ANCIENT WARGAMING

My SECOND Blog
(The first one didn't load) so lets see how this one goes.

Background

I first played a wargame in about 1979. It was SPI's "The Conquerors". I had never even seen a wargame before but had a high interest in history so when  a friend of mine offered a game after a hockey match I said yep. I played Macedon he played Rome and we re created the 2nd Macedonian war between the Roman Republic and Macedon (200-197 BCE). I held the Romans at bay for several years before they pushed me back to my capital Pella and they laid siege and rolled a '6' and took and sacked the city. I lost my first wargame but was hooked. nearly 40 years later and 500+ wargames later I am still into the hobby.

I started painting figures and building armies about 14 years ago. My first army was a Persian army followed by a Macedonian army.

Part of my Persian army mainly plastic from Hat, Caesar, Zvezda. Notice the red bin for the large amount of loses this army will take and the Immortals ready for battle in their dressing gowns. 

I started to buy Hat plastic figures deciding that 20mm 1/72 was the scale I was going to follow. I decided that if I take one of the larger ancient battles that would work out good for scale, so I decided to build armies to recreate the battle of Gaugemala / Arbela. So I decided to paint enough figures for a 47,000 Macedonian army and a 250,000 Persian force! I soon realised that making this at a scale of one figure=20 men might be a big prohibitive. So I scaled back and found DBM rules and decided that the sclae of 1 element ( a bit of cardboard with figure glued onto it) = 250 men was more easy to manage. So 4 Elements would = c.1,000 men. 

My painting was very rough at the start and I am a lot happier now with my painting, though I am not planning to be a high level painter it is good enough for me. So questions I am asked.....

What brands of figures do you buy? 

I started buying plastic figures for they were cheaper to buy. Hat Industrie make up a lot of my figure collection as do Caesar. Then there are others which are not as good generally such as Strelets, Mars, Airfix, Italerii, Lucky Toys (mind you I think their Indian Porus army is excellent-I must have bought 20 sets of those!). I also buy a lot of figures from Newline Designs in the UK from Sean and some other metal figure from Hong Kong for Han Dynasty. 

What armies do you have?

I have lots, see a future blog for a list! At the moment I am just completing a Seleucid Greek army and am about a third of the way through a Ptolemaic army. 

What types of paints and brushes do you use?

I am not a serious painter so just get most of my paints from Spotlight here in South Australia. My brushed a cheap and nasty '000' as they get wrecked quickly. I do not paint professionally so this not a major concern for me as long as they look OK for me.

Do you have a favourite army?

No, but my top ones would be Persians, Hittites, Pontian, Han Dyansty in no particular order.

Each army has a HQ piece like a king in chess for the Chinese Han dynasty it is this lot making a special appearance is Pigsy, Monkey, Tripitaka and Sandy (plus escort).