Madaxeman.com Updates

Persians at the Tagus : ADLG in Lisbon

 Lisbon, and the Lusitania Challenge - a 4 person team event held in the Military Museum in Portugal's capital on the banks of the Tagus which I'd last been to all the way back in 2012.

In recent years the Lusitania Challenge has been reinvented and reinvigorated by the adoption of L'Art de la Guerre as its Ancient ruleset of choice, putting the event firmly on the map of the pan-European ADLG event circuit. 

This time around a staggering 24 teams (96 players) had assembled in the gun-infested bowels of the Lisbon Military Museum to do tabletop ancients battle together (and, also, eat sardines from tins as often as possible).

In terms of the actual gaming this was a competition with 4 players in each team, each playing a themed period roughly analogous to the 4 classic DBM Army List Books - and I was in Period 2, Roman & Classical. having decided that this prestigious international event was the ideal opportunity to put on table the wheeled Persian Archery Towers for the first time in competitive action as part of an Achaemenid army.

The general theory of the army was to use a combination of infantry archers (Sparabara and Immortals) together with good quality Satrapal and Guard cavalry on each wing to overwhelm any opponents mounted troops, and use the Archery Towers, some low-grade mercenary spearmen and a small force of mostly light horse in the centre to block and distract the enemy's capital troops and keep them from reinforcing what I hoped would be their by-then heavily embattled wings.

Over the course of 5 games and 2 days the Persians took on the Sassanid Empire, two lots of Early Imperial Romans, an Alexandrian Macedonian army and then ventured Eastwards to fight the Classical Indians, giving a wide range of opposing armies and troop types for the Achaemenid plan to be tested against. 

All 5 battle reports are now available on the Madaxeman website, complete with the usual mix of irrelevant captions, post-game analysis and insults from Hannibal, in-detail reporting of our culinary  and beverage related exploits in and around Lisbon, and links to how I cooked up the wallpaper for the towers and the pavises of the Persian army.

First posted on 20 September 2022 | 10:06 am

3D Printed Elephant & Metal Crew

I've just finished painting up a 28mm elephant printed by Disain Studio ( https://disainstudio.com/ ), which I bought from them at Britcon, and then added to it a metal crew from Aventine Miniatures. 

The pikeman has an "extended" waist as I used 2 thin rare earth magnets to fasten his legs and torso together - partly so he can be removed for transit and storage, and partly as he looked a little stubby. 

The elephant (I think) looks far better than most 28mm "wargames" elephants out there, although I have high hopes for the Victric hard plastic one which I'll make eventually. 

The paint job on the elephant is a standard black undercoat with progressively lighter grey drybrushing. I missed a couple of minor casting (printing?) lines just behind the head, which really I should have sanded away, and so had to paint them out using paint as a filler to make them go away - I don't think they show unless you are looking for them.  

The shield pattern is an LBMS Thracian shield, as the ones I have for some Victrix pikemen and hoplites are way too big for this Aventine crewman. I did also have to bend the Indian mahout's legs a little with pliers to make him fit. 

The whole thing is based on a 60x60mm mdf base, with stained and drybrushed builders sand, and a couple of bamboo plants from a Chinese eBay purchase.

First posted on 15 September 2022 | 12:07 pm

The Kyivan Rus on the M4 road to Reading

 One of the great beauties about L'Art de la Guerre is the way the shorter game time (about 2.5 hours) means you can fit 3 games into a day. It sounds fairly minor, but a 3-round Swiss Draw tournament is just, well, a lot, lot more "meaty" than a 2-round one would be - but without imposing so many games on you that a poor army design could leave you cursing the protracted pain of facing a series of lengthy drawn out defeats either.

The recent Reading-based 1-dayer ticked all of those boxes with a theme of "the World of the Rus and Vikings" - armies with a connection to either of these peoples, in the form of a historical antipathy or conflict, a mention in the army list notes, or an allied contingent of either of the two. 

I however went full Zelensky on this one, and chose a Rus army with no allies at all, a simple list chosen mainly as it was as close as I could get to using all of the lockdown-rebased Rus spearmen I owned all on table together whilst not totally ignoring the "good" options in the overall design.

That did mean a lot of spearmen - an often-unloved troop type who are nevertheless superb in the right circumstances. And, of course, how could I forget, a chance yet again to deploy the age-old groan-inducing Rus Abbot punchline against three unwary opponents!

First posted on 31 August 2022 | 9:53 pm

Another unit of 28mm Spanish

 Yes, in my gradual and partly accidental attempt to create a 28mm Feudal Spanish/Sicilian Norman type army, the next unit on the testing line is some Fireforge Almughavars

They have gone together very neatly - every set of arms is mail-clad, which makes joining them to some of the torsos a bit easier as you don't have to get a perfect match with the cloth/tabard guys shoulders.  

Dave From The Podcast keeps telling me Almughavars didn't have shields, but there weren't quite enough left arms on a sprue to do all 6 guys without shields, so maybe I am reflecting the balance of academic views on this (if its about 83% of scholars think they were unshielded, 17% think they were shielded). 

The figures look a bit cartoonish on the box art, but having painted and based them I suspect that impression is down to Foreforge's painters style rather than anything inherent in the figures. 

They are also normal sized - some Fireforge stuff is a bit big - and their spears have been made to a sensible non-easily-breaking thickness too, unlike some of Fireforge's earlier Arab cavalry bows, which I have already.

They come with glue-on swords, scabbards, pouches etc allowing them to be well customized 

These were (of course) given the Army Painter effect to leave them with a dirty Middle Ages feel. 

Taking the photos I realised I'd not gone back to do their helmet nose-guards in gunmetal, so that's now been done - just squint and I'm sure you can imagine it in metallic silver!

