The Pendulum Swings...

Bolt Action Back on the Painting Table!

Having begun to make some considerable progress with my Swordpoint Carthaginians over the balmy days of Summer, the time came to make the annual pilgrimage to the Newark Showground, to wander gobsmacked round the hallowed halls of the Other Partizan. When I looked through the contents of the programme, I noticed a demonstration game being put on by a wargaming club from my home town; this was a different club to the one that was aware of and their demonstration game was an Allies v Germans Bolt Action scenario... Although I was delighted to find a very active club based just a few miles from home, I began to get a feeling that my current target of 32 wild Gauls for my Carthaginian host might just be about to get side-lined!

As you can see, once again, enthusiasm for a game at a show got the better of me and I was sucked in to that old Bolt Action Attraction that I first experienced watching a demo game on Beasts of War and, since returning home from Partizan, I've been consumed by Joseph Stalin and his Communist ideology! 

I'd already painted the squad leader in the picture above and, apart from the fact that I'd armed him with a Mosin-Nagant M91 instead of a nice juicy sub-machine gun, I decided that I might as well use him as the starting point for a reinforced Soviet infantry platoon that I could take along to the club sometime fairly soon. 

There is much about the Soviets that really appeals to me, both as a painter and a gamer, not least the fact that their method of warfare and leadership dovetails very nicely with my own complete lack of tactical battlefield skill. Charging headlong into a storm of lead and hoping for the best is exactly what is written in my little red book of table top tactics.

From a painting point of view, the Soviets have proved very entertaining, in as much that all the information I have managed to acquire about uniform colours, suggests that 'uniform' is probably not the right word to use. It appears that the factories that produced uniforms were never given a proper brief as to what exact shade  the uniforms they were making should be and, as a consequence, they arrived with combat units in a multitude of assorted colours. Coupled with the fact that the materials, dyes and mordents used were all very poor quality, which lead to a rapid fading process, means that I get to paint individual figures in a medley of relatively miscellaneous colours! I have stuck to the colours which are mentioned in the painting guides that I have assembled and conformed to some degree of uniformity by only using Vallejo 894 (Cammo Olive Green) for helmets.

The one downside that I have discovered so far in choosing a Soviet force to build, is that there is a relatively large number of infantry to paint. In fact, the Bolt Action army lists are so keen on making you paint more figures than anybody else, that they even give a you a free 11 man squad of riflemen. Being one of the World's slowest painters is a decided disadvantage in this respect.

All in all, however, I have to say that I have definitely been bitten by the Soviet bug. Comrade Stalin and I will get on very well I think (until the next purge at any rate) and it's nice to find an army whose ideology and methodology you feel totally comfortable with. I'm not sure that I'll be setting up my Maxim medium machine gun directly behind the witless dullards, that I've sent scurrying haplessly towards the Fascist battle line, ready to gun down any shirkers who think it's acceptable to turn back and not give their lives for Mother Russia, but, I shall be singing "The Internationale" and waving the Red Flag as my boys hurl their Molotov Cocktails bravely into the advancing Panzer's jaws of death... on second thoughts, I might have to scour the rules to see what pluses I can get if they drink the stuff instead.

Victrix Iberian Infantry Painted for Swordpoint.

The Swordpoint Surge Continues!

Victrix Miniatures' Iberian infantry are a real treat to model and paint. The contents of the sprues give you endless variety for your models, with loads of different heads, crests, weapon types and shields. They can be purchased in two packs; one with the infantry wearing chest and back plates and the other identical but without the armour. This means that all the bits are interchangeable between the two packs. You get 40 figures in the pack and they currently retail in the U.K. for £26.95, if you buy a single pack. If you buy them at a show and don't pay postage, that works out at just over 67p per figure, which I think is pretty good value, given the quality of the figures and the variety you can create.

When you build your Iberian infantry, you'll find the usual casting lines in all the usual places. They are not difficult to remove and, once you've identified that they run from the top of the head right round the outside of the figure, including up the insides of the legs, a routine scraping with a sharp craft knife soon gets rid of them, without removing the stuff that you actually want to keep. If you are going to base your figures for something like Swordpoint, with multiple figures to a base, then you will need to do quite a lot of hacking away at the figure bases; they are huge and there is no way you could fit four of them on a 40mm x 40mm base. I paint my figures in groups of four and, once they are painted and varnished, I base them altogether, cutting down the figure bases as I go, gluing and flocking them  individually, which largely negates the problems you have getting your basing glue into those awkward places between figures. 

All the figures in this unit are fitted with Little Big Man shield transfers, which can only be purchased direct from Victrix!

Thus far, I have used some of the un-armoured pack to make a unit of light infantry Caetrati and, this new unit, which is made up of 24 of the armoured types, which are going to be fielded as veterans, with large shield, light armour and a heavy throwing weapon, which, for a six base unit, amounts to 144 points in Swordpoint.

At some point, I'm going to look again at how I painted the spears on this unit. One of the advantages Iberian infantry in this period had, was that they used all metal throwing spears and some of the spears on the Victrix sprues are clearly intended to be metal rather than wooden shafted. Some, however, are little more ambiguous! Fortunately, it wont be any great hardship to re-paint some of the spears with wooden shafts where they are currently painted all metal.

The fearsome Iberian Scutarii charge into action!

Hannibal's Hardened Veterans!

They've been a while on the painting bench, but they're here now!

A couple of months ago, I took a break from painting my Punic Wars Carthaginians to make a start on some Bolt Action World War II Germans. This week I took a break from Bolt Action to finish off some of the Carthaginians who have been patiently waiting at the back of the painting shelf.

When I took my Bolt Action break, I had twenty of the veteran infantry, from the Victrix Miniatures Warriors of Carthage box, painted and in various stages of basing and only needed to complete a further four figures to finish off the planned twenty-four man unit to use with Swordpoint. Having had a complete change from painting mail shirts, brass armour and shields, the enthusiasm had definitely returned and the final four spearmen were soon receiving the acrylic they had been awaiting for so long.

In Swordpoint, Hannibal's veteran infantry will cost you a hefty 198 points, if you take all the additional upgrades, which is roughly 20% of a 1000 point army. For your points outlay, you get a unit made up of 6 bases of troops who are veteran, superior fighters, drilled and stubborn! It seems a lot, but all that lot sums up the quality of the troops who had spent many years fighting alongside the great man, across the length and breadth of Italy.

The 24 figures were all painted pretty randomly and given different shield designs, as I didn't want them to appear as a 'regular' unit. My impression of Hannibal's veterans is a unit which has absorbed all sorts of people over the years, each bringing individuality, while retaining enough unifying features to make it distinctly Carthaginian.

Completing this unit has definitely re-ignited the enthusiasm for cracking on with my Swordpoint army and I have just a few figures to paint to complete a unit of veteran Spanish Scutarii. After that, a 32 figure unit of Celts, doubling up the number of Spanish and Numidian cavalry, a whole new Celtic cavalry unit, some people to command the whole lot...