Go Home Iron Men, Go Home or Die!

With the dawn, the Earl's army arrayed themselves for battle, and advanced.

The spears formed into two blocks while archers advanced on either flack to flush out any ambushes and the cavalry followed behind until their time arrived.

As expected, there were light troops lurking in woods and marshes or on the rocky hills but these did not stop the spears in the center from scaling the ridge and throwing themselves against the defending spearmen. The ensuing melee was fierce and prolonged.

On the flanks, the fighting was fierce for a short while but both sides were both more focused on protecting the flanks of their own center than on trying to expose the enemy's flanks.

The Midlish pikemen struggled to climb the hill and push back the defenders and as the day grew shorter, the Midlish line started to shrink despite the commitment of a reserve body of spearmen. The only hope was that the battered defenders had been weakened enough for the knights to break them.

Charge followed charge and the casualties were heavy on both sides but as the defenders right flank appeared to be open, stout body of armoured soldiers shaking their axes and two handled swords in defiance moved up from their hidden reserve position to fill the gap, while the defenders skirmishers finally drove off the last of the Midlish mounted crossbowmen on their right flank and started working around the open Midlish right flank. 

As the sun began to sink, there was time for one last desperate cavalry charge but it also was repelled and the battered Midlish spearmen began to fallback without orders. Fortunately for them, the enemy was too badly cut up and weary to pursue and were glad to rest on their spears and jeer their retreating enemy.

Note: The figures are 25mm from Garrison, Revenge (via Old Glory), a few Minifigs and various individuals from all sorts of places. Some of these were painted and started fighting for me in the 70's, others were painted here and then over the years with a few more still in waiting. Many of the figures have been converted or modified in some fashion

Rules: Gathering of Hosts (2024 version). 

The Great Raid: Prologue

At last the planning and preparations are done, the polyglot forces have gathered, and the Great Raid into the Midlands has begun.

Captain Theodora, at the head of the Third Squadron of Riders, pauses at the crest of the pass to survey the vista of farms and villages that stretch across the Midland plain below.

Captain Theodora, recently appointed to command the Third Squadron of Horse Guards, has been given the honour of commanding the allied advance guard. She may find glory at the head of this polyglot force but she is as likely to leave her bones for the ravens in these rich lands. 

As long as the Bards sing songs of her deeds it will be worth it.

Another Gathering of Horse Archers

Bow and spear armed light cavalry were a staple feature of the old Valdurian army. They featured as far back as the first recorded battle.

New Recruits in Training - 25mm Garrison Hyrkanians.

It comes as no surprise then that the cavalry heavy armies of the Northern Confederation which included Steppe tribes as well as  Valdurians, also featured horse archers.

Army of the Midlands: The King's Rangers

Few men now inhabit the forests and plains that were once the heartland of the ancient kingdom of Valdur. Wars and waves of invaders have turned it into a wilderness battleground. The very site of the Royal Seat, a fortress perched high on a hill, has been lost but Dunklerne is not forgotten  and the lands along the river, reaching from the mountain to the sea are not called the "Northern Border" but "the King's Hold" and it is guarded not by levies but by troops of the King's Household.

King's Rangers of the Hold Guard or the Green Jacks as they are known in the taverns.
Garrison 25mm.

It says something about history and perceived threats that while the primary responsibility for the Eastern and Western borders of the Midlands lies with the feudal lords and their retainers and tenants,  the Northern Borders are guarded by full time, paid, garrisons even though it has been a generation since the last incursion by the Riders of the Northern Federation.

The lands to the West were once the founding nations of the Great Kingdom of Valdur and the descendants of those ancients may boast of the past in from their wild strongholds but they pose no real threat to the Midlands. To the East there have always been enemies and while the fortunes of war have ebbed and flowed over the centuries, invasions from the East have always drained away in the end.

To the North however, there once stood the Kingdom of Dale. Here the ancestors of the Midland nobles first set foot on the Continent and carved a home for themselves. From there they first fought against and then for the Valdurian Queen and then became more and more apart of that Kingdom until in the end, they made it their own. It was long years thereafter that a new wave of invaders came over land from the East and joining with rebellious Valdurian tribes and Nobles who resented still the Dalish newcomers. Together with the men of the west they tore the Kingdom apart.

