Finally, a new post!

Germans, sir, fahsands of 'em!

Figs by Old Glory 25s

I am finally beginning to catch up a little bit on my ancients. Work life here has been off the scale ever since I arrived, and the virus situation has made it worse because we have all had to duplicate everything and move it online - double the amount of work for the final quarter of the academic year. However, working from home has had an extra bonus, which is the ability in between swathes of admin to do a colour here and there and even take some photos. Space is a bit tight, but anything is better than nothing...

So the photo above shows (rather badly) two newly completed warbands of 36 loose formation loonies. This completes all of the massed foot for the army:

Here they are in their nice comfy underbed storage box.

This gives me eight close formation warbands of 48 figures each plus the 72 just completed. Next up will be skirmish javelins and I already have those. Gaming with them will of course be another issue, but I have a cunning plan. When the army is finished, I am hoping to run a reasonably tight sample battle using Tactica II for the purposes not only of moving my moribund ancients campaign on a bit, but also to follow up on an in-depth review of the rules I produced for the most recent issue of Slingshot. 

In fact, I'm actually planning two battles as the Cimbri take on the might of Rome. One will be against a very late Republican army, and the other a newly raised, but rather unwieldy and poorly trained emergency force using the new so-called 'Marian' legion. Basically, it's the campaign version of Arausio, divided in two to be manageable. These will make a nice two-parter explaining how the rules can be used to construct custom armies, plus a reasonably straightforward couple of battles based mostly on infantry combat. The combination should work nicely. That's the plan anyway - it'll probably take a while to come to fruition, though, because I still need to paint the skirmishers, cavalry, command stands and (of course!) the much-needed casualty markers...

Still, I have produced this lot in around four months, so it should be do-able. This is about half of my previous level of productivity in Scotland, but it does represent my best effort since coming to Cheltenham. I seem to getting at least some of my mojo back.