Early Imperial Romans Artillery

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!

EIR - Cavalry

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.

The models came with spears although I suspect they're supposed to be javelins as the models also come with a separate javelin pouch, which to be honest I couldn't be bothered painting. I did not enjoy these models and will probably get some Victrix plastics next time!

Fictitious African State - Unnamed Mercenaries

Kitbashed from Warlord Games Project Z survivors (make and female) and random crap from my bits box. This dastardly trio will be elite level and hard to kill, being tooled up to sin and assist l also armoured with an insane amount of confidence and chutzpah!

Fictitious African State

 I’ve been gaming historicals now for about 15 years although always stayed firmly in the “it happened a while ago so its far enough away not to feel too weird” camp. I know that’s not quite true as there are people still alive that lived through WW2 however most of the footage and pictures of that period are black and white which makes it feel “old”. However, in the main I’ve stayed away from anything that could be seen to glamorize or trivialize events that people are still struggling to deal with today.

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:

• The Zaka Neba Ministry of Development – government officials and hired mercenary specialist “operators”
• US Marines and Delta Force – ostensibly a peacekeeping
• force, but may have CIA involvement
• Western Operators – unknown Spec Ops, possibly of various nations or private interests
• The Rural Peace Initiative – Local militia operating as police in rural areas
• Agents – Unknown who they represent, pose as civilians.

A Roman Invasion

At least that's what it feels like on my painting table. I've got legionnaires, auxiliaries, cavalry, command stands and light infantry coming out the wazoo (technical term).

So, here are some more legionaries, Warlord Games again. I've got quite adept at painting these production line style. It's boring but it gets the job done and so long as I intersperse it with something different and interesting I'll be fine.

Next up, Auxiliaries!

Saxon/Viking Light Infantry

I hate these models,  well most of them anyway.  I have a Gripping Beast and Bill Thornhill model on the two commands stands and they improve the look of the unit. 

The rest of the models are Warlord Games plastic Viking Bondi (previously Wargames Factory) and they're really light on detail and weird poses but they'll do for multi purpose dark age light infantry.

I did a pretty simple paint scheme with just base colors and then an army painter strong tone dip. Now that I'm slowly picking up Hail Caesar I have quite a lot of models to paint so need to get used to bulk painting again.  After years of painting skirmish forces I need to relearn how to paint lots of models!

Dark Ages Shaman

I don't even remember where I got this model from as I don't remember buying it.  But it really does suit my Jomsvikings and will work nicely adding flavor to our dark ages games. 

I went for pretty natural neutral tones as a color scheme.