Slipping Again

Ooops! A week since my last post - I'm slipping again. Fortunately that is only in terms of posting here and not as a result of being idle.

Whilst I might not have made as much progress as intended on the Mongol light foot, at least there is a good reason. I realised that the only chance I'd get to do any spray priming would be at the weekend, so I spent a couple of evenings gluing them onto sticks for painting (and gluing riders onto horses).

I also had a game of FoG:AM on Thursday to give Clive some practice before Warfare. He's taking Mid Republican Romans which was a good excuse for my Sarmatians to have a gentle trot across open steppes. they took along some Scythian mates. Sadly, I didn't take many pictures, mainly as a result of me trying to compensate for my completely idiotic initial deployment.

Amazing deployment. Light horse on the left flank facing heavy cavalry; shooty medium cavalry in the centre; big scary blokes on big scary horses with long scary pointy things on the right flank where they won't really be able to do anything useful.

Maybe the horsey boys were less than enthusiastic by the thought of looting cola rather than impossibly huge glasses of ale?

My crappy deployment was made all the worse by my truly awful dice rolls in combat and the loss of two generals. I think the horsey boys were regarding their model generals as extensions of me and showed their contempt for Clive killing them by passing their cohesion tests with flying colours.

In the end we ran out of time, but it was a clear "winning draw" for the Romans. At least the horses got some exercise for the first time in a long while.

With hindsight, I should have taken Siracae or Iazyges Sarmatians rather than the Rhoxolani. Their shooty medium cavalry is "Bow*" rather than "Bow". This means that in single rank where they can evade, they only get 1 die per 2 bases which effectively means no shooting against most opponents. The alternative is to have them 2 ranks deep so that they can shoot (but can't evade). The inability to evade means risking being charged and then being at a disadvantage in the combats to follow.

Our club has been introduced to a set of French ancients rules - L'Art de la Guerre" - by Seb. The English translation of these is now available and we made a mass purchase. I picked up my copy on Monday evening. Having had a quick read through and seen bits of some games at the club, they look to be a great set of rules. Army size is somewhere between DBA/DBM and FoG. Command and control looks quite interesting and will lead to some tough decision making when the armies are in contact. Two great advantages of the game - you only need one d6 and the armies should fit in a small box making transport very easy. The movement and range units are in 40mm increments for 15mm-based troops, which with the smaller table size used means that battle lines will get into melee quite quickly.


Anyway, that's enough rabbiting about games, time for some workbench chit-chat.

Mongol Light Foot

They're nearly finished. I just need to do belts, metals and the fur trim to the coats and hats, give them a Klear/ink coat, spray with matt varnish and flock the bases.

Seven Years War Russians

Yesterday morning I was thinking I wouldn't be able to do any priming as it looked like rain was on the way. Fortunately the sun came out instead, so in the afternoon I set up to do the spray priming. I'd managed to spray the artillery, commanders and grenadiers with the red primer. However, the can ran out when I was part of the way through the first of the 6 musketeer regiments.

So, I moved onto the cavalry and primed them grey. Very little of their uniform is red, so there was no benefit for using red primer for them.

This morning I popped out to Halfords for some more red primer.

I picked up 2 cans so that I will have enough for future infantry and artillery additions, I should have picked up a can of grey as well for the cavalry additions I will be making. I can do that next weekend or some other time.

The weather today has been grey and damp, so I haven't been able to continue with the priming. I'm hoping for some decent weather next weekend.


Painting Plans for the coming week:

1. Finish the Mongol light foot

2. Start on the Russians. I'll probably do the artillery first, then the commanders, then the grenadiers. The artillery should be quite quick as the crews had red uniforms and the woodwork of the guns and limbers was painted a rusty red colour (so I'll just have to paint the metalwork - result!).