In times of plenty relations are good between the Midlands and the North and trade flows across the mountains but when the winters grow cold, the summers dry and the harvest fails, then raiders cross the border again instead of merchant caravans and so the King has tasked Sir John and his Black Company to hold the Great Pass and along the North West frontier he has built posts and filled them with soldiers. The posts themselves are held largely by infantry but horsemen are needed to patrol the lands between the posts. At first these were lancers, sometimes accompanied by a few archers mounted on old nags but as the crossbow evolved and was imported from the Empire, a new soldier appeared. This is the Mounted Crossbowmen trained to shoot from horse back or to charge sword in hand when the situation calls for it, In peace they patrol the borders, in times of war they act as scouts and flankers supporting the Knights, spearmen and foot archers of the main battle line.

The Northern Federation

Good Ol Santa, suitably bribed, came through with a last box of Garrisons. A few Midlish Hobilars, some peasant levies, reinforcements  for the Great King: cataphracts, clibinari and peasants, and some Hyrkanian horse archers.

The last of their kind.

There was the usual quiet chorus of burbling "yes....yes yes" until I hit the Hyrkanians and thought "Damn, I knew I should have ordered dozens!"

Of course I hadn't because I don't really want a whole army of Huns-by-any-other-name. I wanted some horse archers to flush out the Federation or Alliance of "Barbarians" in the north.

A variety of old Valdurians surrounding one of the new horse archers.

I haven't got the details sorted but the Federation exists to provide a home for a battered mix of Celtic/Saxon/Fantasy figures, primarily early Valdurians from my college days. I had started to think of a Gothic sort of army but then remembered my old Rohirrim horse archers that I had de-armoured. I'm also minding that I have Prince August molds for "barbarian" infantry as well as a few left over Valdurian Celts.

 So there we have the basis of the next player in the campaign. An army of Noble Heavy Cavalry backed by levies of warrior farmers,  horse archers and a handful of Valdurian tribesmen, driven into the mountains generations ago by waves of invaders.

The Tunstall Tower Archers

I was going to wait till I had leisure to take some decent pictures during daylight hours but while I've been able to sneak a few moments to paint early in the morning or late at night,  leisure is a fleeting thing these days and I'm impatient so here we are.

Sir Daniel inspects the new recruits.

 Last week I added 7 or 8 new Westlands spearmen to bring me up to 2 double units. This week, upon returning from a visit to family,  I decided to paint up the Midlish Garrison  archers I got last year. The original idea was for them to be yeoman answering the call but the armour and tidy uniform look just screamed livery and this is mythical history so uniforms it was.

In one of my favorite books as a kid, the bad guy's troops wore his livery colours, Murrey and Blue. In college, I had a rather rich looking Minifig nobleman who has been wandering around for decades now with a trumpeter, drummer and 2 torchbearers  (there was a priest  but he appears to have gone off to some monastery). His entourage ended up in said Murrey and Blue even though the nobleman was a good guy who retired from exploring dungeons to play chess against his sword, I just liked the name and the colours.

So now he has a company of archers with billmen and lances on the way and a border tower to hold. Its becoming clear that professional garrisons hired by Lords, appointed by the King,  play an important role in the defence of the realm.

The newly augmented spears. Mostly Garrison but the officer with the big shield is a Partha Elf who has been waiting for nearly 40 years for some paint and a role to play.

The Black Company

Thank you to all for the helpful input. The reminders that this decision will have ramifications for the storyline were timely. I have not yet done  the  legwork to name existing cities let alone figure out the details of economic and social structures. There is however, a long history of mercenaries in this region,  particularly heavy cavalry and missile troops to supplement the native ones. 

So, still on their painting stick,  the crossbow men of the Black Company. I'm sure we will discover more about them once the unit of knights has been added and some "historical" research has been done.

I had initially intended to   paint them in toy style block and varnish with black (dark grey) surcoats but as I  progressed I realized that they were wearing studded jacks so went for black leather with brownish overtones. The figures are small enough, with enough detail and undercuts to make a smooth block finish difficult.  Luckily I remembered that the majority of the figures they are joining were done with overwashes so I proceeded to use the old techniques. Still a simple approach and I think they will blend in well.

