Celts from Various Vendors

Unidentified Celts

I picked up a mixed bag of miniatures from someone offloading their collection on TMPs auction board. The price was pretty good, and since I'm trying to bulk up my hairy barbarian hordes I thought the "30 Gauls and Germans: Gripping Beast, Old Glory, Black Tree, and Foundry" would offer me a great chance to get a sample of the various vendors before committing to a large mail order.


Hoping to put ID the vendor for the two sets of Celts:

One set of Celts really stood out as something... different.  I do not know what the sculptor was thinking with these fellows. They don't even look human to me.

 The have an extreme shock of limed hair that looks like the head of a broom, their faces are distended into an Edvard Munch-esque scream, and their heads have a sloped forehead like some sort of prehistoric throwback. Very, very odd.

Beautiful Figures.. Now How Do I Get Them Into My Army?

Aventine phalangites, painted by Craig Davey I believe.

I've seen a few new figures showing up on various manufacturers' websites that I think are just gorgeous. I'm committed to the Punic Wars and Late Republic eras currently, but I'm hoping to find a way to work these figures into my armies.

Aventine mailed phalangites.

These are Aventine's new mailed phalangites.  From my understanding even Hannibal's "phalanxes" during the Second Punic War were using spears roughly 9 feet long, about half the length of classical Greek and Macedonian phalanxes. Still, I love the look of massed ranks of a phalanx.  I'm thinking of using these new mailed phalangites with short spears as some of Hannibal's African veterans, or using painting them up as Pyrhic phalangites and using them as proxies in a Carthaginian army for the time being.

Next up, Warlord just announced a new plastic Sarmatian cataphract set. The ready availability of plastics is one of the prime reasons I decided to jump back into 28mm for my ancients, but I haven't been entirely satisfied with the plastics so far. Wargames Factory tended to have the more realistic poses I like, but the recent takeover by some apparently unsavory folks have left me unwilling to purchase from them.  Warlord seem to have better sculpts, and I like the actual company, but their Romans always looked beefy and odd in photos, and their Celts tended to flail their arms and thrust out their chests a bit too much.

These new Sarmation cataphracts on the other hand look delicious.  Cavalry with barding look great painted up, these poses aren't quite as wild and woolly as their Celtic cavalry, and they'll be plastic! Affordable and easy to modify. Really looking forward to picking some up.

Battle of the Nile, 47 B.C,

Caesar and Cleopatra. And her gimp.

Didn't make a lot of progress on wargame stuff this weekend. Reglued some Numidian spears that came loose (can superglue go bad?), primed them again, built a few Roman command figures and blocked in some Germanic command.  While I was puttering out with that stuff I did catch a documentary on Cleopatra's sister Arsinoe.  I like the Roman civil war era (Julius Caesar! Pompey! Mark Antony! Octavian!) but the actual battles of of two primarily Roman armies facing off aren't as interesting to me.  I like asymmetric forces, so the mirror battles of legion vs legion don't stoke my enthusiasm. I've been toying with the idea of running a hypothetical "Cleopatra at War" game, where Antony and Cleopatra forgo a naval battle for a land engagement against Octavian. The documentary highlighted a battle I hadn't been aware of though, the Battle of the Nile in 47 BC. Here's how it went down:



Pompey and Caesar had been duking it out when Pompey was forced to flee. Hoping to recruit the Egyptians as allies he arrived in Alexandria seeking shelter and aid from the current monarch Ptolemy the XIII.  To ingratiate himself to Pompey's enemy, Caesar, the boy king Ptolemy chose to kill Pompey instead! Right there as he got off his boat, beheading him in front of his wife and children! Yikes!

When Caesar showed up he was peeved. Even though Pompey was Caesar's enemy, he was still a consul of Rome and you just can't gank a guy like that while he's bounding down the gangplank, all sighs of relief and outstretched hands.. Caesar imprisoned Ptolemy and took control of the city. Cleopatra, who was exiled at the time, saw her chance to take the Egyptian throne. Sneaking into the palace she allied herself with Caesar, who elevated her to regent. Ptolemy and Cleopatra's younger sister Arsinoe escaped the palace and gathered an army of loyal Egyptians in the desert intending to retake their city by force.

Caesar was short of manpower and had to tighten up his grip on Alexandria so he sent a messenger to his ally Mithradates in Syria. Mitty responded and headed south with his army. getting the jump on Ptolemy's army as it was heading towards Syria, presumably on its way to gather more troops and supplies. Surprised, Ptolemy recoiled, he and his army fleeing to a fortress on the Nile. Caesar was able to join Mithradates and launched a joint attack on the fortress.

