Friday, 17 January 2020

Florentine knights


As well as the new guns, I've also been putting some more knights together for the Italian Wars. Above are some Florentines; I put them on unarmoured horses, like to ones depicted in the "Rout of San Romano". The excellent Florentine flag is one of Pete's flags, from eBay.

Below are more plastic Perry knights, this time in charging poses. Most of these were painted by chum Lionel in France, who paints a mean barber's shop lance. :-)


The extra knights give me more options for fielding either more units for the 15cm grid, or larger units for the 20cm To the Strongest! grid. I'm also currently putting a second Renaissance army together for eventual play-testing purposes.

Thursday, 16 January 2020

Gonnes


Here are my first medieval artillery pieces, two Perry breech-loading field pieces. The one on the left is in Burgundian livery, and on the right in Italian style. I bought these minis part-painted, finished them off and based.

I have been plugging away at the TtS! Renaissance draft, again, recently. Guns become quite useful in the Renaissance where there can be some very promising targets! :-) I plan to build a fair old artillery park, including bombards, organ guns and some big French field guns.

Tuesday, 31 December 2019

New Year, New Herds!


Over Christmas I've been working on three new herds of elephants, two of which are for the new Salute game (Battle of Ipsus)  and the third for the previous-planned Salute game (Thapsus, which I've pushed back a year). The new game, Ipsus, should enable me to get the better part of thirty howdah-less nellies on the table. There may have been as many as 575 elephants at Ipsus.

All of the Indians at the front (mostly superb Aventine resins, with some nice old Vendels, painted by Dan Toone and Shaun McTague) need to be finished and based or re-based. The six Aventine nellies at back left, and eight more not shown, need to be painted- they will be Macedonian ride-ons. The ten nellies back right (and below) are Aventine resin Africans, painted by Kevin Lucas). 


Below are some of the Indians. The riders are magnetised and can be removed; I'm not entirely sure whether that is necessary, but it is kind of cool. It might help with storage, and gives me the option of replacing Indian riders with Macedonians. They are all on my crinkly-edged batbases.


A very Happy New Year to all! I hope this finds you and yours well. A couple of chums are going through challenging times at the moment, and I'll be thinking of them at midnight. I hope we all have a rip-roaring Twenty-Twenty! 

Tuesday, 24 December 2019

Merry Christmas!


Merry Christmas everybody!  I hope all of your miniature dreams come true, in 2020. :-)

Friday, 13 December 2019

New Hussite army list published


The new Hussite list, written by chum Peter Anderson (thanks Peter!), is the first published list to include large numbers of war wagons. The Hussite Wars are fascinating and this really is an iconic list that we should have published years ago. You can find the 218th TtS! army list in the  Later Medieval booklet.

The stunning war wagon above was painted by Gregory Blake, who tells me he has a dozen of them, lucky so-'n-so.

Wednesday, 11 December 2019

New army lists!


Since the beginning of September, I've published 13 new army lists for To the Strongest! and edited and extended many others. There are now 217 different lists. The new lists include:

  • Hephthalite (White Hun), Indo Skythian, Later Muslim and Later Hindu Indian lists, all in the "Across the Indus!" booklet
  • An Old and Middle Kingdom Egyptian list in "Cradle of Civilizations"
  • Kyrenean Greek and Mercenary Greek lists in "Frogs about a Pond"
  • Western Frankish and Magyar lists in "Early Medieval"
  • A Khwarazmian list in "High Medieval"
  • Later Medieval Portuguese and Low Counties lists in "Later Medieval"
  • A Turkish Tribes and Kingdoms list in "Oriental"

I'm very excited about some of the new lists- particularly the ones in the new Indian booklet, which are very exotic and include some very unusual troop types.

All the lists can be downloaded, for free, from https://bigredbatshop.co.uk/collections/all/army-lists

Monday, 9 December 2019

Thapsus elephants


It's been the longest time since I posted images on minis- real life stuff has kept me too busy. But normal service will henceforth, hopefully, be resumed. Here are some WIP images of one of the projects I've been busy on. Six of these beautiful Aventine elephants (along with two other beauties for another project, not shown) were painted for me by chum Kevin Lucas- I just added some highlights on the howdahs and crew. The Aventine elephants are resin with metal detail and are beautifully light. I have rebased two very nice Agema elephants from my Numidian army, to join them.


The un-textured areas of base will take the screening light infantry, which aren't yet painted. These eight will form the screen for my Pompeian army for the Salute Thapsus game. I'll take proper pictures, when they are finished in January. I think I now have 31 elephants on bases, altogether, with another 15-20 painted but not yet based, mostly intended for a projected Classical Indian army.