Mercenaries or Militia?

I should really be painting up some more Midland...Midlander? Midlanish? Midlish? archers or knights  or billmen but I have a hankering to do these crossbowmen. I was picturing them as the light infantry-ish type but Rob threw in some pavises  and I was very tempted to do a crossbow and pikearmed pavise bearer unit but I've decided to hold firm and do them as just crossbowmen.  Whether or not to permenantly attach the pavises to the bases or leave them separate and how having them should affect their movement are questions that remain.

More importantly, who are they?  The yeoman farmers of the midlands are archers or spear and bill men. The cities would have more foreign influence and money and of course the use of mercenaries has long been widespread. The figures are very uniformly dressed but that need not apply to colours.

Since I'm discovering this fictional history as I go, what do people think?

A. City Militia in uniform surcoats over their clothes?
B. Individually recruited mercenaries wearing whatever?
C. A Free Company of mercenaries wearing the Corporate Colours over their clothes. Perhaps with a cavalry contingent to match? White with a red lion perhaps....... or Black or......
D. Royal Guards in livery. 

A Midlish Muster

The Earl of Cowcross'n arrives to take command of a West March muster.
(Any resemblance between the Arms of the imaginary earl and those of the historical Earl of Oxford are purely due to copying the latter.)

A short while ago a Westland raiding party slipped through the Midlands and into the Imperial Pale. Imperial forces repulsed the attack  but the Ambassador to the Midlish court complained to the King about the increasingly frequent incursions that Midland seemed unable or unwilling to prevent. The implied threat was that if the Midlish could not defend their borders, the Empire would do so for them. 

The King of course protested that the raiders often traveled by sea over which HE claimed no jurisdiction and that the Midlish borders  WERE secure. None the less, a courier soon left the castle heading towards Cowcross'n, seat of the Earl of Cowcross'n, Warden of the West March and the next day a summons went out calling the border levies to a muster.   

The Midlish West March Muster.
A mix of Garrison knights, Revenge Men-at-Arms and Scottish spearmen, and various odds and ends including one of my favorite figures, an armoured axeman from Minfigs Alexander Nevsky range who has been commanding Valdurian or Scottish spearmen for decades without ever resting his axe.

There are roughly this many figures again including around 3 dozen new Garrison figures  and a variety of older figures waiting for repair and re-basing.

Squaring off

I've been pondering basing again. There are some good points to the 80mm wide bases and some attraction to the idea of 1 base = a unit, buutttt..... its also quite limiting. Of all the 25mm ancient basing systems I've experimented  with over the last 5 years, the one I like the best for itself as opposed to the game that it enables, is the one using 40mm square bases with 2 cavalry or 2,3 or 4 infantry per base. I do have some cavalry who will need to go a bit deeper, 60mm for the galloping Garrison horses, but I like the look and feel and its fairly flexible. For example, apart from adapting to multiple rule sets, you can do road columns which are not convincing when 80mm wide. The plan will be to do 4 base units as a standard organization

This happens to be 15mm standard for many rules which  won't help if playing some using standard 25mm  basing but that won't matter if both armies are mine. It does mean I can make impetus units out of 3 bases or if using 2 bases can match Ron's units for playing on a hex grid. I just tried it today using Comitatus and it worked great, well some units were on 40's from earlier experiments, others were singles on a 20mm frontage and I fudged the rest.  Getting ready for the game got my enthusiasm levels up high enough to finish 4 more Persian Clibinari and rebase them with the existing ones to finish that unit.

I also got a start at refurbishing my old Valdurian Royal Horse Guards to serve as Guards for the Queen of Marakanda.  I picked these Rohirrim lads up at the Minifig stand in the wargames tent at Aldershot the summer of 1974. My first metal cavalry. To keep up their status next to all those RAFM & Garrison horses I need to remount them, they've borrowed some PB horses here.

Anyone need 10 x S range 1/2 armoured horses?

First time in battle in decades and another victory to their credit.

Still Slowly Gathering

These lads were born as Garrison Sassinid Standard Bearers. They were destined to join my not really Sassanid Clibinari to give them some of that traditional bubble headed look.    Some how though, even with lances, they just didn't fit in with my other, lance and bow armed,  Clibinari and in any case I've been inching back from the Sassanid angle. If not lance and bow Clibinari on 1/2 armoured horses, then how should I arm them?

