Sunday, August 29, 2010

Norman Army for DBA... In 15mm

For a local gaming campaign with the DBA group here in town, I painted up a West Frankish/Norman army in 15mm. This was my first foray into painting 15mm, and it wasn't as bad as I thought. Generally I've disliked 15mm because of the poor proportions, but the Essex miniatures I have are not too bad, especially the knights.

Here is a shot of the whole army with all options.

Here are a couple of closeups of the general element:
The general is a knight element, so the figures are armoured similarly to the other knights.

Here are all the knights together, the main striking power of the army.
Some closeups of the knights:
Note the charging horsemen with the round shields in the top picture. These guys have older and poorer equipment, but they are charging like knights and in fact they must be knights to fill up the needed knight slots for this DBA army, so I'm assuming they're poorer relations. :)

Here are the less glamourous cavalry and light horse, but important nevertheless.
Some closeups of the cavalry:
I really like Essex's sculpts here. They have a lot of detail, although the faces are rather caricatured, something that seems unavoidable in metals, especially 15mm. Note the round-shield armoured guys, even poorer relatives of the round-shield knights from above?

Now for the less socially important (but not in the game) components of the army, the foot soldiers:
Unfortunately the archers and crossbow psiloi turned out rather blurry. They're actually very nice looking models, however the foot soldiers seem to have much worse proportions (big-headitis) than the cavalrymen.

The campaign is coming up soon, so I'll see how well a knight-heavy army will do. It helps that most of the opposition are blades or warband. :)

Sunday, August 8, 2010

1/72 Romans for DBA/HOTT

I've finished painting the DBA Marian Roman army using 1/72 miniatures. This can also be used for Hordes of the Things pretty much as is. Well, maybe I'll figure out some mythological elements to add to it.

Here are the general and cavalry elements. The general and the standard bearer are from HaT's Roman command set, and the rest are HaT's Celtic cavalry, representing this Roman general's mercenaries. (At this period in time the Romans' own equestrian class was pretty much gone.)
A close-up of the general element.

These are the two psiloi elements for the army. They are from HaT's Alexander's light infantry box and represent generic ancient Greek archers.

These are the blade elements, the backbone of this army. All the miniatures are Caesar's Republican Romans. They are nicer miniatures than HaT, but I don't think they're up to the standards of the best Caesar has done. There are 8 blade elements in total, and they are some of the most powerful units in the game.


Close-ups of two pila-armed units, in the previous pictures they were hiding in the back.

Finally the Roman camp, which I built hastily and is still unfinished. I'm going for a palisade march camp type of thing, maybe with some more content in the middle. This is meant to be a DBA camp, but I'll use it as a HoTT stronghold until I can think of something better.

I had a lot of fun painting for DBA, and I'll be doing more of them in both 1/72 and 15mm.

Monday, August 2, 2010

I'm Alive, Really

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I've actually been refocusing my efforts to DBA, both in 15mm (no!) and 1/72 scale. I've finally come to the conclusion that DBA is better to play than Basic Impetus, and I'm going to base everything for DBA instead. Currently, I'm working on a 1/72 scale Marian Roman army that can be used for both DBA and HotT. Photos to come...