"Just finished painting my first 10mm Late Roman unit." Topic

Finished painting my first 10mm Pendraken Late Roman unit.

My plan is simple, collect a 10mm Late Roman army that can be used for Warhammer Ancient Battles, Warmaster Ancients and a set of rules I am writing with a friend. All the figures for this army will be from Pendraken Miniatures Late Roman range. I've chosen to paint the shields so that they can be used for Late Romans or Romano British/ Arthurian units.

For Warmaster each 40mm x 20mm base of infantry will count as a stand. Three such stands form a unit. For WAB a single 40mm x 20mm Warmaster stand counts as two men (even though it has eight figures on it). To make casualty removal easier each unit has a number of 20mm x 20mm stands (these have four figures on them).

In WAB the unit counts as 20 men even though it is actually made up of 80 individual figures. I did this so that it forms a Roman Century, confusingly a Roman Century was 80 rather than 100 men. I also did it to speed up game play. Counting each figure as one man in WAB would have meant rolling a ridiculous number of dice and just seems like extra work for no real gain. This way we can play games that look amazing in a few hours.

This first set of pictures shows the unit set up for WAB. Remember that in WAB this counts as a unit of twenty men, not eighty!

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Some pictures of the unit when used for Warmaster Ancients. Note that the leader becomes a command stand in Warmaster.

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The unit marching in column.

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The unit deployed in line.

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A picture to show how I've based the unit to cope with the different rules sets.

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I also made a movement tray to make moving the unit in WAB easier. These pictures show the unit in the movement tray.

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Now that this first unit is finished I can get on and order the second one. The finished army will have six of these units in total. As well as an accompanying cavalry arm, skirmishers and auxiliary archers.

Gawwwd those are nice.

Very cool. Love Romans in every scale.

Lovely figures!

Sparrowhawk: Did you ever consider using the 25mm basing and distances with loaded up bases of 10mm figures? I am considering that option myself with our AIM range of 10mm, to achieve a better massed look for FoG units. The advantage being it places ground scales more convining to figure scale and enhance (for me at least) the main reason for doing miniatures.

If you DID think of doing it, what changed your mind? Since the rules suggest using 15mm (40mm frontage) basing for 15's and smaller, I am afraid "I" would be the only one so basing. This would limit my games to those like-minded gamers doing FoG in 10mm. THIS is probably why I will base mine as per the rules.

But such a sight and the playing of the game in such a grand manner is …well…exciting!

Well done, BTW!

Best,
Tom Dye
GFI

Very nice and excellent subject; Late Imperial romans are my favorite.

Will you be painting Huns or Goths to field opposite of them?

Those 10mm Late Romans from Pendraken that Clibinarium sculpted may be the nicest 10mm ever and that is fully recognizing that some other lines and eras are darn nice as well.

Very nice, Sparrowhawk! As a 10mm afficcionado, I'm really impressed. As a matter of fact, I'm currently basing my ancients in the same fashion (i.e. on a mix of 40x20 and 20x20 bases for use with various rule sets). I really like to cram the troops in, though, usually opting for 6 wide on a 40mm frontage.

…Did you hand paint all those shields?

Thanks for all the nice comments.

I'm in a bit of rush to get to work this morning, so I'll get back and answer your questions this evening.

They are just awesome!

Phew that was a long day at work, now for some relaxing hobby time

Tom I am using the 25mm basing and distances for Warhammer Ancient Battles with these figures. I base four 10mm figures on a 20mm x 20mm base and count them as 1 figure for WAB. To make playing Warmaster Ancients easier I've based eight figures on a 40mm frontage x 20mm depth, these just count as two figures in WAB. This gives me two armies for the price of one! I can also use the army for DBA and although I don't have FoG yet, by the sound of things the basing should work for that as well?

By the way I think quite a few people are going to use 10mm figures for FoG, allot of people have been talking about it around my way, and there have been a few talking about it on TMP as well. I don't think you're alone in wanting massed ranks of troops marching across the tabletop. It really is exciting seeing such a game!

Synflood I'll probably do both so that I can use them against the Romans, and it allows me to split the Roman army in half and play East meets West civil wars with barbarians on each side. I'm also going to collect an early Saxon army and some Romano British units to play Age of Arthur games. I just need to find suitable manufacturers for them all.

KniazSuvorov I'm with you when it comes to massed ranks of troops and massive armies. My choice of unit size and number of figures per base was largely driven by a desire to model a Roman army using their basic building block of Centuries. As you probably know a Roman Century was a unit of eighty men, not one hundred. Six Centuries formed a Cohort or Auxilia. By the time I'm finished this army will be made up of an infantry Auxilia and a cavalry Auxilia.
My barbarian armies will have more figures crammed on some bases and less on others to give them that warband look. I'll also vary the number of bases per unit, with big units having forty bases.

The shields are all hand painted, it wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be.

McKinstry I agree that they are amongst the nicest 10mm figures available at the moment. I hope that Clibinarium does more stuff for this period, I'd buy big armies worth of everything that he sculpts for this period in history. I'm even considering commissioning him to sculpt some ranges for me to get produced…

Thanks to all for your kind comments, it will keep me going for the next unit, which I'll be ordering on Friday. Hopefully I'll get them done in a week or two.

Ok then, this unit is offically – Awesome.

You've done a first class job; I love the idea of units this big, but I'd never have the time to paint that many figures. In fact you've painted about as many for this unit as I've managed for my own army so far. How long did it take you do churn these guys out?

Seriously impressed!

Thanks Clibinarium, I take that as a big compliment coming from the guy who sculpted them! To be fair you did a superb job on the sculpting which made the painting so much easier.

I'm not sure how long it took to paint them. I painted them over two weekends in batches of 40 figures, but I had other things to do as well as paint. So it's difficult to gauge how long it took as I was doing some DIY, looking after kids, ferrying kids to parties and back, putting things away in the loft and cooking dinner between coats of paint. I'll keep an eye on the time when painting the next unit.

By the way, are you sculpting any more figures from around this period?

I do have plans to do other armies for the period, though progress is painfully slow. Since its a personal project I can only devote spare time to it, and I have very little spare time these day; I'm finding it tough to get the Late Romans finished, never mind their opponents.
I have an increasing ammount of commission work these days, I'm heavily engaged in Pendraken's AWI range, which though it began as a pet project, its now more of an "offical" one.

clibinarium, how can I contact you to discuss commission work?

Awesome paint job, done on an incredible sculpt.
The mass effect is great, too.
Hats off, Sparrowhawk!

Eric

Sparrowhawk, drop me an email at clibinariumATyahooDOTcoDOT UK, or contact me through my yahoo group; link

That should be clibinariumATyahooDOTcoDOTuk

Thanks Eric

Cheers clibinarium, I'll drop you an email a little later.

Please keep us posted with updates Sparrowhawk as the project moves forward.

Will do Synflood.

Sparrowhawk,

I meant to ask before: how are you planning to base your cavalry? That was one of the issues I had when I decided to try basing for different rule systems. Initially, I based them on 40x20mm bases, i.e. for WMA or DBx… I've decided now to go with 25x25mm square though, i.e. half a WAB cavalry base. I tried to think of some way to have the best of both worlds, but couldn't come up with anything.

KniazSurorov,

I've been pondering this question myself and I'm leaning towards the 20mm frontage x 40mm depth. My reason for going with 20mm x 40mm is down to the rules systems really. Warhammer Ancient Battles is very forgiving with base sizes. Allot of WAB players around here base their infantry on 25mm x 25mm and their cavalry on 25mm x 50mm bases. So I know from experience that having infantry and cavalry with the same frontage isn't a problem for WAB. On the other hand Warmaster Ancients, DBA and possibly FoG are quite precise about the base frontage. Warmaster Ancients, DBA and FoG all requite either 20mm or 40mm frontage. Depth isn't really as much of an issue. So I can put two bases together and count them as one stand for the games that require a 40mm frontage and for WAB each 20mm x 40mm base will count as a single cavalry figure.

I'm also toying with the idea of basing chunks of each cavalry unit on 40mm x 40mm bases. My reason for doing this is to allow me more scope when modelling the bases. I like the idea of modelling a cavalry charge where the front rank isn't all lined up neatly. Having a 40mm square base gives me allot of room to play with the placing of figures and little terrain features on the bases. But I'm not sure if I'll go through with this idea.

clibinarium,

Which Pendraken's did you do?

Sparrowhawk,

Excellent painting!

Thanks Trajanus,

As far as I know the only figures that clibinarium has sculpted for Pendraken are the Late Romans and The American War of Independence. If you look at the Pendraken site the pages now have the sculptor listed for most of the ranges.

pendraken.co.uk/index.html

With the exception of my original Napoleonics and some medieval stuff, I've never replicated any period in a different scale, so I'm unlikely to ever go for 10mm ancients.

However I have recently started an FPW set up using 10mm and I've been surprised how easy they are to do. I'm following here on an earlier post in the thread that talked about using more 10mm figures on a larger scale base to get the sense of mass. I'm putting 7 figures on a POW 30 x 15 base which in 15mm would fit three, possibly four figures. The sense of mass is quite good.

Two other thoughts
1. When 15's first came out I often wonderdd why people didn't go for 4 15,s on a 25 base.
2. Going smaller, there was atime (may still be there) when the baccus site showed DBM or DBR bases for 15s packed with 6mm troops. Again for the mass impact.

Trajanus, Sparrowhawk is quite right so far Late Romans, and AWI. I hope to be covering more Late empire stuff, and revamping other ancients like the Punic wars. Possibly doing early Naps too, but thats a real maybe the moment.

Please do finish those late Romans, clibinarium! I'm holding off on buying a heap until I know I can get everything. It's also somewhat disgraceful that you haven't sculpted your namesake ;)

Incidentally, what's the difference between the packs ARL3 and ARL13 (both armoured cavalry)?

And while I'm haranguing you, PLEASE redo the Republican Roman infantry. I have a whole whack of them from various manufacturers, none of which I'm happy with-- I'm confident you can do better.

…Not that you should be distracted from sculpting Goths, of course. What can I say? I'm a big fan of your work!

My namesake's on the workbench at the moment!

ARL3 used to be the old figure from the previous range. I did one test horseman to see if I could do cavalry. He then became the new ARL3. The rest of the armoured horsemen became ARL13. Its a bit akward, but it was done to preserve the old codes, There's no real difference, other than you should order more ARL13 than ARL3 as ARL3 has just one pose.

Once I get some Germans done the Republicans are next on the list for a face lift, I've been working on some preliminary dolies.