Wednesday 20 May 2020

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.

10 comments:

  1. Good to see you back and posting, excellent German warbands!

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    1. Thanks, Cyrus, it's good to hear from you.

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  2. Absolutely fantastic result. They look bloody terrific.
    If you haven't tried 'To the Strongest' rules give them a crack.

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    1. Thanks! I really like Tactica II, but To The Strongest! has the added advantage of being ideal for solo play. I have played it in person once (with Simon Miller) and I really enjoyed it.

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  3. Back with a bang! Nice work, Paul.

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  4. Good to hear from you too! Hope all is well now that you are back in NZ...

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  5. Great looking Germans! Does this mean you'll be easing up on your young kingdoms campaign or are you going to keep that up too?
    Best Iain

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    1. Hi Iain, the plan is to keep the Young Kingdoms campaign going. We are playing once per week, and I am well behind on the updates, so there's plenty to do there. In between times, though, I am finally painting more often as well. I'm mostly concentrating on my ancients for the moment because I really want to finish the Germans, but occasionally I'll dip into the fantasy figures too.

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  6. That's a lot of barbarians! Looking forward to seeing your reports. Glad you're back.

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    1. Hi Mitch, I still have more to paint before I can game with them. But I am improving...

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