Prior to Alexander, Bactria and the surrounding areas seem to have produced bow and spear armed cavalry both unarmoured and armoured with some of the latter being on armoured horses. Alexander and presumably the Achaemenids before him, apparently also raised some Javelin cavalry from the southern areas reaching down into Afghanistan and two heavy javelins were standard Persian armament at the time. Some Greek cavalry would have still been javelin armed while others would have adopted the long Macedonian cavalry spear. Under the Seleucids heavily armoured Cataphracts were introduced and became the standard heavy cavalry of the Parthian Empire. In the turmoil between the fall of the Seleucids and the rise of the Kushan and Parthian empires, what would "native" cavalry raised in the area have been like?


Now its not a co-incidence that the current gathering of armies is set in a time and place where  information is limited, that was the goal from the beginning. My assumption is that cavalry would have been varied, especially in a time of dynastic struggles but that the later lance and bow on 1/2 armoured horse Clibinari are unlikely even though I plan to field some. Some cataphracts are more likely, especially those with felt and leather horse armour, as well as some other lancer cavalry but since the javelin seems to have persisted through out the period, that is also a likely option for some. Lightly armoured and unarmoured cavalry probably predominated but what percentage were "cavalry" vs "light cavalry" (a distinction that I'm not convinced was as clear at the time as it is in our wargames)?.


Another question is about the hats. It seems the latest fad is to dismiss what used to be the archetypal Sassanid Felt Bubble Cap as an error  but since there is evidence of some earlier Medes wearing a similar hat as well as later shepherds and the like, I am happy to assume that some thing similar has been worn by some people over the centuries. Possibly not in the area where this rebel Iranian heritage army is being raised to fight the last of the Greco-Bactrians but the hats give it a distinct flavour so they are in.

The figures just seemed to want to be modified into javelin armed cavalry so I obliged and ended up with javelin armed cavalry with shield and armour, possibly similar to Roman, later Greek or Celtic cavalry. I have been basing my shock cavalry 4 to a base and my horse archers 3 to a base and had planned to base these as four figures. The officer I painted to go with them just didn't fit so he has been relegated to command the next stand of lancers and these ended up 3 to a base.  This seems to put these in the well equipped light cavalry category so that's how I'll use them , leaving the real fighting to the heavily armoured lancers. .Mind you, I think these would serve well as early Mede cavalry as well. They need some friends though.

What did the Romans ever do for us?

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to see a small packet  from Garrison after Rob's comment about sample Romans. Thank you Rob!

When I got my Sassinids and Medievals, my first thoughts were a tumble of "I want more/I want to paint them". With the Romans, my thoughts were. Hmmm. Maybe.

LtoR: Garrison S&S, Romans, painted Sassinid. PA Barbarian, Garrison 20mm Phyrgian.

I love the officer and standard bearer.Classic Garrison. The officer probably won't wait for a Roman army and I can see getting more for whatever Romans I end up with..

I like rather than love the legionnaire. He is noticeably taller and sturdier than all my other figures.  Not impossibly so and I don't mind the officer being a little smaller. If he was a Barbarian, I'd have no qualms but some how, I expect the barbarians to be bigger than the Romans, even if the latter are from a Legion recruited from the Gallic fringe. To make matters worse, I was thinking of recruiting some barbarians from my Prince August molds. These go nicely with my few remaining Garrison Saxons which I want more of (we're edging back into fantasy here)   and even better with my few Garrison 20mm figures but  are a definite mismatch with the big Roman. 

The figures actually look better side by side in the photo than in person (maybe angles or the fact that the Sassinid has some basing remnants under his stand) and in any case, in separate units on the table they would probably be ok.  If I had an alternate source of Romans in mind it might be easier but there aren't that many  old 25mm Romans about. What I'd really like is a few dozen of the Minifig AR Range Roman throwing Pila that I once had  but that's not likely to happen and I was never that fond of the PB replacements. I've never seen the Warrior or Tradition 25mm Romans up close so eventually samples may be in order. 25mm can mean a lot of different things to different people.  Looking at the PA barbarian, Garriosn 20mm Romans might work but I really don't want to get started on Romans this year so the matter is not pressing. Time to paint them up and check if the "attacking figure" is the same bulk.

