Merry Christmas everybody

A Christmas Review 2016

Lots of troops gone to winter quarters but some of the more recent recruits are still hanging around. So it seemed a good opportunity to have a Review on the dining room table before it got covered with more edible offerings.

The Successor Heavies...

Elephants flanked by Indian 4 horse chariots - Successor chariots were off on holiday somewhere.... then  the cataphacts, light cavalry in front of them, then general inspecting everyone.

Some of the Alexandrian heavies.

Unbased general lying around to take the Salute... Garrison general, cast by me, painted by Harry.

Seleucid Light Cavalry

Another Minifigs troop type from my early days - these had originally been replaced by a unit of Hinchliffe figures.

Seleucid EHC Cataphracts

Time was I had a load of these. Gradually replaced by Lamming then the later Minifigs offerings this figure was consigned to history. Well, I've got some of the old boys now. Not enough, and I've painted them in brighter armour than I used to, but it's a start. (Need at least 2 more units)

Alexandrian Companion heavy cavalry

A few weeks ago I posted my current Alexandrian army Review.

Since then I've acquired some painted Companions with unpainted horses, so I've painted the horses, added an officer figure and based them. This means I now have 3 units of Minifigs Macedonian Companion cavalry:

These are the new guys. Must start taking more time over the lighting...

Alexander and his crowd. All these have just been rebased, nothing else.

Thought I had rebased these but haven't - job for the New Year!

In retrospect, couple of things to do - find an officer the third unit and convert one Companion in each unit to a standard bearer as I did with the shielded heavies.

Seleucid/Roman HC update

I've now painted and based the second unit of shielded javelin cavalry. Because I want to be able to use them for both Seleucid and Roman armies I've just given them plain shields - red shields can act as Roman cavalry, green shields as an Allied Italian contingent. Only reason for green shields is that I painted these at the same time as the Indian chariots - no sense in changing paints all the time. Although these two units are enough for my needs there is still my 'original' unit waiting in the wings of course.

I've added standard bearers to both units. Difficult conversion - crossbar cut from a spear and paper flag. Again, I've left them in plain colours. If I did do a third unit I would probably give them blue shields.

Both units consist of a command element and four three figure bases - the command element being present to act as general or subordinate general, the other four elements make up my 'standard' 12 figure unit (standard non-Garrison I should add - most of my Garrison cavalry units are 24 figures.)

Looking better now

Remedial work plus basing completed. Still a few issues but they meet the criteria for a 'minor' priority  army as regards quality anyway.

Only got enough horses at the moment for two of them - have got enough to make the last one a 2 horse chariot but I can wait - I know I've got more Indian cavalry horses somewhere.. A six man crew is rather a lot to fit in to the chariot cab itself so I've spread the crew around a bit. Must sort out better lighting for photos sometime.

Always check the can...

Last spray of varnish on some Indian chariots, put can down, turned models, picked can up, started spraying.... wrong can...