Local militia, not very impressed with western forces coming in to their town and fighting their private little war amongst their wives and children. Whilst not very well armed or trained they have the most important motivating factor in their favour, this is their home!
No, this isn't a bunch of howitzers or mortars, although that would be cool. No, the Romans developed a bunch of exciting long range lobbing devices that scared the very living crap out of the cultures they conquered, and as is usual for any wargamer I just had to have some in my growing roman legion.
First up here are my repurposed dwarven bolt throwers as Early Imperial Roman ballistae. The crew are a kitbash of regular Warlord Games EIR and the spares that came with their very nice plastic scorpion kit. I've based them for Hail Caesar as a unit of artillery is usually on 2 models on 50x100m bases.
And here are the aforementioned plastic scorpions based the same way as the ballistae. I quite like the plastic Warlord kit, the crew are better sculpts than the regular legionnaires but still the same scale so don't look too weird. I painted everything in my usual "it doesn't matter too much as I have to paint a bucketload of these because its Hail Caesar and you need tons to make an army" style.
Now I just need to find out if ancient artillery suffers the same curse as WW2 armour - freshly painted means utterly useless in their first game!
Typically cavalry consisted of allied troops rather than Romans although I believe that in the imperial period cavalry could be citizen soldiers. These figures are Warlord Games again, metals this time. I really hated these sculpts, there was quite a lot of flash and the legs and bodies were separate meaning they took some effort to get them to stick together in any kind of decent pose.
When Osprey released Black Ops I was drawn into the potential of gaming fictional spy and action movies and video games, after all the cover does appear to feature Solid Snake! This post won’t be a review of Black Ops as that’s been covered by other, more competent bloggers than me out there, but this will be an introduction to the fictional setting for my foray in
to very near future/modern gaming!
So let me introduce the fictional African state of Zaka Neba, which roughly translates to Home of the People in the local language of Mooré (a real language spoken by the Mossi peoples of Western Africa).
This is a post-colonial western African nation sandwiched somewhere between Mali to the north, Nigeria to the east and Senegal to the west. Through negotiation and peaceful revolution, it emerged from its colonial past to become a democracy competing favourably with its neighbours in the wider African geopolitical community. Its people are ethnically and religiously diverse and currently enjoying a growing economy and improved quality of life equivalent to many prosperous African nations (although this is mainly in the cities). Rurally things still echo both the colonial period of rich european landowners as well as isolated tribal communities following traditional cultural practices.
However things recently got weird with the accidental discovery of a naturally occurring mineral compound that has the unusual property of being 20 times more effective at capturing carbon than any known industrial process. The team that discovered this were a joint initiative by the Zaka Neba government research institute and 3 leading western universities, and as you can expect the news of this discovery made its way to several western governments who instantly prioritised the exclusive acquisition of this compound over their competitors.
What followed was aggressive negotiations by the west with the Zaka Neba government over who would have exclusive access to this potentially immeasurably valuable resource, however behind the scenes this would be decided through the age-old solution of take what you can by force!
The key players in this imaginary drama are:
