The merry bowmen of Dacia

It's been head down painting figures and gaming over the weekend. I've got the first of the three archer units done and the other two cleaned up, primed and ready to go.

The technique is the same as the rest of the troops as is the basing. I'm getting much faster at painting this scale figure now and improving the quality, still not great, all the time. I may get the army done at this rate!

I played two games of warmaster fanstasy over the weekend, Empire against Chaos. I won the first and lost the second, damm chaos knights are hard. In the seond game the knights just destroyed three large brigades of infantry in two turns because they can fighting more than two rounds of combat, unlike ancients.

We here you go, the pictures of the archers, stand by stand...

The Rholoxani skirmishing cavalry

This unit didn't take long to do as it only involved 9 minatures. These are the first horses i've painted at this scale, and I really don't like painting them at 28mm. I painted each one different colour and once agian did the shields individually.



They were based in the same style as the foot skirmishers.





Well thats all the skirmishing units done now; next the three units of archers.

The first units

The first units I painted for the army were the skirmishers. The Pendraken army deal didn't include any, and I knew I wanted some, so I ordered a pack of Germanic Javalinmen from Militum Magister while the army deal made it's way to me. The Javalinmen arrived the next day no less so I got cracking on them.

The pack included 30 miniatures so with these I split them down to two units of three stands. This gave 5 men per base, the usual being 8. This had the dual effect of making the skirmishers stand out from the warrior units and being economical.

I've painted each shield individually, a thing I may regret later, but just stuck to my base pallet.

The bases are some old GW fantasy bases I had knocking around. They've been sanded, painted scorched brown, then drybrushed with bleached bone. They have patches of static grass and scatter foam.

Next the Rholoxani skirmishing cavalry.

Background to army

I've played fanstasy warmaster since it came out but have recently been introduced to warmaster ancients. The same warmaster game but with historical figures and armies. And as I'd recently got into ancient history, aided by the Rome serise on TV, and had become a bit jaded with my main wargaming format of Warhammer, I decided to have ago at something alittle different. So leavingthe fantasy behind I bought the WMA rule book and got cracking.

The army that first jumped out at me was the Dacians. I'm not sure why, i'd never heard to them before, who where they? Why hadn't I heard of them? The background in the book had them as enemies of Roman from the Romanian area of Europe, north of the Danube. The were conquored by Emperor Trajan and absorbed into the Empire in around 100AD. I did a bit of reading around the subject and found that there is very little know about the Dacians. The main source is Trajans Column, carved to celebrate Trajans victory and placed in the Senate in Rome. The carved images on the column show the Dacians warriors clothing and weapons but not the colours they wore. It also had their shield designs, which are ornate, but once again no colours.

So with a lot of enthusiasm and a little money I ordered the Dacian army deal from Pendraken miniatures and set about creating a 1000 points army. Now this army deal problably has more than 1000 points of troops in it, and I also ordered a few other bit so the army had a selection of miniatures. This gave me a choice of what to put in the inital army. Here is my starting 1000 points:

General with portents

Leader

Cheiftain

8 Warrior units

3 Archer units

2 Foot Skirmishers units

1 Falxman unit

1 Rholoxani Skirmishing Cavalry unit

2 Rholoxani Heavy Cavalry units

Due to a lack of criteria for painting I settled on a simple colour scheme of Bleached bone undercoat and combinations of terracotta, regal blue, catachan green and scorched brown. This allowed me to get a unit (three stands) done in about 2 hours all in with basing and undercoat. They are nothing special painting wise but being only 10mm and with eight models on each stand I think they are servicable battlefield standard.

I'll post the first units tonight; I've started with the foot skirmishers.

Hope you enjoy my little adventure into 10mm historical figures.

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