Sultanate of Rum (DBA III/73)

Over the last two weeks I finished my Seljuk army for our upcoming DBA campaign. I decided to do the Sultanate of Rum list, which is a bit heavier than the generic Seljuk list, but it is still dominated by light horse. It will be fun to play, challenging to win with against crusaders with bow and knight combinations. The figures are from Legio Heroica and I got them in exchange for painting Terry's Ayubbid army.

The army consists of Cavalry general:


An additional cavalry element:


One element of knights:


6 elements of light horse:


Spear, likely to be my camp garrison:



Choice of bow or psiloi:



Choice of bow, psiloi or auxilia:



Next up: I might get back to High Elves and break open the Island of Blood models, and I also have a plan to do a Crusade campaign board using GW's Mighty Empires.

Finished a unit of 16 High Elf spearmen for WHFB. I acquired these from Bob in a trade and they were in bad shape when I got them. I used Simple Green to strip them, and was really pleased with how well it worked. I have in the past used Pine-Sol but it is very strong and the missus hates the way it smells. Simple Green works just as well, perhaps better, is less toxic and with only a slight and not unpleasant odour. It just takes a bit longer- I let them steep for about 10 days before using an old toothbrush on them to take them down to bare plastic.




High Elf spearmen are not a game-winner, unless perhaps the unit is very large, but it provides a safe place for mages to hang out while they cast their magic. So you have really got to have some. I would like to pick up some more, but GW charges $42 for a box of 16....sheesh...

Next up: 15mm Legio Heroica Seljuks for DBA are assembled and primed.

Ayubbid DBA army

I just finished a Legio Heroica DBA army for my chum Terry at the club. In exchange, he bought me a Seljuk army that I will paint later for our Crusades campaign.

Terry indicated he preferred a dark theme for the army, so I went with black robes and dark chainmail with some gold trim, and turbans and sashes in a masculine hued colour palette (blue, red, green and white). I'm saving the pastels for my Seljuks.

First we have the General, this is a model of Saladin, champion and standard bearer. Terry will need to add a standard since I don't have anything good for it.


The core of the army is cavalry, 5 elements of it:


They are supported by 2 elements of light horse:


Then there is a choice of horde or auxilia/warband (nobody will choose horde, but they always look so cool!):


Then two elements of bow and/or psiloi:


And finally another light horse or psiloi:



Nice army, should be very competitive in good going with all the mobility, plus there are significant element choices to contest bad going patches too. It will reward a player that makes the most of manouever rather than force. Saladin was very canny, after all.

Hope they meet his approval. It occurred to me as I was lining it up that I owe him one more psiloi element. Doh! I'll get it done, mate!

High Elves

I have made a start on a WHFB High Elf army, starting with 24 old school archers I got from Bob. All the same pose, but I like that. These guys will fill out some of the core of my army which I am planning to go magic-heavy on. That will be a contrast to my Empire gunline and Bretonnian knights.





Also on the workbench is a Legio Heroica 15mm DBA Saracen army I am painting for Terry. Nice figs, should have those done by the end of the week.

2010 in Review

My painting totals for 2010:

15mm - 254 foot, 68 mounted
20mm - 808 foot, 162 mounted
28mm - 470 foot, 106 mounted, 6 cows, 1 anuran

Total - 1,532 foot, 336 mounted, 6 cows, 1 anuran which is a grand total of 1,875 figures painted. A large number were 1/72 ancients and Napoleonics and 28mm ECW. I thought I might reach 2,000 and was on track for that until I started painting Bretonnians in November and the rate declined precipitously. Next year, I will likely paint fewer figures since I am not planning on starting any really big new projects. New projects will include several DBA and HOTT armies, High Elves for WHFB, maybe some WW2 Pacific and Western Desert stuff, and Gallipoli.

I played a lot of DBA in 2010, and kept track of my win-losses:

Early medieval Poles 2-1
Scots Isles and Highlanders 6-1
Early Achaemenid Persians 3-3
Late Achaemenid Persians 8-1
Gallic 2-0
Dacians: 11-3
Hittite Empire: 2-1
Asiatic Hoplites: 5-3
Sassanid Persians: 13-11-1
War of the Roses English 3-0

Overall I played 80 games and won 55, losing 24 and one called a draw. Sassanids were the hardest army to win with (2 horde and an elephant make this army difficult to manoeuver) and the Dacians and Late Achaemenids were perhaps my most formidable, going 19-4 combined. Probably 3/4 of my games were played against Mark. Next year will feature a Crusades campaign in which I will field the Seljuks and I would like to complete my Egyptian and Roman armies. These are all formidable combined arms forces, so I would like to maintain my 70% winning rate...roll 6s baby!

I have now finished my Bretonnian army, just completed the last unit of Pegasus Knights



I even managed a game against Kevin's lizards last night, and the Pegasus knights administered the coup de gras against the Slann and temple guard along with the Grail knights. So the Brets are off to a good start in 2011 thanks to a favourable terrain set-up and some timely dispelling.