Ptolemy's army was drawn up on the flat plain before the fortress town, but there was an easier unguarded path along the river. Protecting the path into the rear of Ptolemy's camp were numerous ships manned by slingers and archers. Caesar did not want to launch an attack into the teeth of Ptolemy's army, but there wasn't enough room to maneuver along the banks of the river into its weaker rear.  Caesar split off a smaller force to flank the Egyptians and attack on the river side while his main force occupied Ptolemy's army. 

The flanking force caught the Egyptians flatfooted, and their diversion turned into a major success, completely routing the few defenders on the river side.  When the sounds of battle reached the Egyptian army from their rear, they panicked and fled into the city, with Caesar's army nipping at their heels. The Egyptians attempted to escape to their ships, leaping from the fortress ramparts into the water below. Ptolemy managed to make it to boat, but it sank under the weight of too many refugees. Ptolemy was drowned, and the armed rebellion against Caesar and Cleopatra was finished. Cleopatra's sister Arsinoe was forced into exile, but when Caesar was murdered, Cleopatra sent assassins to kill her sister to prevent the possibility of a coup.

In the grand history of Caesar's ascension to dictator, this is a tiny confrontation, but it has just the sort of forces I'd be interested in painting up.  I only have a snippet of info on this particular battle but there's a lot of interesting stuff here. Caesar himself, phalanxes of Egyptian troops, a fortress, ships with combatants on them, terrain that's more than just a flat plain. Great stuff! And a good place to start if I want to run with a hypothetical battle with Cleopatra taking the field.

Ancient German Shield Designs

I needed to paint up the shields for my ancient Germans, and decided to do a bit of background research to pick color schemes and patterns that at least gave a nod to historical accuracy. Here's what I discovered.

• - Germanic tribes arrived in continental Europe from Scandinavia. Around 250 BC they had begun migrating south from the northern coasts, with the Rhine serving as a cultural border between them and the flourishing Celtic cultures to the west.
• Along the Rhine border, a number of influences spread into Germanic culture. Germanic shields are a prime example, being similar to the styles used by Celts of that time : ovals, rounded corner rectangles and hexagonal. Over several centuries Germanic shields took on additional Celtic influences before being replaced by the circular styles typically associated with the Vikings.
• Shields were wooden (formed from either a single piece of wood, or from two or three planks "glued" together with a resin putty). The center of the shield was hollowed out to provide a hand grip, with a wooden or iron boss covering the hand grip on the shield's face. The shield was held in front of the warrior, and didn't feature an arm strap affixing it to the forearm. The exterior of the shield was clothed in hide or leather. Tacitus, writing in the 1 C AD, (Annals II.13) has Germanicus say in AD 16:- "...even their shields are not reinforced with iron or leather, but are merely plaited wickerwork or flimsy painted boards..." and in the 'Germania' "...there is nothing ostentatious about their equipment: only their shields are picked out in the colours of their choice..."  It's likely Germanicus was playing down the quality of the German arms since he was addressing his troops at the time and trying to pump them up for the coming battle.
• Shields have been discovered at several archeological sites. Because ancient European tribes often ritually sacrificed arms, armor and treasure, many artifacts have been pulled from the bogs that served as their ritual graves. The Hjortspring boat’, Deal Warrior’ shield in Kent, and Salisbury Hoard votive shields are all actual shields or ceremonial replicas. The Portonaccio Sarcophagus also features Roman representation of German shields.
• The designs painted on German shields are virtually non-existent. A few thousand years buried in a bog tends to scour away any sort of painting or decoration. Actual shield designs for Celts and Gauls are more common. Because there was some cultural overlap between Celts and Germans I decided to take a look at Celtic shield designs as well. Celtic shields can be seen on the Pergamene marble relief from the sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros (showing a Galatian shield), a terracotta figure from 3rd Century BC Egypt of a Gaul, as well as a number of coins commemorating triumphs over Gallic warriors.

In the end, there isn't a lot to go regarding "authentic" shield designs. I created a quick mock up in Photoshop to test out some designs.

My fanciful ancient German shield designs.

Since I'd be painting these by hand I wanted to use fairly simple geometric patterns. Even though each shield is unique, I wanted the unit to have a cohesive look, so I limited my color palette to the shades I used in painting the clothes of my ancient Germans. It took working on these over several nights to finish all 30 (they were a lot more fiddly to deal with than I expected), but they are done and ready for my Germans. Once the unit is complete I'll get a pic posted.