Rob also included some of the 28mm Late Roman cavalry. Keeping my mother's teaching in mind, I'll just show a shot of them next to one of the exquisite Sassinid  Cataphracts that I want more of:

.

Lance & Bow

I was contemplating horse archers last week, both armoured  and firing, and wondering how to fit in my handful of  Tarun horse archers without building a whole army for them. Eventually I decided that with a bit of repainting to get rid of the Arabic looking stripes and disguise the flowing robes, I could mix them in with some Persian Clibinari.

 After doing them, I realized that adding a pugree and cloak to the Persians would have been easy and helped them to blend in. On the other hand, leaving them as is should make it easier to blend the stand in with my Iranian rebels.  I'm trying desperately to keep the size of these Bactrian of Beyond armies down. The Iranian rebels look like settling on 40 - 50 heavy cavalry so far.

For some reason, I thought I had posted these pictures last week, better late than never and anyway, the 2 replacement Sassinid elephants aren't quite ready. Bloody annoying Hinchliffe kits to be honest but I'm glad to have the old team back. The one archer crewman who remains of the original pair still claims to remember nothing.

Munching the Greener Grass

Why is it that what ever figures I have stacked up ready to paint, its always the ones I don't have that are on my mind. This morning I put aside for a moment my efforts to sort an army for Queen Tomyrot of the Tokharians, ruler of Marakanda (Samarkand to you) and painted up the 2 samples on my desk. I'm not currently adding hoplites but I do intend to add a battalion or 2 of Lambdas and this chap looks fairly officerish so that was easy. The other looks, as intended, very guards-ish. He is also a little hoplitish except for his shield which isn't. It has an embossed animal or god head and polished bronze came to mind. The term Chalkaspides soon followed and then my mind drifted to my old Valdurian Guards, Minifig thureophorai with blue tunics, shields painted bronze and leather armour painted on (I seem to have had issues with painting figures straight out of the box).  Alright then a Guard unit from Alexandria the Farthest, the other intreptation of Hypaspists, fast moving shock infantry, FL's in Basic Impetus speech, VBU of 5 +2 with long spear.

   For some reason I seem to be having trouble with focus and colour, but, close enough.

Is it just me or does the over all size and the look of the head and neck on Garrison Persian camels look more Bactrian than Dromedary despite their 1 humpish apeparance? Is it not possible that the saddle design is disguising the 2 hump nature? Of course it is. Why else would a Queen in Bactria and 2 of her squadrons be riding them?

And last but not least, I started pondering a new city for my lost Hellenistic outpost, not that Alexandria Eschate (the farthest) is bad, but its a real place and I briefly thought that perhaps an Historical Fantasy setting should have made up names so I thought about something like Alexandria the Improbable or Alexandria the Imaginary and turned to Bablefish. OK, now I have a name in unreadable (to me) unreproduceable (to me) Greek letters. No problem, there must be a site that will translate English into a Latin alphabet version of the Greek, yes? Well, maybe, somewhere. After half an hour and after fending off various Old Testament sites that tried to enlist me, I gave up and decided that for a whim,  "Alexandria The Farthest" is just fine.

Now back to thinking about another dozen or more horse archers (galloping and firing) and empty coffers.

Late, as usual

After 35 years the 1st unit of Levy Spearmen finally show up to support the slingers and javelinmen.

Reinforcements Arrive

Clibinarius on borrowed Cataphract horse, Cataphract (need more of these), Desert Queen, Spearmen and a Prince August levy.

Its enough to make a fellow wish he was still doing large, Grantian armies and had oodles of time and money and no distractions. I finally ordered a teeny order of Sassinids and absolutely love these little gems of figures. I was actually ordering some medievals and slipped these in just because. Anyway they arrived while I was at Huzzah and never mind the medievals, guess who's on the painting desk. They might need their own army though.........