I also then remembered I had a turntable as well that I bought ages ago - so managed to dig it out and do a few spinning around videos too. Not sure how well Blogger will render it though - so apologies if its a bit crappy.

All in all I am very happy with them, and once the other 18 are done I will have a very nice (and if anything more "realistic" than the box art and unpainted figures might suggest) set of 24 Catalan Almughavars. 

First posted on 19 August 2022 | 4:19 pm

Adventures in 3D Prints : The Reconquer Designs Experiment

 Having tried some scaled-up 10mm Etruscans recently my other dabble into 3D printed figures has been at the exact opposite end of the scale, with some Reconquer Designs (until recently known as Caballero Miniatures) Medieval Spanish spearmen.

These figures look astonishing in the renders, and so I bought a packet at a show and painted some up to match the style of some existing metals I had for the same army 

 

After thinking about drilling into their heels to put a pin into them and the base I instead realised that they'd be so huddled together on a 60x40 DBx base that I could instead glue them all together into a single lump!

This in turn meant there was just one "thing" to handle, and it would have multiple points of contact with the MDF base making it far more robust than if the figures had been based "individually"

The paint job is a pretty simple one reliant on Army Painter washes to give them a battle-hardened look

I gave every one a metal spear. Some came with open hands for spears, and others with open hands and printed swords. These were a complete nonsense, and broke as soon as you looked at them so I gave up almost immediately and just went all-metal, all-spear 

These figures are superbly animated, so much so they are a little wasted in this close formation - but being able to glue them together for mutual support did solve a basing problem, and its how I need them to be anyway so it does still look quite cool IMHO.  

Here they are next to some North Star metal spearmen painted in the same style. The Reconquer/Caballero ones are more "normally" proportioned but don't look too out of place. 

They are great figures, superb sculpts - but they do currently come at a price which puts even metal alternatives as a much, much cheaper option (never mind plastic kit figures) if you are buying them printed by a 3rd party. I have no idea how they work out if you buy the STL files I'm afraid. 

They can be bought from Britcon 2022 exhibitor Irongate Scenery in the UK. 

First posted on 16 August 2022 | 1:32 pm

Who's Playing What - the Post-Lockdown Edition.

 It's now been over two years since I last posted a full-year update on who was playing what on the UK Ancients  Competition scene - which is of course hardly surprising given that no-one was able to play anything face to face for much of that time, with various grades of Lockdown running from the start of 2020 until around mid-June 2021. 

Ancients competition wargaming in the UK did however stutter (or in some cases "roar") back to life again in the middle of last year, and so with over 12 months of events to look back on it's probably as good a time as any to start once again having a look at Who's Playing What. 

This set of "post-Lockdown" stats cover the UK "player universe" numbers for competition players across 7 of the most popular Ancients mass-battle rulesets for all events held in the UK in since things started up again at the end of June 2021 that I can find results for. 

Most sets now have a single, comprehensive results or rankings page and I'm therefore indebted to the various people who undertake the thankless task of maintaining these pages. I do also keep a weather eye on various forums and FB groups to make sure I also pick up any "unranked" events, and sometimes extra players who only filled in, or dropped out part way through some events as well - that's why the numbers you'll see here can sometimes be higher than those you'll see on the "official" rankings page.

I've also focused this time exclusively on UK-based players, as overseas travel has not really gotten back to normal and so relatively few overseas players have made it to the UK to play. 

To make comparisons to the pre-Lockdown era I've used the figures for the 2019 calendar year. A handful of events did manage to take place at the start of 2020, but even then attendances were impacted by the looming shadow of Covid to various degrees, so using the clean" 2019 numbers seemed a better benchmark than using Feb 2019-Feb 2020.

Even so, the calendar is still not quite settled yet with some events not yet sitting in their regular calendar slots (Campaign), and others (from last summer) still yet to happen (Britcon), and so I've tried to flag where this may have had an impact on attendance numbers in the commentary.  

Total Unique Player Numbers  (2019 calendar year in brackets)

1. ADLG      177 (180)    #1          (L'Art de la Guerre)
2. MeG         66   (62)      #2          (Mortem et Gloriam)
3. DBMM     61   (72)                   (De Bellis Magistorum Militum) 
4. DBA         55   (67)                   (De Bellis Antiquitis) 
5. DBM        40   (44)      #3         (De Bellis Multitudinum) 
6. FoGAM    35  (48)      #4          (Field of Glory Ancient & Medieval)
7. TTS!         28  (64)                    (To The Strongest!)

This shows how many different, UK-based players have taken part in an competition since Lockdown restrictions were eased in summer 2021. 

As of today ADLG enjoys a 38% market share, with almost as many players as the next 3 most widely played sets combined. This small increase in market share for ADLG (up from 35% at the end of 2019) is however largely a mathematical artefact caused by the slower recovery of numbers for several other sets post-Lockdown.

The upshot is that post-Lockdown, total player numbers across all sets still compare very favourably with the 2019 totals - and (as I'll go into in the commentary on each set) even the more notable shortfalls can usually be explained by event scheduling or other issues unrelated to any loss of enthusiasm for face to face gaming in general post-Lockdown

Notes:

# 1 I am aware of four players who played on the ADLG circuit who have sadly passed away since the start of 2019, so have excluded these players from both 2019 and current period counts.

# 2 MeG player numbers at the end of 2019 were at their lowest point that year. The peak, just after Roll Call in April had seen 70 UK-based players entering a MeG event in the previous 12 months. 

#3 One DBA player who appeared in 2019 has sadly passed away and so has been excluded from the stats

#4 FoGAM's rolling 12 month player count was also falling steadily throughout 2019, and ended the year at its lowest total, having started 2019 with 59 "active in the previous 12 months" players.

First posted on 27 July 2022 | 5:05 pm