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!