Saturday, July 20, 2013

Athens refuses to yield earth and water

After getting those oo shiny Baccus Greeks last year it took only this long for me to get started with them. The first batch of hoplites is now ready. I wanted to make the models as flexible as possible in terms of compatibility, and by adopting the Warmaster Ancients basing I can play WMA, Hail Caesar and Impetus at least. I didn't consider the DBx games as their basing is the strictest of them all. 


The period I'm aiming for is the time of the greco-persian wars and the peloponnesian war and I drew my visual inspiration for the period from various Osprey titles. During the period (as far as I know) each hoplite supplied his own equipment and was free to choose the shield design he wanted. This made hoplites a colourful sight. Even Spartans had different shield designs and the uniform look with everyone having the Lakonian symbol came at some point during the Peloponnesian wars, so these models can be used to represent pretty much every Greek state without diverging too much from history.


At first I thought about saving some models and basing only two ranks on one 4cm*2cm stand, and I think I would've gotten away with it:


This way I think you get to appreciate the shields more than with three ranks. With three ranks the shields in the back rows are lost in the unit and difficult to spot. However, hoplite formations were sometimes as much as 16 men deep, so two ranks doesnt really convey that idea. I consulted my wife on the matter and she favoured three ranks as looking better. She also said it "would be just a small effort for me to paint a few hundred extra models". Oh, well.



Anyway, let me know what you think! I've already basecoated a code of the attacking hoplites which look more dynamic. I'll post pics of them too once I'm finished.










1 comment:

  1. I agree on your basing ideas. If I ever play samurai, I'll go 40x20.

    Those look really cool btw.

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