Now don't ask me about Zenobia, Rob slipped her in and I have no idea if she's from a 20mm range, a defunct range or a special that he did. But she is just the sort of ruler my new Iranian Imagi-nation needed. I had been sighing and thinking if I bought actual Sassinids then I'd have to buy the long delayed Romans to face them, but the ones I'd want would be the wrong Romans. Well, seeing these, I'm back on track with my series of unknown Iranian and Greco-Bactrian Kingdoms back of beyond. Except that Rob also slipped in some marvelous hoplites that I suspect are Hyborian in origin which has me thinking about Spartans and of course, flipping through the S&S list gives me other ideas. Well the good side of  Basic Impetus using so few troops is that even with multi-basic impetus armies, I could easily do a dozen armies with 100 or so figures each.

Well, first things first, paint at least 1/2 of the new arrivals and finish planned armies then plan and buy more!

Thanks Rob for keeping these figures alive and sharing!.

Experimental Clibinari

I decided to indulge myself and start in on some Clibinari. These are from the  Garrison 25mm Achaemenid list. What I really wanted were some Sassinid figures, but I had a unit of these in my Valdurian army many years ago. Like my Sassinid elephants, they went missing when I graduated from college and headed west. To be honest, I expected to have followed up with Sassinids by now but maybe this fall. In any event, it felt like time to paint some up. This is where I hit a small hitch, I had no idea how the figure should look. 

This figure, with its baggy pants, cowl, short sleeved over tunic and gallic style hauberk, doesn't resemble any illustrations of Achaemenids that I have seen, thought the short sleeves are typical of Garrison Persians.  I thought I saw something similar in the 2,500 th anniversary parade but on reviewing the video footage I couldn't find them again so perhaps I imagined it.  That was one problem, the other was that I hadn't decided yet who they will represent, Rebels, Persian Nobles, subjects from which province?  It seemed smart to stop and figure that out and work on a test figure.

After trying a dab a colour or 2 to see how it looked, and doing some thinking, I decided that these would be Nobles answering the call to arms, not a regular guard unit. My first thought was to make them Rebels along with my Garrison light cavalry, my "Hyrkanians", but the more I looked at what figures I had available, painted and unpainted,  and thought about scenarios, I decided to put the Garrison Persians on one side, that made these loyal Nobles. One question answered.  

Leather seemed like a reasonable fabric to make a protective hood out of but in addition to not being able to find .any Persian or similar examples, the hood has wrinkles like cloth not leather thick enough to protect. fabric. If you ignore the helmet, the head piece actually resemble one versions of the usual Persian headgear. Since this is often shown as white, I tried painting this one white. That seemed a bit too stark a contrast so I fell back on a dark yellow.

The short sleeved over tunic could probably be almost any colour, my Immortals and light cavalry wear uniform versions but then you can see the whole thing, here only the sleeves show. More than that, I decided that these would be Nobles rather than guardsmen and uniform doesn't sit well with Nobles. A compromise was in order, I went with a dark red that might have been a leather under tunic or might be a tabard of sorts.

Baggy pants and tunics were next. Since they were now nobles answering the call, colourful and non-uniform seemed in order. If the pants had been tight, I'd have thought about embroidery but stiff embroidery doesn't seem to match billowing fabric and I didn't want to go for the cotton print look either so solid colours with embroidery on the tunic, mostly a little brighter colours than this fellow with his dark blue pants perhaps.

Although the armour might be  bronze scale, I have opted for iron since that says "cataphract" to me, but I added polished bronze bits to brighten them. The shields might have been wood or leather or born personal devices but without a reference point, these being nobles in the King's service, and me being lazy, I settled on plain purple shields with a bronze boss.

Now, 11 more to go as the opposing Royal and Rebel armies take shape in my mind.
 

The Gathering Resumes

It has been more than 6 months now since the last unit of 25mm Ancients left the painting table. For most of this time, there have been 10 1/2 painted 20mm Phyrgians sitting at the back of my table. For some reason, I'm not sure why, I just couldn't get a feel for them. I haven't been painting much anyway and so I let them slide when I did find the time and energy.

Just before Christmas, I got a sudden urge to convert the whole project to Sassinid vs Romans. Several days of  day dreaming and considering possibilities passed before I remembered that I was going to drain off any Roman impulse into the Prince Valiant 40mm project and began to dig about on the net for info on the Babylonians and Assyrians as a distraction. Worked like a charm, by Boxing Day evening I was relaxed, had time of my choosing and within minutes of starting to apply stripes, it was all good and so the first 1/2 unit of Phyrgians "light" infantry has emerged.

