Stomp, Stomp, Stompies!

Elephants:  4 new stompies for my Carthaginian army.  I put some effort into the blankets since they're going to see battle without war towers. You have to look good to feel good, even if you're a war elephant! I decided I'd made the tusks too large and trimmed them back a bit.  Then again, the North African Forest Elephants used by the Carthaginians are extinct and I could claim some artistic license.

In Field of Glory, the Later Carthaginian list allows 6 elephants BUT if you take a Numidian ally, you can field 8 in total.  Elephants will reportedly get 3 dice per base at impact in FoG 2.  We're ready to bring it, en masse.

 

Thureophoroi:  My Thureophoroi, based as Medium Foot, give the Carthaginians another unit to contest and fight in terrain.  They can be paired with a unit of elephants in a battle line.

Slitherine announced that version 2 will be published in paper and digital format after all. That's excellent news as an iPad/laptop only version would have scotched Field of Glory 2 in our club.  We've been reading the announced list of changes and we're quite anxious to give them a try.  So anxious in fact that a buddy and I printed out the list of changes and put them into a game with my newly painted Carthaginians.  I'll post the AAR next week with a few observations.  The short version is I'll be a Day 1 purchaser when the new rules hit the market.  Two years of tweaking and field testing has paid handsome dividends, in my opinion. 

Rebuilding my Carthaginians

Lately, I've been digging into a pile of Punic era figures to finish a long-stalled Field of Glory project.  I sold my Mid Republican Roman army last winter and in the process, I cannibalized my Carthaginian to build out the Romans.  I planned to paint up replacement battlegroups but then along came a gladiator project, 3 Impetus armies and my Maurice Ottoman army.  After 8 months delay, here are the replacements!  All Old Glory figure.

Numidian Light Horse:  My Carthaginian cavalry is generally outclassed or ignored in my matches so I'm going to try a different approach.  I'll max out on Numidian Light Horse (3 battlegroup) and take a Numidian ally which  allows a 4th BG.  That  should be enough to tie up enemy cavalry while sending one unit after the camp. Colors are variations on a brown theme but I do like the look of these fellows all massed up.  This time through, I deduced that the small blob at the bottom of some shields is a feather!

Cretan Archers:  I trimmed the red tunics with white but it had a Santa's elves meets Candy Stripers vibe.  I switched to sky blue but a darker blue would've worked as well.

Stompies!  The upside to painting figures a second time is the opportunity to change things up. I've been doing a bit of reading (a dangerous thing!) and learned that war towers were not used in the 1st Punic War.  In the 2nd Punic War, war towers were used BUT not on every elephant.  In fact, there is a line of thought that war towers were used infrequently.  This batch will be sans towers.  After filing away the ropes, I decided to use Green Stuff to make large tusks on 2 of the ellies.  You wouldn't think this would be diifficult but in fact, its quite fiddly in 15mm.  Oh, and I added a crash helmet for one of the mahouts.   

Thureophoroi: A unit of Thureophoroi is sitting in the painting pan. These guys will be tough to paint after the Xyston Thureophoroi I painted for my Pontic army. Even by Old Glory standards, these are poor molds.  Which begs the question, when did I cross over and become a painting prima donna?

Terrain for Maurice

I recently took a look at my terrain collection and realized I need to buff up my choices for Maurice. I made a trip to a big box hardware store and bought a 4' by 2' board of mdf (aka hardboard).  I'd been buying it from a local Blicks art store and paying dearly for it.  The cheaper stuff works just as well as the high priced product so unless you're loaded, grab your mdf from a hardware store.  The only downside is I don't have a table saw and it's a bit of work to chop up a large sheet with a circular saw. Going into this, I had 3 goals for my terrain:

1.  It must look better than a piece of felt.  Some people shoot for the stars.  I aim for the ground because I can hardly miss!

2.  It must be light.  Since I rarely host a game in my house, I have to drag my 6' x4' canvass terrain mat, a box full of terrain and my armies on the road.  It's quite a load and the more terrain I make, the heavier my terrain box becomes.  So this time, I'm not putting loads of water putty onto the mdf. 

3.  It must be versatile.  My current collection of terrain was bought or made for Field of Glory.  The terrain I'm making here is for Maurice.  As time goes by, there'll be more rules and systems to play so ideally, I want this to work under multiple rulesets.

First up was a marsh. You're thinking that right away, I violated Rule #3.  It's hard to pretend a marsh is anything other than a marsh but I made so it's sized to work under both Maurice and Field of Glory (if I push all 3 pieces together).

I mixed up a thick batch of water putty, smeared it on the mdf and dropped bark in to give it visual interest.  Then I covered it with a dark brown basecoat with dark green in the low spots where the  Woodland Scenics Water Effects will go. After it dried, I put a wash of diluted brown ink over it to muddy up the water.  Then some flocking and I've got marshes.