Dark Age Greek raw material

Not so much an army in need of a rebase, as elements that date back to my first DBA conversions of the Atlantic sets that sat around unpainted since I was a kid. I had fun reworking the chariots using wire and card! Likewise for the horse, the black shields were part of the 2.0 Dark Age Greek army while the forces still on their Cv bases are 1.0 spares. 

Over on the right I have old Atlantic Trojans that I used for Carthaginians. I'd forgotten about them, and they are way too big to match the Caesar Trojans.

In the "recyclable" ziploc the Esci barbarians and more Atlantic Greeks I converted for the 2.0 Dark Age Greeks.

IV/47 Golden Horde

Pre 2.0 this was a successful, if over-varnished, build of Mongol Conquest directly from Zvezda. Then 2.0 made it obsolete, splitting that into an all-mounted Conquest and the Golden Horde variant. 3.0 is more specific again. I'm not too sure what to do about it. There are good potential supplements, notably Italeri, but all of them lack enough LH. I don't think there are any great options.

IV/17 Later Crusaders

This army occurred by accident when I decided that the Zvezda Russians were kind of hopeless but wanted to build something with them. The core is those plus Italeri Medieval Knights. Then for 2.0 I doubled down and added more Spears and converted 2 elements of Crossbows. 

My plan is to abandon them... I never intended to build Saladin-period enemies for them after all. I would like to make up Feudal French b, but may have to settle for a more generic Franco-German mishmash.

IV/16 Scots Common

Unlike my Sargonids the issue with Scots Common is not that 3.0 makes a lot of it wrong, it is two things.

1. Old ugly bases - easily fixed by rebasing, that's the point of the rebase project 

2. Overenthusiastic pikes. This is a 2.0 problem, where I added more Pk elements for 2.0 but made really long ones. I guess I was trying to cover too long a period, having Flodden in mind. Wrong! But in my defense a lot of the literature needlessly drags Flodden in.

I plan to fix both issues by throwing money at issue #2, buying more Strelets medieval levy and using those. My original Scots Common were from the pretty ghastly Army of the Wallace, full of kilts and bad poses, really a fantasy Braveheart army.

I can recycle those, hopefully, to Highlands and Isles.

I/51 later Sargonid Assyrians

I look at this project with very mixed feelings. The Assyrians as described in one of Donald Featherstone's books (maybe wargames through the ages?) gave me the same sort of oooo! feeling that most young teens get wargaming nazi German armies. These green-sawdust based elements must date back to among the very first DBA sides I converted (circa 2010) and are directly inspired by a photo of Airfix Waterloo Cuirassiers converted to Assyrian cavalry. 

The 3.0 list later Sargonids are essentially a whole new project, barring the one element of Hd that I converted for 2.0 using Atlantic Indians. I conclude I should have bought the infantry as well, many years back when I bought the allied infantry.

bench update 14 July 2024

The bastille may be stormed but who is in charge? Happy Bastille Day!

No real update, I'm trying to recover from rhomboid muscle strain from too much typing and painting. My current WIP are 28mm fantasy minis for RPGs.

I've reboxed a couple armies into foolscap size file boxes, and taken a few boxes off the shelves to decide which rebasing comes next. I'm leaning towards Scots Common but it's a huge job with repainting involved. I think all the final four or five left to rebase are in need of stripping and repainting, if I can motivate myself.

Mini review: El Cid Spanish command, HaT #8248

Plasticsoldierreview.com should be your go-to for this set, but I will add my 2 cents worth here.

Working on these minis swept me back 5 decades to the early 70s Airfix minis like British Paratroopers! The plastic in my set had the same consistency to Airfix. Judging from the official review this differs across batches, your set may be more akin to the rubbery composite HaT used for all my other El Cid period sets.

Detail is good but not as excellent as on the softer plastic: again this may be the plastic, or the mould may have been a little past its use-by date. Chainmail armor ending and cloth beginning are not entirely clear. The minis definitely have that "scaled down" detail that Nicholas Kove pioneered for Airfix.

As long as your craft knife is very sharp, and you are patient, you should have little trouble with mould lines. There are few areas where you wish the moukd designer had opted for a different division. 

Separating the shields from the sprue is tricky, two of mine ended up sliced. Err on the sprue side and trim off later.

The version of plastic I had takes varnish/stain base very well, with the exception of the shields. That means you can suit yourself as to paint technique thereafter.

Those shields, hoo boy. I would prefer silly pin-and-hole to nothing. They are sculpted so that the round ones have to be "at the ready" although two of the four minis clearly show the shield-strap slung for a shield on back. I used superglue for a very tenuous tack, then fortified that by dribbling PVA into the join.

The final product looks great, I'll just have to handle them very gently.

bench update 07 July 2024

Woo-hoo! These El Cid command pieces are very close to completion! Yesterday was shields and standards day, plus a few very minor tidyups on the knights.

Today, the banners/gonfalons went on the staves and those are now glued in place: