Roman Artillery

Continuing the Roman theme, these guys are my scorpion unit for my Imperial Roman army

Again they are Pendraken figures. I've not put them together right as I thought the little box was an ammo box so I mounted the bows on a piece of balsa wood, when in fact I've since found out the little box is supposed to be the weapon mount! These paint up quite nicely as the crew have nice definition in their scale armour so a wash and a quick pass with a drybrush really brings up the armour.

In the game they are pretty rubbish! The ability to ignore armour saves is useful against 5+ save units, but there aren't a lot of them around. Typically as well people will only line up their troops two deep, so the best their ability to penetrate ranks gives you is 4 shots (2 on the front rank and 2 penetrating through to the rear rank). They could be good against heavy cav which generally are 5+ save, but they can't stand and shoot so tend to get the worst of that. I haven't been able to find a decent use for them and generally don't take them, they are not as good as a unit of archers in my opinion.

Of all the rules in warmaster I think light artillery is the one which doesn't work. I know the Bournemouth guys who play a lot of the WMA and maintain Rick's site now have their eyes on updated pike phalanx rules and house rule it at the moment, but I think these need looking at.

Possibilities could be to increase them to 3 stands to give them an extra shot (for a modest pts increase), or giving them a rule in the roman army to reflect their combined arms usage in the legions. Some way of negating their penalty of being unable to retreat (and thus being wiped out if anyone basically contacts them)?

Let me know your thoughts on light artillery

Roman Heavy Cavalry

Thanks for the comments on the recent posts, very much appreciated!

These two units are again Pendraken Imperial Romans. And again a combination of one unit I got in the 1000pt starter army and another I picked up from a friend in a bag of unwanted Romans.

As with a lot of Pendraken packs there is just the one pose in there, which can make like a little boring, I have painted up one unit with red shields and one with blue so I can tell them apart. A lot of people tend to paint small blobs of paint on the rear edge of the base so they can see which stand belongs to which unit as they move them, however I always prefer wherever possible to make slight variations in the paint job so it is obvious.

I've got another unit of the same to paint up, but as with yesterday's archers they are a 0-2 choice for Imperial Rome so the 3rd unit would only ever get use in a campaign or 2000pt scratch game, neither of which happen very often and even in a campaign the odds of getting a territory allowing you to select heavy cavalry is slim!

These guys were again quick to batch paint, but there are some routine casting errors on the horse's bridle that appear on a lot of the models which is a shame. I also think in hindsight they have a horsehair crest on top of their helmets? I've just painted it in silver...

I'm hopefully having a game of Infinity tonight, so if I can get any pictures I'll report back.

Roman Archers

I've got a fair few units of archers in my Roman force. You get one unit in the Pendraken 1000pt starter army, and I then picked up another 100 or so Pendraken figures from a friend who wasn't using them, which gave me a second unit. Finally I picked up a couple of packs of Pendraken greek archers at Colours one year. I thought with the addition of some Pendraken Roman command figures they would make great auxiliaries.

Unit 1 - "The Blues"

Both Roman auxiliary archer units

Greek/Cretan auxiliary/mercenary archers. For these I gave the command stand a complete first rank of Roman figures with the 3 command figures and a "1st archer". I wanted to make them stand out from the rest of the Roman force which is a bit homogeneous, hence the green tunics! I've still got one more unit to paint up, but to be honest as archers are a 0-2 choice in an Imperial Rome army for Warmaster Ancients I will only use the 3rd unit once in a blue moon for a 2000pt game, so it doesn't seem necessary at the moment!

The figures for both types from Pendraken are solid without being spectacular. Obviously only have one pose does make for a slightly boring job painting them, but on the flip side you can race through them batch painting. The tunics and hat brims on the greeks are nice, as there is enough recess that a base-wash-spot highlight really make them "pop".

German symmachiarii - Warmaster Ancients

Sticking with the Warmaster theme for now, these are some of my first 10mm figures, but I've never got round to taking pictures of them until now.

