Persians, Celts a Battle and more

A bumper post this week as I catch up before the weekend. I have been carrying a bit of an ankle injury which is annoying but has provided more time for painting, so a silver lining to the cloud. First up I finished the second unit of ‘Celts’ or lightly armed dark age warriors.

Just for variation I gave these some square shields which I had lying about, colours are to match with the previous unit, I may make a couple of even lighter units next ?

More on Persians below but inspired I picked up a couple of packs of foundry Persian archers at Partizan and here they are mustering out, you will spot a couple of spare plastic figures as I only picked up two packs. 

A game this week down at George’s defunct post office. My Persians vs his Seleucids, my second battle using War and Conquest, so a slightly better idea of what was going on although as they are from the WAB stable they do have a lot of detail which is easy to forget.

My Persians are really Early/Achaemenid so were always going to find it tough against a more heavily armoured enemy, although for fun I included a couple of chariots, as I found out later these are not well treated in the rules both being easily knocked out by range fire before striking home 🙁

Of course I did have lots of ranged weapons

The plan seemed to be hold our position and shoot hoping we would kill enough before we got cut to pieces, initially this worked quite well, but with rolls to hit, armour saves and then a kill roll my shooting only had a limited impact

Disappointingly my one unit of mercenary hoplites fell apart in their first combat due to a disastrous morale roll by me, and as the heavy Seleucid infantry pushed forward the writing was on the wall

The Persians stuck in for a while

Mercenary hoplites flee the field leaving the even lighter armed Persian spearmen to face the Seleucid phalanx , that’s not going to go well !

They flee too and the army begins to crumble

Some more poor morale checks saw my cavalry flee as well

And then everybody joined in 

Only the Sparabara infantry blocks were left and despite turning the sky black with arrows they couldn’t hold the centre.

A fun game as I learn the rules, more complex than I usually play. We discussed how these rules always put a disadvantage on light cavalry as they don’t have the space to fulfil their true battle field role, they are expensive, points wise but effectively are immobile archers, this does mean the rules in a head on battle favour heavy infantry. One option is to keep the armies the same size but increase the playing area ?

Last weekend I made it to Partizan, a splendid show caught up with quite a few people which was nice, bought some stuff (well we all need more stuff) and spent a long time looking at the games on show, as others will have said they are generally very high quality so great inspiration. Here are just the ones which caught my eye.

Vietnam (well done Dave 👍)

Beautiful battle of the bulge , interested in the winter terrain here for my Norwegian games

Some ACW

Hastings, I felt there were too many Saxons and not enough Normans ?

Big scale Command and Colors Leipzig I think

A smaller Napoleonic battle, this was a really nice scale of battle 

Massive SYW

Lovely desert terrain, thinking of this for Al Andalus although this was a nice WW2 desert battle

Finally a Norman vs Viking mash up beautiful stuff…..but storage !!!!!

Day after the show after staying with friends I had the day in London…..yes more Romans this time visiting the small remains of the Roman Amphitheatre at the Guildhall

Shown here on a reconstruction

The remains were found during construction of the art gallery and have been preserved in the basement, there isn’t much but it’s free 

These remaining walls were part of the entrance way according to the info boards

The guildhall also has this on display the charter from William the First to the city granting various rights and privileges in 1067

A trip then to the British museum on the way to the station, having been many times before I focussed just on a couple of displays, mainly the Persians, Early Iranian and Greeks

I think I have some immortals somewhere to paint ? I’m off to find them after this post

Specifically I wanted to see this Cyrus Cylinder as it was mentioned in the book I am currently reading on the Persians

A Corinthian Greek helmet.

A depiction of a Persian archer 

Some lovely depictions of Greeks fighting

Another battle this weekend amongst other stuff thanks for checking in 😀

Matt