figures advice.
(its funny, An Italian asked exactly the same question on my perferred rules email list over the weekend)
I went for 15mm, and mostly Xyston.
Khurasan do the best imortals and sparabara I could find – but there range stops there. their figures are scaled to fit with Essex, but I was not impressed by the essex range itself.
Additionally, I massively over-ordered from Khurasan since I failed to spot the number of figures per pack, which gave me the ability to pick the exact poses I wanted for front and back rank, and since my preferred rules allow double deep bases, I could put spara and spear men in front, and bowmen in back – leaving a ton of extra spara to resue in the rest of the army (very useful).
for the rest, pretty much all Xyston
I know their figures are for the later Alexandrer / Darius period, but if you ignore kardakes and takabara, then I'm happy to use all the other subject peoples as subject peoples from the earlier period. Having extra Spara helped me here, as did having a bunch of spare shields from all over the place – some Egyptian Marines shields added to Phoneician Marines figures gives a much better Assyrian looking chap, for example, and spare Spara added to some Persian Levies make an interesting robed figure (who deserves a better colour scheme than the one I gave them).
Another option is Minifigs 15mm range – they sculpts are a bit dated, but they look like they will paint up well, and they are the only guys who realy get into the vagiaries of the subjects as per Herodotus – but no images on their website, so its always a risk when you order sight-unseem.
The big question you have is always going to be which sort of Xerxes army list are you going to use.
Marathon to Platea gives three distinct choices, I think
marathon itself, which seems a pretty basic all Persian sort of army
Platea which is the same with extra greek hoplites (neither with imortals to be strict)
And the main invasion force, which is all unwilling subjects and interesting things to paint and the immortals.
As I found here, a huge number of guys on this site will only do Platea style with extra Imortals -so all the best infatry (Immortals, Sparabara and Greek Hoplites) and none of the rubbbish getting in the way – maximised options for a style of play which I fail to understand.
I went the other way, and got all the really crapy useless subjects – and as much variety as I could find within that.
- It was immensly more fun to prepare and paint, but a lot more thought had to go into the prep,and its not exactly a maximised competition army (although I did beat up a thracian army two weeks ago)
