15mm Carthage

Okay, so now that I have decided to `go` for 15mm for bigger games (or as some have commented, `finally saw the light`) one of the first things on the shopping list was an ancients army.

Now, you seem to have either one or two choices, mainly a horde army of barbarians with a lot of natural colour tones, or the Roman legions which feature a lot of red, both basically rather boring to paint the umpteenth model of.

So I reduced the list to some of the more `mixed` armies, or colourful ones, like Dacians, Carthaginians, Byzantines etc... Only criteria needed to be that they had to have fought in the (larger) mediterenean / middle east theatre, as this is the geographic region most gamers tend to collect forces in.

The final choice fell on Hannibal`s alpinists, aka the Carthaginian army with a lot of spanish troops and Gaul allies. Now, I must admit, the fact that I could get a force of them from the Strategia E Tattica range through North Star Miniatures bargain bin deals (less then 20 pounds for 15 packs) helped tote the balance as well.



This deal has some elephants, some Cathage command and cavalry and this all supported by Celtiberean (spanish) troops, some Gauls, Lybian light infantry and Balearic slingers. Nice and varied colours and troops which makes the prospect of monotonous painting non-existant.

BTW, for the fast ones, he has a Fall of Rome deal up in the Bargain bin for 11 pounds at the moment.

Which brings us to the dilemma

How to base the buggers?

I`ve been doing some reading and a lot of drooling around on other blogs and forums, and it seems that most played rules for 15mm are either Fields of Glory or Impetus, but both use different basing methods.

In the end, I decided to use 4 by 2 cm bases and field them Warmaster Ancients style, with three models per `ranked` infantry per base and two models for lighter troops like archers and skirmishers.

This allows me in about 80% of the cases from both rulesets above to `combine` the elements in the required size. FoG for example has 4 by 2 as the standard for medium and light troops, while Impetus uses 8 by a variant of 2 for most units. So by shuffling them together, I should be able to make most units perfectly base sized legal. Easy.

And the fact I have a couple hundred 4 by 2s from the Magister Militum rangeb helps as well of course...

So after the first scifi models for Tomorrows War are painted (some are, but I can`t show them already due to the Lead Painter`s League) I`m going to prepare my force to journey over the alps and into Italy...

... all the while playing my battlesong: