nomad Empire in a series of battles
The reports also feature a band new educational component, in the shape of a suite of painstakingly accurate and fully researched German exclamations and a number of entirely plausible German compound words as well.
To top it all off there is also an accompanying podcast to listen to as well.
Click through and enjoy the road trip !
18 May 2022
Charlemagne - The Emperor has Arrived!
A Carolingian army has been sat on the to-do shelf for a couple of years now - I bought it partly to see what Baueda figures looked like in the metal, and partly as I had already bought 1 dozen of their mounted Carolingian archers with a vague thought of adding them to some generic Gothic cavalry and cobbling together a morph army at some stage.
Digging into it a bit more I had soon realised that the whole army needed to be, well, "Carolingian-looking" though, hence the purchase.
Over the past year I'd added some more Forged in Battle cavalry through a few eBay purchases, and that had both bulked out the army and made it harder to begin to paint as well.
However after a road trip to Aachen, seat of the Carolingans and interment place of Charlemagne himself I became inspired enough to pick up the spray can, and to give them a quick and colourful (mostly Contrast) paint job to get them table-ready, in part as I had to paint something to get away from rigging more little ships, and in part as Aachen Cathedral is so fabulous that I convinced myself I didn't need to paint the soldiers all in Middle Ages style duns and tans, as this dude had some style, and also some money to splash around.
The end result is a fairly over-enthusiastic and colourful army with all of the possible options;
These are Baueda - their horsemen don't mix with FiB's very well as the Baueda ones have very narrow horses and V-shaped riders legs to fit on them, and the FiB ones are chubby beasts with suitably arch-shaped riders legs - so the two manufacturers provide (mostly) separate parts of the army
This is the same unit from the back. There seemed a lot of red and blue in some of the contemporary depictions of the Carolingain military I found, so I felt comfortable giving these "better quality" guys a bold uniform red cloak look.
FiB horsemen in leather armour, as Medium cavalry. Of course, LBMS shields.
The Horse Archers - a Baueda special, painted ages ago and now rebased to the same scheme as the rest of the army
Armoured cavalry from FiB (maybe a couple of Baueda boys sneaking in there too)
Baueda infantry, apart from the unit in the centre front, who are FiB with the more distinctive Carolingian helmets. Because the Baueda chaps are fairly non-specific they may appear as Saxons or something at some point in future too.
From the back the Contrast Paint style really shows up well.
FiB Light Horse. I only needed 2 bases, so mixed in a few of the other riders with the Medium cavalry
Javelin skirmishers. Fairly weedy dudes, not sure how long their ankles will survive in-game handling TBH
And, the whole set - 38 bases including Generals. I suspect some Vikings will also freelance as mercenaries at some point when they finally get on the table too.
There are even more photos in the 15mm photo gallery of these dudes.
14 May 2022
Victrix Fireflies... at last...
What with Victrix selling their 1/144th scale tanks in rather unruly packs of 6, and already having some of their "standard" Shermans the OCD Wargamer in me has been dithering for quite some time about whether I should replace my perfectly servicable (..yet not quite the same as the Victrix ones) Fireflies, I think from PIthead, with some from Victrix to match the rest of the fleet.
Having been unable to find any on eBay at a sensible price, this had been going on for some time until finally a mate suddenly decided he wanted some too, so the possibility of a pack-split became the solution to my tight-fisted dilemma
And this is the result:
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
Interesting times indeed!
19 Apr 2022
Roll Call Reports - in Video Format
After the success (over 600 views!) of the Beachhead video reports, and also with a rather extensive writeup of the 4-day trip to the Braubach tournament in the pipeline I've decided to put my 5 games at Roll Call out as a video as well.
You can therefore see in rather over-saturated detail the Mighty Assyrians take on some Galatians, Romans, Classical Indians, Warring States Chinese and finally the Seleucid Empire in 5 HD-quality badly-narrated reports which are available now on the Madaxeman YouTube Channel.
Yes, you can now spend just under an hour waiting for the theme tune to crop up and interrupt my inane ramblings as I try and graft some semblance of tactical nous onto the generally shambolic shufflings of the 28mm army of Assyria (which has also featured heavily on this blog after being painted during lockdown).
17 Apr 2022
Black Seas - Rigging Hell!
OK, maybe it's not all that bad, but the pun needed using anyway so ... I now have a handful of fully-completed ships for Warlord Games Black Seas game, and they are so spiffing that I've popped a load of them in the lightbox and taken some snaps, some of which are previewed here.
There is a whole page of these, together with some info on how they were painted and some tips I picked up on how to do the rigging as well on the main website
If you want to see more there is a whole page of these, together with some info on how they were painted and some tips I picked up on how to do the rigging as well.
Ship Ahoy!
7 Apr 2022
Donnington Clubmen
One of the cool new units in v4 of ADLG are the Palestinian Clubmen who appear in a number of the later Roman armies.
With o-one really making figures for them, I had proxied a few Legio Heroica arabs to act as medium Clubmen, to which I have now added some close formation Heavy Infantry using Donnington's Arab MUF10 Sudanese lutatman from their New Era Crusades range