Scott come over today for a WHFB rematch at 2,000 pts. His daemons versus my shiny Bretonnians. My force was similar to last time with 40 longbowmen and trebuchet in the foreground:


And 3 lances of knights, I also had a strong contingent of heroes and the lord:


We rolled for a pitched battle and the terrain ended up like this, dominated by linear obstacles and a pit that churned out random spells at the far end:


I deployed strong on my right flank with knights, bows and trebuchet, and hoped to refuse my left with the men-at-arms holding back the daemons as long as I could:


Facing my strong right were his flamers, gumbies and the bad doggies:


While the angry red guys and the daemon prince were on my left. Turn 1 saw him cautiously advance while I held my ground and faced the menace. I wanted him to move into charge range before punching forward, hoping that the pressure of longbows and trebuchet would keep him moving forward:

Men-at-arms face the prince:

Turn 2 was supposed to be my big one, with all 3 knight lances charging. But it was a fucking disaster. Two of three charges failed, a damsel miscast, and the trebuchet misfired...



Turn 3 saw the daemons continue to advance,


and a nurgle thingy charged my stalled knights of the realm, fortunately we won on combat resolution and there was a nice self-immolating break check that left him in a puddle of goo:

Turn 3 I completed the charges, the one successful questing knight charge destroyed one unit of flamers, but the second hopped along the bushes of the far board edge and fried both of my units of archers right off the board on single shots. Hot dice..

Meanwhile, on my refused left, the men-at-arms proved to be resilient and went toe-to-toe with some bloodletters for a while:


Until they were rear-charged by the daemon prince and ran for the board edge over a burning fence, incurring even more casualties. Fortunately, the pursuing bloodletters also caught their scrotes on the burning fence and somehow came up short in the pursuit. But there were only two of them left by now, and we rallied and turned to face in the next turn.



On the right, my grail knights eventually destroyed the gumbies, but the realm knights were defeated by a combo of bad doggies and angry red men

The last turn saw my surviving knights and characters facing his surviving angry red men and dogs. At this point I had high powered characters at the core of these units and felt optimistic. He charged my questing knights and my tooled-up paladin with a 2+ ward save against flaming attacks took on the skulltaker. What happened? He got two killing blow hits and I failed the 2+ ward save. Go figure, that was the game for me. On top of that, we nerfed a pile of easy armour saves against the flamers and the grail knights were roasted as well. The lady just wasn't with us today.


So we conceded. By this time my resident daemonette of Slaanesh had returned after an afternoon of swimming with the kids and was giving me dirty looks for not finishing up in time to make an easy-bake cake with the 5-year old nurglette.

Hordes and Highlanders

Montrose marched off to meet the undead horde at Bob's house today. In game 1 I was the defender, and here you see the view from the right flank with the Strathbogie regiment of pike and shot in the foreground:


My plan was to push shooters and warband into the forest on my left as a holding action and use my right wing of the Strathbogie with mounted as the hammer. Here Bob advances his bony boys into the mill:


And I try to get warband and shooters into the woods on my left, I started with lousy pips so the development was slow:


Once I reached the woods, I could not resist the opportunity to jump forward with Highland warbands into the hordes (nice matchup with quick-kill in my favour) and blow a hole:


And behind this skirmish I tried to develop the right. All the while, I was mostly concerned with his flyer (still not active):


Eventually I was able to start forcing the right flank more and more, I don't remember why it took so long for Bob to take flight, but I think he was busy working my left with his bow elements and I was losing ground there. But the right flank matchup with my pike and shot versus his knights was what I was after:


Bob popped the flier who helped to outflank my left, but I was able to shoot him down from the woods with my last stand of Irish shot. Here we see my left has collapsed but the right has developed nicely and I have position to turn his general:


And eventually this is what happened, fortunately the dice were kind too (my 4 to his 1):


Game 1 was very close (11G:10). They don't come much closer.

Game 2 saw the positions reversed with Bob as defender. I looked at his deployment and decided to refuse my right and infiltrate and overlap his left by forcing warband and shooters through the woods, perhaps with a Stronghold assault to decide the outcome:


I had lots of pips to start and developed as planned. But my refused right was a concern, and the flier worried me. I kept my general back as a reserve and ZOC to limit his ability to outflank me. In hindsight, I should have used MacColla for this. As a hero he is better able to counter fliers and has lots of mobility. This tactical error would be my undoing.


The left flank attack worked well despite Bob's knight reinforcements, I had enough pips to engineer the match-ups I wanted:



And eventually I killed the entire left, but I was left in disarray with all of my shooters unable to support my right and the threat of the flier. Then it happened, the flyer jumped my right with a supporting knight and I foolishly allowed my general to be taken in a flanked position.


At that time, I was just ahead or even on AP killed so the game did not end immediately, but the next turn Bob regenerated some dead hordes and killed off another highlander warband, so we were defeated. This ended up something like 8G:6. My downfall was my poor aerial defence on the right. My army composition and game strategy were fine, just tactically I goofed and let the flyer grizzly-rape me. Bah! Bloody good fun though. Bob and I agree, if I could only ever play one game for the rest of my life, shipwrecked on an island with one rulebook, it would have to be HOTT.