Last Sassanid units: levy sparabara and light horse

Here are the last of the Sassanids for a while - levy spearmen and archers and a few stands of light horse. I actually have quite a bit more of the light horse but those are for another time - most of the cavalry in my Sassanid army are savaran heavies.

Team Yankee in 1/285

Over the holidays I picked up a copy of the new Team Yankee rulebook from Battlefront. For those who don't know, this is the Cold War version of Flames of War intended for their own range of 15mm stuff, but in my opinion, vastly better suited for microarmour in terms of ground scale. I always wanted to like Flames of War because of the range of models, production value and popularity, but the rules always put me off for being clunky and full of special national characteristic rules which to me is just bad design. Team Yankee is a vast improvement on the FOW engine - it's considerably streamlined, sensible, has few special rules and exceptions, and might actually look like okay with 1/285 models in terms of ground scale.

So it has inspired me to paint up more modern microarmour, the game is set in 1985 when M1 Abrams tanks just arrived in Europe, historically painted in forest green at a time when most of the kit like M1092, M113s etc.. in theatre was still MERDC camo and prior to the transition to Nato tricolour:

Sassanid elephant division

Here we have four (!) Sassanid elephants - two from Aventine and two from Old Glory - along with a bunch of light foot archers and javelinmen. Getting close to having a very sizable and colourful Persian army to play with! The biggest challenge may be storage - these are big pachyderms.

In 2015 I painted a lot of lead - not sure if the pile actually shrank or not on balance, but here are the numbers:

1/600: 24 aircraft
10mm: 462 foot, 24 mounted, 9 guns, 2 wagons
15mm: 235 foot, 56 mounted, 4 chariots, 4 vehicles, 1 chopper
1/72: 329 foot, 18 mounted, 6 guns, 2 limbers, vehicle
28mm: 154 foot, 56 mounted, 1 dragon
6mm: 48 vehicles, 52 infantry
1/35: 1 tank
Total: 1333 foot, 154 mounted, 103 other

The large amount of 10mm were ACW, the 15mm stuff was mostly DBA, the 1/72 were Napoleonics and WW2, and the 28s mostly ancients/medievals.

In 2016 I plan to complete these Sassanids to play "To the Strongest", and would also like to try Team Yankee using my growing collection of modern microarmour.