 
Those for an eye & a memory for such things may note that the single figure rebellion appears to have been quelled. I had a few bad moments when I was tempted to emulate the excellent 4 man 40mm sq bases that my 25mm ECW Scots have adopted but in the nick of time sanity reigned and I remembered how useful it can be to have something approaching "hobby standard"  for 25mm Ancients and how annoying it can be to have inconvenient non-standard arrangements. So it had to be single figures or 60mm elements.  My 40mm Prince Valiant figures give me "ancient" singles so its back to elements for the little guys. (Whew, glad I only rebased troops who needed it for other reasons!)

Preparing for Platea - A Puzzling Question

The rules have been updated and are now available here: (Aug 27 post game)

The Athenians (Benassi) as seen from behind the Phrygian (Garrison) and Theban position. (The poor Thebans were left with the stragglers when I ran short on hoplites. At some point I need to finish refurbishing the last 48 RAFM hoplite types)

As I look at the table laid out for the refight, a puzzling question comes to mind:

The Pseudo-Spartans (mixed RAFM, Ral Partha, Garrison & Minifig)
from behind the (largely Garrison) Persian center. 

Why didn't the Persians outflank and surround the Greeks? 




The flanks don't appear to be resting on terrain, there are huge gaps in the middle of the line and lots of cavalry to ride around. The Thessalian cavalry seems to have given a deal of trouble to the Corinthinians and others  marching up from the rear so were presumably ordered to ride past them but surely some of the cavalry could have been spared to attack the Athenians and/or Spartans from the rear?


Now I can see in the Dover refight that the lads were probably "in the spirit" and might not have considered such a move to be "on" but what about in the day?  There are 3 possible answers that occur to me:
a) Heavily armed hoplites are dangerous to light troops and cavalry even if attacked in rear
b) There were command and control issues at work
c) Some of the Greek light armed troops who appear in the OB but not the battle narrative or the Grant scenario, were employed on rear security.
d) In the Grant scenario, Artabazos's troops start the game with the rest of the army  rather than only coming up after the battle was essentially lost. That might substantially affect things.


Well, for the 1st run through, I am going to follow the battle plans in Grant's book as closely as possible so it shouldn't be an issue. I may try alternate versions later.

 The Corinthians in position at the foot of the mountain, a lonnnng way from the action. 

Rospak hoplites obviously painted while my 1st canine buddy, Yoda the Black Lab was still alive and providing inspiration. 

Please click on the pictures to see the full thing if you are only catching the corner.

Missing Post

The following post was supposed to go up 3 weeks ago but I think I waited for pictures and then forgot it!

Belatedly:
The first infantry regiment has now been through the refurbishing mill. Originally I was just going to rebase the infantry but when dealing with individual figures, its a big help if you can easily identify which regiment stray figures came from. I don't buy suggestions that units were issued particular patterns of intricately embroidered clothing even if some items were handed down from above but I do want each regiment to have its own character as well as making it easy to identify which unit a figure comes from.

For the initial campaign, there will be 4 units of spara-bara, line infantry if you will. These are:

The Hyrkanian Regiment. (formerly fielded as Immortals, I have taken their rout in the last game as an excuse to down grade them and will order 'proper' Immortals in long robes to replace them)  Yellow caps, red tunics, garrison miniatures carrying bow, spear and shield. This regiment has an associated cavalry regiment with similar dress and weaponry.

The Ecbatana Garrison Regiment. A regiment of Medes in white domed felt hats. Again, all garrison figures, 6 archers, 6 spear and spara (hats slightly modified), 12 bow, spear and shield.

The Raffum Regiment. A regiment of Iranians with white tiara, 12 archers, 12 spearmen. All RAFM figures.

The Scaran Regiment. A regiment of saka in coloured scythian caps, a mix of Garrison and Bennasi figures, all archers but the front rank will have spara (hats slightly modified and spears replaced).

Other planned regiments are the Susa Regiment of Elamite infantry in long robes and fillet, an as yet unnamed regiment of Mede spearmen, another Saka regiment which may be spara bara or light infantry and a regiment of guards in long robes..