Smashing Through The Rank And File

   This week has been a bit of a breakthrough in terms of getting bulk loads of figures done, the long weekend is what you are expecting me to say, but mostly it's the fact my son has learnt to put himself to sleep, which has freed up an extra hour in the morning before work and untold hours afterwards, and that's not including weekends.

   With that in mind and still waiting for my Old Glory Napoleonic's back order to arrive I went back to my neglected 15mm projects - Middle Imperial Romans and Undead. I still plan to split my Romans in half for their first proper game, before I really get on with buying and painting an enemy for them, but I've also had half a thought that they might end up fighting my Undead army in the short term as well. Using Lion/Dragon Rampant means it doesn't really matter what is on each side. With a unit of Legionnaires being 6 points to a regular skeleton unit's 3, I'm going to need to get cracking with undead, but as a quick reward for each Roman unit finished, I think they will make both projects move fairly quickly now.

   So, this is what I managed to achieve this weekend:

   Firstly, I finished the remaining two units of Legionaries, this time with shield transfers that I discovered that Forged in Battle had added to their range since I bought my army - this now leaves me the issue of going back to the two units that I painted shield designs on, which I am not looking forward to.

   Next are my Medium Cavalry. I had already finished one and a half of these units - which was when I found out my plan of 12 cavalry to a base wasn't going to happen, however, this has the happy accident of meaning that I get 3 units out of 2 packs of models, which is nice. Thankfully, sorting out the transfers on the finished models was a simple process. I have half a plan of buying another couple of packs and giving them a different shield design but that is a problem for later.

   Lastly, the the Romans, is a unit of Auxilia. I got 3 units wearing similar gear to my Legionaries as part of my kickstarter, so when I wanted to round the force out, I purposely picked something different. A bit of a shame I can't get printed shield designs for these guys, but they are supposed to look a bit like a rushed raising of local militia rather than a standing unit.

   As I was on a roll, I decided to get some undead units moving too, just to keep myself a bit more refreshed. Nothing particularly exciting here as its a lot of quickly painted mass infantry but I've got two more units of regular skeletons, a unit of skeleton archers and a mass unit of zombies off my painting list. The regular skeleton warriors are made up of a slightly better mix of figures than the first unit I did, as on my second order I realised Alternative Miniatures have a pack of skeletons with swords. I probably need to put a small pennant on a spear in each unit, but I'm not too worried at this stage.

   I've put the zombies on a base 50% deeper 80/60 instead of 80/40 with an extra 11 figures to try and make the unit look like a cheap horde - in game play it won't make any difference but I like the idea of fantasy zombies being so easy to kill that units need to look intimidating - I also think Sword and Spear uses bigger bases for horde units, so it will allow them to work with that ruleset too.

As always with my 15mm stuff, I apologise for my photos. 

As this whole 15mm thing is a bit new to me and 15mm fantasy ranges seem to be the worst for websites that don't have pictures of the product, I've had a bit of a splurge and bought a single unit for a few different fantasy armies with the plan of seeing how they look next to other models in different ranges and whether my 24 infantry and 8 cavalry fit on a base - I don't want to place an order for an army and find I'm a few figures short and I really don't want to be buying a whole army and finding I really don't like the look of the models - so expect to see a few projects appearing that don't seem to go anywhere for a bit.

Thanks for reading