Here's one of the books I used for reference:

Megawood

Finished up my "megawood", a huge stand of dense trees to fill a large portion of the table.  I based the design on a combination of techniques from Architects of War and other tutorials for similar woods with removable canopies.
A few years ago when I was playing more Company level WWII stuff, we played a lot of battles in pretty dense terrain. Trees and woods were a quick and easy solution for generating a lot of cover, but I was never happy with the look of individual trees making up the bulk of our woods.  I wanted a few "megawoods" with actual canopies to form the center of these large forests, with the smaller individual trees making up the less dense border areas of the woods.  I'm hoping these woods will be just as useful for my hordes of Celts and Germanic tribes to lurk within.

The canopy lifts off to allow placement of figures within the woods.

Together with my other wood bases I should be able to create fairly dense forests.

Hoping to get one more megawood finished as well as a number of the smaller tree bases.

Improving My Miniature Terrain Trees

Woodland Scenics tree on the left, my custom trees on the right.

I had an epiphany a few years ago. For all the time we spend painting, detailing and basing our miniatures, most of a wargame's playing surface is covered by terrain rather than figures.  I think it's a shame to see beautiful figures battling it out on top of some ratty green felt and half a dozen crummy model railroad trees.

I really get jazzed about beautiful set ups - wargames that look like dioramas with terrain that matches the figures in aesthetics. My first order of business when I got back into wargaming was to upgrade my terrain. I found out that I may have had some figure painting skills built up over decades, but when it came to terrain I was clumsy novice.



Here's what I started with. I have several dozen Woodland Scenics trees based on washers.  Pretty weak sauce.

My first stab at improving the look of my woods was to add some additional foliage to the base.

That's a mix of lichen, clump foliage and flock. The effect was better, but I felt the lone tree was still lacking. What I needed was a base of several trees and foliage to add additional visual "weight" to the woods. I made some test pieces, trying out different combinations of plaster bases, base colors, flocking, commercial and natural stick tree armatures. The results weren't too impressive, but I was learning a lot.

I studied a lot of my favorite layouts like those featured on Joe Dever's site , some of the really great demonstration games at the various wargame shows as well as tables featured in Wargames Illustrated. I finally struck on a combination of natural wood armatures, plaster basing and flock that I was happy with.

I finally settled on tree bases that provide large, heavy trees, but dispensed with the "wall of foliage" I had experimented with to avoid making every tree look like an overgrown bush. Comparing this new solution to my previous trees, I was pretty happy with how much space the new pieces took up. Those are some meaty trees.!

The Woodland Scenics trees don't have a very large footrprint on the games table. Pretty sickly looking saplings!

I think the new trees create the impression of a woodland with only a few pieces.

UPDATE: I've posted a brief tutorial on bulking up trees that uses a technique very similar to the one I employed to make these improved trees.

Basing Woes

Example of Impetus style basing from the Saxon Dog blog (saxondog.blogspot.com/).

I spent a lot of time digging up information on the intricacies of basing for ancient and medieval wargames, only to find that there is no single good solution to the problem. Here's the deal. Decades ago, wargames were designed primarily as simulations. Each figure represented a certain number of soldiers, each inch of the board corresponded to a precise number of real world yards, and the bases the figures were affixed to were supposed to take up the proportional amount of area that those troops would take up on the real battlefield.  During the 80's bases got standardized to fit the most popular set of rules at the time: DBM/DBA. Since then most of the other games that came out to compete with DBM/DBA used their conventional basing for multi-figure stands since nobody wants to rebase all of their figures just to try out a new set of rules. Recently several rules sets have been published that play a little looser with the sizes of multi-figure bases, either using larger or smaller bases, or getting rid of explicit base sizes altogether in favor of proportional bases sizes. 

I want to avoid having to rip my figures off their nicely textured bases in the future, but settling on a single type of base size has been tricky. I really like the look of very large bases, 120mm x 60mm that use fewer figures and allow the miniatures "to breath". I've seen this referred to as "Impetus basing" after the popular Impetus rules that use it as their standard basing. I've also been reading the new Hail Caesar rules, and while the authors state time and again that any basing type will work, they use 40mm x 40mm bases and group several of those into units. Because units need to disperse into open order (usually shown by spreading the bases apart so there is a gap between the various bases within the unit) in order to move through woods or rough ground, I think this is something I'll need to take into account. And then there's the venerable DBA/DBM rules that use bases 60mm wide that are still suggested in wide range of rules.

I'm pretty pysched to try out Hail Caesar, so currently I'm leaning towards 40x40 basing but I'm not quite settled on it. I may need to just stick the figures to temporary bases to try out the rules and see how it actually feels moving the various base sizes around during a game.