Saturday 20 October 2012

6mm Ancient Thoughts


For a while now I have been thinking of a way to get back to using my 6mm Ancient Armies using Dr Phil Hendry's Avgvstvs to Avrelian. Finally this morning I cracked how I was going to base the figures up as I have struggled to find a satisfactory method of doing it that either looks right with a small number of figures or doesn't commit me to painting 1000's of Ancient Britons/Parthians/Ancient Germans because my Roman Cohorts are too big. Initially I based the Romans in Cohorts 64 figures strong but the amount of "barbarians" I'd have to do to make a decent opponent for the Romans would of been well beyond my abilities in painting irregularly dressed figures.

Having progressed with the Zulu Project I had realised that by separating the figures from the strips they are cast in made painting them far far easier. Its only necessary to do this with strips based in ranks, those in file have enough separation between them. However I would separate the strips in file if the figures will be painted with different clothing colours for each one. I would then paint batches of similarly clothed figures to speed things up then mix them in with the other figures when basing them up. Why I didn't think of doing this years ago I don't know especially as I use this method for larger scale figures.

I have three ideas for ancients, which are:

A project based around Pyrrhus' invasion of Italy in 280BC

A project continuing with with Early Imperial Romans (EIR) of which have in substantial numbers I would then need to add an appropriate opponent.

A project based around the Wars of the Roses - I might pick a particular battle or series of battles in the war and recreate the forces fielded there not necessarily with the intention of refighting a particular battle but just to give me some rough troop type ratios to work from. However details are rather sketchy around some of the battles so it may be a bit of a challenge to work out who was there and in what numbers.

The figure to man ratio would be about 1:20 for the 2nd two ideas and 1:30 for the armies in the 1st idea. Basing wise each period may well end up different as I do not like doing battles between unhistorical opponents (e.g. EIR vs Medieval Germans or New Kingdom Egyptian vs Vikings). Any figures for the ancient period would be taken from Baccus' ranges.

I think this weekend I will try out some basing ideas with my EIR figures and take things from there. I also have loads of Biblicals in 6mm (Baccus New Kingdom Egyptians and Hittites) though I haven't quite worked out exactly how to put the 6 part chariots together.

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