Ancient Germans & Romans - Progress Mid July

Despite working on my Ancient Germans and Cesarean Romans methodically over the last month, I haven't taken the time to record my progress.

Foundry Ancient Germans, painted and ready for basing.

Wargames Factory Romans awaiting bases.

There are roughly 80 figures on my work table being based now, hopefully enough to run a few more tests of Hail Caesar without resorting to proxies.

Historicon 2011

This awesome Antietam board was but one of the many ACW games this year.

Scheduling a full four day wargame vacation wasn't in the cards this year, but I did manage to make a one day excursion to Historicon 2011. Despite only having a limited window of time on site I still had a great time. Pics and a brief report after the jump.

Wargames Factory Romans, First Set Painted Up

Fella on the left just saw 10,000 naked gauls come charging out of the woods.

I managed to finish of the first two groups of Wargames Factory Romans I've been working on this weekend.  I've never completed any mass, assembly style paint jobs on 28mm miniatures before so this was an interesting test of getting good results out of repetitive painting.  I can see room for improvement, but I'm fairly satisfied with these wargame level paint jobs.


When I was researching manufacturers and paint schemes for Romans I relied on other gamer's websites.  Scott Macphee's in depth review of the WGF Romans was particularly helpful. I thought I'd add on a few more comments and provide some comparison shots for anyone in the same boat.\

Messing with Hail Caesar

Testing out Hail Caesar with 20mm proxies

It's been a very busy few weeks for me but I did manage to get in some work on my ancient armies.  I was still fretting about basing so I took some of my shelved 20mm ancients, quickly glued them to bases with PVA and started pushing them around a table while testing out the Hail Caesar rules. Playing solo, it wasn't much of a game since I was simply trying to see if I had grasped the rules and wanted to get the feel of moving multiple bases around to see how fiddly they felt.  Despite spending most of my time looking up rules, not having enough elements on the table, playing myself with only the most basic strategies, I actually had fun. Really looking forward to playing a real game.

Some thoughts from my first test

• There were a lot more counters on the table than I had anticipated. Towards the end of the battle, nearly every unit had at least 3 wound counters.
• Perhaps it was only because I was playing both sides, but I forgot which side was due the "winning" bonus from round to round of prolonged melees. I'm thinking of making a small marker (like a flag or standard bearer) to mark the winning side of a round.

Production line painting

I'm also making encouraging progress on my figures. I've got a 32 man unit of Germans that just need basing, 32 figures of Caesarian Romans ready for basing, and various other minis being cleaned and primed. And next week : Historicon!

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.

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.

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: