Success---ors!

Still alive,

and this time it is not an euphemism, like it or not the whole country is in quarantine and people is worried. But if you are locked at home and kicking, painting is a good way to employ your energies, especially when your lead mountain is enormous. I have launche a determined attack to my successors lead pile. Last year I basically painted all my old Navigator Miniatures (but I found some odds and ends recently...) and now I am attacking the additions to that army, mainly some Selecucid themed 1st Corps miniatures.

1st Corps successor range is both lovely and exhaustive. They are also on the smallish side of 28mm so they fit well with navigator. I had basically a 12 men group of Seleucid Pikemen and 4 Seleucid companions.  Here are the pikemen:

LBMS shield transfer from the 1st Corps range.

They are very nice figures, the casts are very crisp,  with almost no visible flash. The sculpts themselves are very nice, and in a bag of 8 line pikemen you have plenty of variation.  I have gone for a non-uniform look for them. They are not a formed permanent unit, but the standard recalled military settlers.  Probably I will add more pikemen to this group.  What I will use them for?

Obviously for a Seleucid force... as game wise, SPQR/Clash of Spear for Skirmish, and L'Art De La Guerre for bigger battles.  Now I know that some annoying people yell when you say pikemen and skirmish, but despite their inarticulate black and white vision of gaming (yes I am referring to that idiot on the Lead Adventure forum that basically spam other people threads complaining about this... and then even say he does not play ancients... so mr. Village Idiot?), no one really defined skirmish as type of engagement or size...

For me skirmish rulesets are not by default about skirmishes, but are played at a lower level that full battle games (another pet peeve... stop calling a battle game 'strategy' it is tactical... in the ancient world campaigns were strategic... but well this is a thing coming from stammering fantasy ad sci-fi game designers and players...). Being played a lower level nothing stops us to just focus on a limited area of a larger engagement. You can have part of a phalanx advancing on the table as a part of a scenario and still play with what people calls skirmish rules. It is like when you play a platoon level game set during the battle of Kursk (as in the excellent TFL pint sized campaigns for Chain of Command).  Yet, for some strange reasons some gamer seems completely unaware of telescoping approach to engagements... but let's be honest... some so called wargamers appears to have been produced without a brain... and this is not just happening in hobby wargames... professional wargaming is filled to the brim with them! (Any reference to that scam of KCL wargaming network and its crew of imposters is purely intentional...)

Anyway snarky comments aside, enjoy these pikemen!

Romans!

Okay, a couple of quick posts to show my reasonably recent work.

First a small 12 men unit of Ceasarian Roman legionaries from Warlord. I bought them sprue by sprue in one of their sprues sale. Shields are LBMS.  I like them, and painting them was quite nice, but the annoying part was for the gladius armed ones removing the gladiuses (gladia, if my latin has not gone completely downstair...) from the scabbards. Now it was not that difficutl (advantage of plastic, easy to cut!) but when the manufacturer as pila and gladia armed ones on different sprues (and sold separately...)  you expect the the bodies are different. Instead only the arms are...

Anyway here are the chaps ready for combat:

I like the shields, I had to get used to a decent method to apply the LBMS transfer on the big spine shields but after a couple of different approaches I found the easy going one... I trimmed the whole shape carefully, did the hole for the boss, and then applied the transfer. Then when it was dried, I used microsol solution to soften it. It was much better than going with the two halves separately.  Then usual retouching with a fine brush. 

For the Glory of Greece!

Long long time ago... in a city far away (London) I bought a box of Warlords (formerly Immortal) miniatures plastic Classical Hoplite, it was 2012 and started painting them quite quickly... then the project, after 26 done entered the dreaded backburner... but recently in my organized drive to clear backlogs and finish armies I started working on them again finishing the box....

They are intended to be the core of a Corinthian army to oppose my Athenians (mainly Victrix) using Armati (with my own adaptation of the "intro" basing scheme). They will soon be joined by their commanders, peltasts (half done) and psiloi (the same). They can also be used for a small army in Hoplomachia (with a single base corresponding to a Lochos) or in the Crusader rules (but the light troops will have to be reinforced in this case). It has been a challenge to paint them but I like the result.

I have tried to give them a lot of individuality. I also think that having painted them in two batches one in London one in Italy  (and with 3 years in the middle) has disjointed a bit the project but still the whole phalanx is quite impressive. I also like the figures a lot. Probably the Victrix ones are a tad nicer, but the Warlord ones are not bad either.

For the shields the first 26 used a mix between hand painted shields and the included decals, the last 16 have LBMS transfers. Well the LBMS are a blast, but require careful trimming and placing because you do not see what you are doing (you apply them reversing them) and the shield is circular. The edges are all handpainted. Ok some details:

These are LBMS shields. The battle scars are a quite nice touch.

  While here you can see the difference between the LBMS and the Warlords decals (second group of 8 hoplites from your left).

Again a mix. On your left a base with LBMS followed by the original decals to the end.

Well for today we are done, I hope you like them!