Early Italian Wars: Refurbished Holy Roman Empire Army

After almost a year of working on Carthaginians, I felt it was time for a break.  However, it is still another refurbishment project. 

Around 20 years ago I built a Warhammer Ancients Battles (WAB) Holy Roman Empire army for the late medieval/early Italian Wars period.  Having briefly lived in northwestern Germany, I opted to base the units around cities I visited, with the Hanseatic League rising as an overarching theme.  Now that Hail Caesar has expanded into that era and I have a local opponent, I thought it was time to pull my figures out of storage and get them back on the table. 

When I first painted this army, the only paints I had access to were were Citadel, which had more vibrant colors appropriate for Fantasy and Sci Fi armies. I also made the artistic decision at the time to really have distinct color schemes for each unit's clothing based around the city flags. While I would do it differently today, I've opted not to repaint everything and instead just add some additional highlighting and washes as needed.  Instead the primary focus will be on upgrading the basing and completing they unfinished figures I've had squirreled away (painted to match the old style).

Back at the time, the only basing material I had access to was some Woodland Scenics flock and a bit of grass I could cut into tufts. While it looked fine in its day, it doesn't really pop on today's tables. 

For the refurbishment, I've scraped off the old flock, and added a layer of Vallejo Diorama FX brown earth with Woodland Scenics brown ballast and some grey rock.  This then received a sprinkling of Army Painter field grass and appropriate tufts from Army Painter and Gamers Grass.  As seen below, it really made a huge difference in appearances.

The army was originally built using Old Glory Italian Wars miniatures for the infantry. This is actually one of their better lines and while not quite up to today's standards, still look reasonably good on the table. These have since been supplemented with some Mirliton fantasy miniatures, and War of the Roses miniatures from Perry, Crusader, and Foundry.  

Spearmen/Billmen from Cloppenburg. Old Glory with two Mirliton fantasy heroes.

Halberdiers from Hanover. Old Glory with one Mirliton fantasy hero.

Arquebusiers with pavises from Osnabrück. Old Glory with one plastic Perry figure.

Crossbowmen with pavises from Oldenburg. This is a new unit made from Perry plastics, and figures from Crusader and Foundry.

I still have more units to either refurbish or start as new, but I'm happy with how things are progressing and am looking forward to getting this army back on the table after so long.

Punic Wars: Gallic and Italian Cavalry

 The refurbishment of my old Carthaginian army is starting to wind down, with just a few units remaining. I obtained some second hand cavalry years ago that has just been sitting in bags, and thought it was time to finally paint them up and get the on the table.

First up are some Gallic cavalry that look to be from Foundry. I didn't have shields for all the figures, so had to use some from the bits box.  They are really well sculpted and I think they'll look great on the table.

Next up are some Italian cavalry from Old Glory. These were mixed in with a lot of other figures, but I believe they are the Ligurian pack, with perhaps some hill tribe figures included as well (half the figures had sculpted saddle blankets while the other did not, so it makes me suspicious that they aren't a single pack).  The horses supplied also seemed to be a mix of sculpting styles, so I'm not sure they are all the correct ones for these riders. But I got these for free as part of another deal, so am not going to complain and I think the end result looks good enough.

At this stage, I've been working almost exclusively on Punic Wars for the last year (300+ figures either refurbished or newly painted) and am feeling a bit burnt out.  Since I now have more than enough done for a good size game of Hail Caesar, I've decide to pause work on this for a bit and focus on another army refurbishment project that I'll be starting this month.  

Punic Wars: Commanders and Gallic Warbands

The work on expanding my Carthaginian army continues. As Hail Caesar uses more command stands than WAB, I’ve created two more from some Crusader Miniatures infantry command stands. They are very well sculpted and cast, and fit nicely with the A&A figures I have in my army (which isn’t a huge surprise since it’s the same sculptor).  Since the Carthaginian army was a mix of peoples, I’ve opted to go with one Carthaginian commander and one Apulian Italian commander. While I don’t have any Apulian units in my army, my hope is that they look generically Italian enough that won’t look out of placing leading a mix of Oscans, Ligurians, and Italian hill tribes. The shields were done using transfers from Little Big Man Studios.

My initial Gallic warband from 20 years ago was made from Foundry figures, with Black Tree command, and a lone 1st Corps figure (known as ‘Shorty Bob” due to his stature when compared to the other lines).  I bought the Foundry figures second hand and they came without shields, so I had to order replacements from Old Glory. Since then, I went on to pick up some Renegade and Gripping Beast over the years. There are some size differences between the various brands (The Renegades are big guys with swords the size of cricket bats), but I’ve done my best to mix everything together.  Overall, I think the dynamic poses help hide the differences in a warband, so I don’t think it’s too glaring. For the shields, I’ve mixed everything up and replaced some with additional Old Glory shields, allowing me to use LBM transfers in additional to the original decals from Veni Vidi Vici.

Warband 1:

Warband 2:

Hail Caesar: First Game

We're still finishing our armies, but we had enough to try our first test game of Hail Caesar (we're still using 1st Ed.): Two divisions of Punic War Carthaginians vs three divisions of Early Imperial Romans, for a total of around 330 pts per side. Overall we enjoyed the rules, though we made a lot of mistakes around disorder, stamina, and break tests. I'm not sure how much our errors impacted the final results (Roman victory), but it will be interesting to retry this battle in the future. 

Th initial battle lines after the Carthaginians moved first. The hit and run tactics of the Numidian cavalry worked well, especially when attacking in the flank.

On the far end of the board, I made the mistake of letting my cavalry get in front of my infantry.  While they hit hard the first round, their sustained attack was weak and it really impacted the back and forth of the battle. I think the smarter move would have been for them to swing into the flank after the infantry made contact.

Though loosing the round of combat (I forgot about the Wild Fighter rerolls), the large Gallic Warband held up fairly well against the Romans.

Very quickly we learned that supporting units and flank attacks were critical to winning the encounters, particularly when light or medium infantry were going up against heavy infantry. 

I was originally concerned the variation in unit frontages (my army was based for Warhammer Ancients) was going to cause problems, but it ended up not being an issue. However, that may be to us taking the game casually; more competitive players might have had cause to raise a stink about how we lined things up.

I originally used my skirmishers as screens to protect my infantry formations as they moved up, but later found them more useful as flank attackers to weaken the Roman attacks on my heavy infantry.

The elephant wasn't as effective of a terror weapon as I had hoped for, at least how I deployed him.  I'll have to toy around with new strategies moving forward.

A lot of people have recommended moving to the 2nd Ed. rules, as the organization is supposedly clearer, but I think we'll keep muddling through the original rules before shelling out another $56 to upgrade. As we continue to finish our armies, it will also be interesting to see how many units can practically be deployed on a 4'x6' table. We should both be at approximately 3-4 divisions of 4+ units per army when done. 

Sahel Conflicts: Panhard ERC-90 Sagaie

JJG Print 3D expanded their modern French offerings with a new series of armored vehicles designed by Guaro3d. I took the opportunity to up-gun my Foreign Legion with some support vehicles. First up was the Panhard ERC-90 Sagaie, which was a light wheeled tank/armored reconnaissance vehicle that was used by the FFL from the 1980s through the 2010s. The model can be purchased in 1/56 or 1/50 scale for 28mm gaming, and I went with the larger version. This came out as 10.4cm (not including the gun barrel) x 5.0cm x 4.9cm.

For my vehicle, I based it on the appearance of these ERC-90s seen in western Africa as part Operations Serval and Barkhane, though I didn't have any of the seen stowage to add.

Source: Twitter

Source: Twitter

The kit didn't have all the surface detailing of an injection mold  scale model, but as a wargaming model, the detail was quite respectable. The only missing item that I wish was present on the kit was the machine gun for the turret railing. I didn't have an appropriate machine gun available in the bits box, so had to go without. To create an antenna, I went with some black airplane rigging rather than wire, as I figured the latter was more prone to damage during transport.

For the camo netting, I couldn't find anything in 1/48 scale, so was forced to use 1/35. It looked less refined than I wanted, but for an issue I'll mention shortly, I felt I needed to still use it.

The kit came in three pieces: the turret and two halves of the body, with the wheels printed in place. There were no registration pins to help with positioning and a bit of a gap in some spots, so filling and sanding were needed to get a reasonable seam. 

While the print quality was good overall, there were some issues with the turret that had to be addressed. First up was a missing set of smoke launchers; the green ones were present, but the brown ones only had the mounts and no tubes. I'm not sure if they broke off somewhere or there was an uncaught printing error, but they needed to be recreated. Luckily I was able to do that fairly easily with some plastic rod and paper strips. It wasn't a perfect match, but were close enough that I think  they wouldn't be noticed on the table.

The major issue with the turret was a pronounced upward curve of the gun barrel. I tried reshaping it multiple times using heat and weights, and while I made improvements, I could never get it to remain straight long term. After eventually breaking it with my efforts, I gave up and opted to fill the dip with camouflage netting.  While you can still spot the issue when you get down to tabletop level,  I felt it was much less noticeable from the usual players' vantage. 

 Overall, I'm happy with the final results and am looking forward to seeing how it performs on the table.