They are part of Pendraken's Imperial Roman starter army and are two units of German javelinmen symmachiari. I painted and based them before I had any rules or any idea, so the base size is a little too big (~45mmx20mm) and I've based them pretty densely for skirmishers. I could easily have got 4 units from these figures. I've never really been too bothered about re-basing them though. I don't tend to use them much really and I'd rather just buy some more skirmishers for Rome than rebase these.

They are nice little figures though, the pose is a little odd, below is a side on version from the Pendraken website:

But they paint up fairly quickly and Pendraken seem to use a much harder white metal mix than say Magister Militum, so the spears stay rigid and don't bend when you look at them! The main disadvantage is the single pose. However this can easily be got around with a bit of foresight. If I was going to do skirmishers (for pretty much any N/W/E European ancient's army), I'd buy one pack of each of the above mentioned Germans, the Dacian javelinmen (which I used as part of a mixed warband project) code:AD6

 & Greek javelinmen GRE10:

For £12 you would get 90 figures, in 4 different poses, all of which have javelins, bucklers and bare heads, so are pretty much indistinguishable. If you based them with 5 figures per stand (pretty normal for WMA) that is 6 units with a fair bit of variety.

Gauls - Warmaster Ancients

I'm hoping to get a bit more organised with my blogging in the future, I think I need to try and blog smaller and more often, but we'll see how it goes. I've been doing a lot of Infinity recently, but there is still a fair bit of Warmaster Ancients love around. These are my finished Gauls for my Carthage army. I'm hopeful eventually of expanding these out into an army in their own right, maybe Gauls, maybe ancient brits.

I have painted up 5 more units (15 stands) in total.

These guys are 2 units of Magister Militum gallic nobles, so in my Carthage army they are just standard warband, but if I field a full barbarian army they would be inner circle infantry with an armour save.

I've really gone to town on these and painted individual shield designs freehand, some of them have striped, or tartan effect cloaks, full works!

A super-close-up of the detail work.

I've also done a more basic job on 3 units of Pendraken Gallic warband that I picked up from the Colours wargame show for about £6 for the lot last year. Excellent bargin bin rummage!

All in all that gives me 10 units of allied gauls for Carthage, or 8 units of warband and 2 units of nobles for barbarians

Pendraken Competition Results

Some really amazing winnners in the Pendraken 10mm painting comp. Anyone interested in grand scale models should check out the winners thread on their forum here.

My chariot entry was accepted into the comp even though it was a few minutes past the deadline (thanks!) but sadly didn't win a prize. There were 5 judges who gave 3/2/1 rankings for their favourite entries and in the vehicle category there were 11 different entries all polling at least 1 point! So a really spread field. The winner was some way out in front

 Camouflaged Sherman, by fred12df

And then the other entries were all really close apparently, with this one sneaking into 2nd place.

Sci-Fi Marines APC, by kassad

What they have now done is all entries that received at least 1 vote by the judges have been placed into a community vote and my chariot made it through! So it got at least a bit of love from the judges!

My Chariot

Shame I couldn't get the composite picture done in time, especially as it seemed so tight for 2nd place and the more detailed shots could have sneaked me over the line, but definitely need to make sure next time there is a competition I leave plenty of time for sorting out the pictures. If you are a member of the Pendraken forum you can vote for the "people's choice" on this thread. No pressure to support my entry. ;)

Pendraken Painting Competition

Pendraken are celebrating the fact they have passed 500 members of their on-line Forum with an inaugural painting competition.

Entry is free and you need to post a single picture (montages allowed) of your entry. It is then judged by a panel of experts. There are 4 categories:

Infantry - 3-10 models on a single base
Mounted - 3-6 models on a single base
Vehicle - single based, or unbased vehicle
Open - anything goes up to 60x60mm base

Prizes in each category are £25 and £10 credit for Pendraken online store. There is also an extra bonus prize, which is all unplaced entries go into a massive community vote for the people's favourite, with will win £20 credit for hobby materials (paint, flock, etc)

Entries open on 1st Feb and run until 28th.


I'm going to try and enter all the categories, I've got enough painted to do this already on a speculative basis, but I know I can do a lot better if I really pull out the stops. I'll probably enter one of my custom Gallic warband in the infantry, a converted British Chariot in the vehicle and I'm not decided on the many different mounted bases I've got for Pendraken cavalry! The open could be really interesting, 60x60mm is pretty big and I reckon with some small conversions, a bit of height on the base, some kind of cavalry charge diorama could be in order.

Making the most of Pendraken Ancient British Chariots

A while ago I picked up a couple of packs of Pendraken Ancient British chariots off Ebay as I fancied painting something a bit different and I also thought that with my Carthage Gallic allies, Imperial Roman skirmishers and Roman Light Horse I could probably put together a small proxy British (or Celtic Irish) force for Warmaster Ancients.

The individual components of the chariot kit are fairly well detailed (for Pendraken), but when I put them together as a dry-fit there seemed to be two obvious missing parts - an axle, or at least axle-stubs on the chariot frame to attach the wheels to and a yoke or some kind of harness to attach the chariot to the team of two horses. Looking at the Pendraken site and other pictures of the models online it is obvious that these two parts are not part of the model. You are just meant to glue the wheels to the frame and leave the horses and chariot hanging and hope no-one notices!

As I was primarily doing these as a modelling/painting project I decided to convert these chariot by scratch building the missing parts, so that the finished article was a bit nicer. This is a step-by-step of the process as I know it is a fairly popular kit.

1) The base of the chariot is about 8mm, to attach the wheels I used a piece of florist's wire about 11mm long. The wire is is about d=0.9mm.

2) There is a small indent in the back of the wheel, you just need to clean this up with a pin-vice really, not drill to any depth into the hub, final depth of hole ~1mm.



3) dry-fit wheel, chassis and wire axle, then glue axle directly to base of chariot and attach the wheels. This pictures shows the axle, underneath the frame on a finished chariot



4) now you need to make a yoke to attach the horses. The exact dimensions will depend on how you are basing them, but I used another piece of 0.9mm florist's wire (which is fairly bendy) about 23mm long. You need to bend the wire into an elongated "M", with the backs of the horses in the top of each arch and the shaft from the chariot in the base of the central "V".



5) I haven't done any research on Ancient British chariot harnesses, I've just gone for what felt right, so you may want to vary the exact shape of this yoke.

6) Finally assemble the rest of the model. I found it was better to first glue the two horses down and the yoke over their backs, let this set and then glue your chariot sub-assembly from (3) to the base and the yoke. This is mainly because you have a very small area of contact between the round chariot wheels and your figure-base compared to the size and weight of the assembly, and being able to rest/glue the front of the shaft to the solid yoke helps keep it stable while the glue dries. You can also gently file down the bases of the wheels to give a flatter contact surface to glue to the base, but be very careful not to overdo it! Lastly attach the chariot team.

These ones of mine just need the chariot crew painting up now before they are ready to go.



I hope this has been useful, if so leave me a comment to let me know. ;)

A Gaul-ing piece of misfortune

The Gallic allies for my Carthage force are now finished, but sadly they will be my last Warmaster unit for a while as I've broken the thumb on my right-hand and it's in a cast. I can paint a bit with my left, but not steadily enough for 10mm!

Enough with my misfortune, onto the picture of the Gauls!

There are 5 units in total. That's 15 stands, or 120 figures!


They are not actually a "gallic" warband, in figure manufacturer's speak, as I used a mixture of different figures. I used 4 different packs of vaguely hairy barbarian types from Pendraken and mixed them through the units. My justification is that personally I feel all these barbarian hordes contemporary with the Romans would have been a fairly mixed rabble, with mixed equipment. It is more than likely that some would have scavenged mail off dead enemies, possibly helmets and shields as well.

The packs used were:
Gallic Warband AG1 (Long shields, moustaches, bare torsos. 3 poses; sword, 2x spear)
Dacian Javlinman AD6 (small oval shields, long spears, cloaks, full beards. 3 poses)
Anglo Saxon Great Fyrd AS4 (round shields, short spears, moustaches. 3 poses)
Anglo Saxon Select Fyrd AS3 (Round shields, chainmail, moustaches. 3 poses; axe, sword, spear)



I batch painted them on painting sticks (like lolly sticks), slowly building up to each model being individual. I'd paint an even number of models with 3 different hair colours, then paint alternate models with 5 different shield colours, then 3 different tunics. Finally I based them up and hand painted on some random shield designs with research on the internet into Gallic shields. The result is that even without any individual shield designs I can have 540 unique combinations of model and colour scheme. Resulting in a truly random, but hopefully unified, rabble.

These pictures have been taken using a backdrop, which I haven't used before (just a random landscape from the internet), and I'm fairly pleased with the result.

I'm going to take pictures of anything else I have finished and maybe some terrain as well. On the upside my hand means I'll be bored and more likely to update the blog more often, the downside is I'm not sure what I'll find to blog about!!

Romans in Close Up

So I am well overdue for an update on Warmaster. I thought I'd post up some pictures of my Imperial Roman force. They were my first 10mm models, all from Pendraken. I bought the Imperial Roman 1000pt army deal direct from Pendraken, but then I was fortunate enough to know a guy who was selling off some 3rd or 4th hand Pendraken romans, and I got another ~500pts for £5. They needed striping and some love and attention, but they've come up pretty well.

As I had a grand total of 3 of the Pendraken mounted officers I stuck two to coins to be my Tribunes and then made a little vignette for my Legate. It is just a coin built up to a mound with pink foam, and the normal mounted officer figure with a centurion and a standard bearer. I cut off the normal unit standard and drilled out the bearer's hands, made a simple banner frame from florists' wire and then a square banner from brass sheets, which I got by cleaning and cutting up a tomato puree tube! I finally stuck the very top of the unit standard (the hand) onto the top of the frame. The figures themselves were not painted in any special way that was different to the rank and file. The only difference was the banner that was painted free-hand with a 00 brush.

These are the veteran legion, but are painted in the same way as the normal legion. I free-hand painted the shield design to add a little "pop" to the figures. I've varied the design across the 6 units I've painted up. These (the 1st Cohort) have 4 diagonal "horns" painted at each corner and then a single vertical line through the middle of the shield. The second and third cohorts have 2 and 3 vertical lines respectively. The 4th have a single vertical wavy line, the 5th a double vertical wavy line, and finally the 6th have a single and single horizontal wavy line. This helps me tell the units apart on the battle field.

The two Tribunes - one on a black horse, one on a white.











Medium or heavy cavalry, as these models are larger I tried to add a bit of variety to them by painting on markings on the horses, if you look really carefully you can see some have blazes or stars on their nose (2nd from left, front row) , and some have white "socks" (3rd from left, front row, left front leg). It was quite quick to add and I let the mood take me, if I was too messy with a star, it became a blaze, or a full white face for example.






A close up of the 1st Cohort command unit. I painted the animal furs on the musician and standard bearer as leopard, to add a certain prestige to the unit! It was actually fairly easy, just painted the yellow colour as normal (base coat and brown wash), then adding 3 black spots with a brush tip in a regular pattern.






Unfortunately the Onager model I got cheap was incomplete. Well I assume it was incomplete, but as there are so few pictures of Pendraken models, and no assembly instructions I just assumed it was incomplete! I've since seen this model put together completely differently, so I could be wrong! There were only 2 parts the base frame and then a 3 point frame. I studied the Onagers in Rome:Total War and also looked up some sketches on the internet of Roman Onagers, and built a throwing arm from plasticard tubing, then used a small bit of bent wire in the end and made a rope and throwing cup from greenstuff and twisted brass wire. God knows if it is a correctly put together model, historically accurate, or physically plausible! But it looks pretty cool, and to be honest that is my main aim.

My long-term plans for this army are to buy some Triarii and use them as veteran legions in my Imperial List, but also be able to use them as Triarii in a Republican Roman List, just proxying my Imperial Legion figures for Princeps or whatever. As its 10mm and they are nicely painted I hope to never have the misfortune to come across someone for whom that would be a problem to play against. ;)

Thanks for looking and I hope to have some pictures of Carthage soon.

Some Pretty Pictures

I thought I'd put up some basic pictures of the finished Imperial Roman Army.

