The Battle At Battle And the Battle Afterwards

   One of my favourite podcasts, the British History Podcast, reached his mythical target of 1066 with a episode based on each event in the year, culminating with the Battle of Hastings. I spent a long journey to an office out of my way, for a team meeting, listening to the episode and the meeting itself thinking about it, with led to me arranging a day out with my family to the battlefield.

   I've been there before, probably 8 or 9 years ago, and we spent more of this trip to the battlefield stopping a certain toddler playing with sheep poo, chasing said sheep or just picking a direction to wander in than I remember from our last trip, but it's still an amazing place and between re-listening to the episode on the journey down, reading The Battle Of Hastings by Harriet Harvey Wood and visiting the site, I am well and truly enthused to do something with it.

Entrance gate to Battle Abbey

The English view down the hill

The Norman view up the hill

   I managed to do quite a bit of painting on the back of this trip, none of which will be on this post as I need to work out which figures they were as they were mixed into my army for the game below . . .

Based on the version of the battle given in the podcast - which I think makes a lot of sense - I set the English up on the top of the hill (imagine the hill) with the wood at their back. There was a reserve on the other side of the road hidden from view from the Normans - whether this was a hidden reserve of stragglers that arrived late is unknown.

The Normans are set up at the bottom of the slope with the marsh and stream to their backs.

The Saxons are all fairly elite, with no fyrd and no missile troops as everyone that made it in time was probably mounted for the journey. The Normans are very well equipped with missile troops. . .

The view down the hill. Aetheflead's banner is there for effect . . .

Gryth is pulled out of line and goes down surrounded by Normans.

The final hurscarls meet a sticky end as William charges their line.

The battle was a short affair in our game with the Norman's surviving fairly intact. I suspect this is due to how effective the missile troops were and me having to break my line to force a hand to hand fight, but its always fun to get really into a project then see it on the table in short order.

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Ride now, ride now, ride!

   My last missing post from Operation Panic Paint, this batch of Riders of Rohan were, again, painted as a palette cleanse between the other batches of figures that I was working through. This is my 5th batch out of 7, and while I'm pretty sure I'll never need more than 4, it won't hurt to get more of these done.

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Continuing Lure Of The Dark Gods

    I've been slowly working on a handful of projects but making very little progress, so I decided to do the only sensible thing, focus on a single different project for a single unit . . .

   I'd had a bit of a tidy up in my man cave and noticed that I hadn't painted the last unit of regular troops for my traitor guard army. As they have a simple colour scheme, they were perfect to just smash out in a single session and get them off my backlog, so that's what happened. There's nothing hugely exciting in this unit, the same sgt, 7 regular troops and a heavy bolter team but it gets me to 3 squads which always feels like a decent starting point for any game.

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Is That Hobby I See?

    In the past week or so I've managed to start sneaking in the odd bit of painting time. I'm not going to promise that I am now painting again, but hopefully this is where I can start slowly getting models back through my system and onto the table*.

*Although, I appreciate with the backlog posts there hasn't really been a gap

   The first thing up is the last thing I painted** and is a Langton Miniatures Dutch 1:1200 scale 68 gun ship of the line - Cerberus. I've managed to get a couple of Wednesdays in a row out gaming, while the first one was a bit of a last minute job, the second was planned a week in advance so I gave my mate Neil a shout about organising a game and he decided that we needed to get our 1:1200 Napoleonic fleets onto the table again - something I whole heartedly agreed with - link to club post. This then reminded me that I had a ship that was painted and just waiting on it's time to be rigged, so I spent a few hours on Saturday, while my son was at a birthday party, with a film on in the background and rigging a ship.

**because obviously

   The next thing I painted up was a recent purchase. My brother and me are still trying to organise more games of Bolt Action and there is a risk the next gaming day might be booked in - so I started looking at lists and realised my winter Germans didn't actually come to a full 1000 point army. A quick order later and I had a team to fill in those last few points and some options for later on. The teams included are; Panzerschreck, flame thrower and sniper. I wanted the Panzerschreck, but the sniper will be equally as useful.

   I still have half a mind of buying another squad or two, or platoon, for this army as it's pretty fun to paint and it's out grown it's current box anyway . . .

   Lastly, and a surprise late entry, is a Chaos Space Marine Venomcrawler. I had a few hours spare while I was doing something else, so I just kept doing a single colour in-between jobs until I had a finished figure in front of me that I hadn't planned. I've been reading a bit of 40k and 30k stuff recently and this was my concession to get it out of my system without spending any money.

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Bats and Zombies, Oh My!

    We are really at the dregs of Operation Panic Paint now, where I started prepping loads of figures in the hope of doing some really big painting days and weirder stuff started getting stuck onto sticks. The zombies are fairly easy to explain as they are a unit I've owned for a while but couldn't be bothered to prep and paint, but the bats . . . I bought the bats at the same time as the bone carts from a few posts back. I've had plans to get them for a while but was put off by how fragile I thought they looked. I can confirm that I don't think this unit will survive even a single game, but they look really good in my opinion.

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Napoleonic Cuirassiers but smaller?

    One key unit I wanted to test was a unit of French Napoleonic cavalry, and this was for two reasons; 1. It would give a unit of cavalry per side for a test game. 2. I wanted to see if using the new Warlord Epic scale figures would look too jarring in scale to the rest of my regular 15mm stuff. 

   Expanding on the second point, I had already bought the 15mm Essex Miniatures British cavalry so I didn't want to add to those units or mix different figures near them, but what about the other side? I've been given 3 or 4 sprues of the Epic scale French cavalry that came free with Wargames Illustrated as my mates were never going to use them, along with some infantry sprues and I think one British sprue. While I don't have any immediate plans for them - although they might be good for other games, so nothing is getting thrown out - I wanted to see if as a stand alone unit, the cavalry might work.

   I decided to only paint up a single unit of French Cuirassiers so that time sunk into the project is as limited as possible, but that I should still end up with a useful unit if the idea does work.

   Compared to regular 15mm figures I suspect that the difference in scale would end up being jarring if seen next too each other too often, so while I suspect they will get replaced, I do still have a unit that can work in games, but I'd appreciate some feedback as I'm torn.

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