This is the Pendraken Imperial Western Roman army deal, along with a handful of other packs I got second hand from a friend. Comes out to about 1500pts at the moment.

General
2 Tribunes
1 Veteran Legion
5 Legion
4 Auxiliaries
2 Archers
2 Skirmishers
2 Cavalry
1 Scorpion
1 Onager

I've got 3 Scorpion models spare as well, so I may stick them onto 2 bases to have a second unit of them, and I have 2 more Legion units that are unpainted.

The two main reasons for not painting up the last 2 legion unit are that, although in his design notes Rick Preistley says that a unit is representative of a cohort (about 400 men), I quite like the idea of each unit being a century (80 men), I guess because there is slightly less abstraction involved. That being the case there are 6 centuries in a cohort, so I have currently painted a roman formation. So that I'd probably want to paint the next units in a slightly different way, different coloured tunics or shields for example, and at the moment I can't decide on colours!

The other reason is that I have hand painted the shield designs on. That's 6x3x10 = 180 shields give or take. And that takes it out of you, so a break from roman shields is called for!

I'm pretty happy with the way the shields came out though. All have the diagonal "eagle wings", the first century have 1 vertical line, 2nd - 2 lines, 3rd - 3 lines, 4th - 1 wavy (lightning) vertical line, 5th - 2 wavy lines and the 6th (pictured right), have two wavy lines and a single wavy horizontal line.

A Crisis of Scale

Welcome to my new blog. I'm going to be posting up progress of my collections of 10mm Ancients as well as some other stuff as and when the fancy takes me. I collect 10mm Ancients (based for Warmaster Ancients), Infinity, a 28mm Sci-Fi Skirmish game, as well as the staples of Warhammer and Warhammer 40K. However you'll mainly be seeing the ancients stuff here.

I have recently finished an Imperial Roman army made up from Pendraken figures (pictures to follow), and I have just bought some new figures to start making up a Carthage force.

I've tried to do this cheaply, but also to make a nice looking force (one of my primary aims!), and with that in mind I thought I'd go for Pendraken figures for the allied Gallic Warbands (as they're cheap) and Magister Millitum figures for the rest.

These are my first Magister figures and whilst I think the quality of the detail is probably a little better than the Pendraken ones the differences in scale are causing some problems.
Comparison in scale between Pendraken and Magister Millitum Ancients Figures:

The shots below show the size differences between the two manufacturers. The left hand picture has 3 troop type comparisons, (Magister figures are all on the left of the pairs).


1) Carthage spearman and Roman Auxillary

2) Carthage spearman and Roman Legionary

3) Rhodian Slinger and Roman Archer.

The right hand picture shows a Carthage Cavalry and Roman Cavalry

At face value they appear pretty similar, and height wise there is not a lot in it (less than 1mm), however the Magister figures are significantly more "bulky" and have larger heads. The heads aren't really a problem, I personally think that a proper "head size" is somewhere in between the two manufacturers and its not really noticeable when ranked up.

However the bulk could cause more of an issue in mixed forces, it most noticeable in archer/slinger comparison in the left-hand photo. You can see the slinger's legs and torso are quite a bit broader than the archer.

Where this causes problems is in the ranking up of troops on a 20x40mm base. There is just far less "fresh air" between the troops with the Magister models and I personally think that it makes basing 10 models to a base undesirable.

In the picture opposite I have placed 5 Carthage spearmen from Magister and 5 Roman Auxiliaries from Pendraken "shoulder to shoulder" on my cutting mat. A warmaster base is 4 yellow squares wide, so you can see that the Magister figures would be stood almost touching on a base, whereas with the Pendraken ones you have a little bit of room between them (maybe 1mm). It's not much, but it does make a difference.

I've mocked up some bases to demonstrate as well, the left hand base is 10 Magister Carthaginians the middle is 10 Pendraken Romans, and the right is 8 Magister Carthaginians. To my eye the base of 8 seems more practical.

The only problem this creates is that my Roman Legions are 10 to a base, and so it might look odd that 10 figures are fighting 8. Ho hum.