Hail Caesar – Lair of the Lagomorph

Carthaginian Infantry

The Epic scale painting continues, this time with my first blocks of ranked infantry: Carthaginian infantry.

As with all my models for this project, these are Warlord’s Epic Scale Punic Wars range for their Hail Caesar game. As I mentioned in the last few posts however I’m not basing these on Warlord’s bases, which are 60x20mm but on my own 3D printed bases which are 80x40mm and are more suited to the Midgard game.

As a result of the larger bases I decided to stick down 3 strips per base rather than the two that fit on the Warlord bases. I quite like the look of the 3 strips together, and therefore am happy with the decision. I also quite like the look of the separation I get between blocks even when the bases are touching as the bases are wider than the strips. This will be accentuated for the Romans when I get to them as they are modelled to fit 3 ranks on the Warlord bases (so roughly the same footprint of 2 strips of the more normally ranked infantry).

Painting-wise there were a few things I had to do differently to the skirmishing troops. First of all, these are not single models, but a full strip of 10 overlapping models, which presents advantages (definitely faster than painting 10 individual models!), and adds some tricky-ness for basing as the basing material is added after the strips are glued down and I had to veeery carefully get basing paste between the strips (a roughly 5mm gap) after gluing them down.

The skin was painted exactly as per the Numidians from the past post, that is with AK Tan Earth. The shields are a mix of AK Ivory, Vallejo Game Heavy Goldbrown and Vallejo Game Heavy Violet. The bronze is Scale75 Necrogold, and the silver Scale75 Black Metal, both my go to colours for those. As for the other models I went for an all over wash of Army Painter Soft Tone followed by a highlight of the basecoat colour.

Overall I really like the ranked look you get from these models, especially with the overlapping shields. These were slightly more tedious to paint than the skirmishers, but again I painted 60 models in the time I painted 20 skirmishers so I suppose I can’t complain.

Here they are amongst the other bases I painted so far. I really like the distinction between skirmishers and ranked infantry you get at this scale. I’ve made a small dent in the Carthaginian Division set now, with roughly a third of the units painted (the rest is mostly a lot of Gauls and Iberians!).

In other news, I just got a notification that today marks five years since my first post which is quite something. I don’t think at the time I had any idea I’d go this long, so thanks a lot to all of you for reading the blog, it does keep me motivated to see comments and views on my posts! Here’s to 5+ more!

Numidian Allies

Hail Caesar, Midgard Heroic Battles

Back with a small update this week; two more bases for my Punic Wars project. As the title indicates these are Numidians, a base of cavalry and a base of javelin skirmishers.

Much like the slingers last week, these were fun and fast to paint. I went for the classic cowhide shields on these, although I have no idea how historical it may be. I’ve always loved the look!

Painting-wise, the strategy was much as it was for the first unit last week (i.e. basecoat, wash, highlight with basecoat), but with some different colours. The white cloth and white fur is AK Ivory, the skin is AK Tan Earth, the wooden areas (spears/shields) are basecoated in Vallejo English Uniform, and highlighted with 50/50 English Uniform and Vallejo German Camo Beige WW2.

The horses and the spots on the shield used contrast paints. As I undercoated my models with a leather brown, I put the contrasts directly on that rather than the more usually recommended white/cream colour. I quite like the look of contrast paints over browns, I think they look more natural than over whites. The reddish-brown horses are done using Gore-Grunta Fur Contrast, the brown horses using Wildwood Contrast and the black horses as well as the manes/tails of all the others using Black Templar Contrast. I think that gives a pretty good result at this scale, and I’ll happily do the rest of the horses I have to paint for this project (which is quite a few horses) this way.

Both of these sets of models are from the Carthaginian Division set of the Hail Caesar Epic Battles range. I have two more Numidian bases, this time archers from the Allied Division set so these aren’t the last Numidians you’ll see for this project.

So far I’ve only done loosely ordered troops so I might try my hand at some close order troops next. We’ll see where inspiration strikes!

Back to the Punic Wars!

Hail Caesar, Midgard Heroic Battles

My historical wargaming kick is still going strong (I’ll get back to you Fantasy gaming I promise!), and I’ve put some birthday vouchers to good use, picking up some models I’ve been eyeing off since they were released last year: Warlord Games’ Punic War “epic scale” range.

I you’ve been keeping an eye on this blog for a while you might remember my foray into Republican Romans back in 2021. This was in 28mm scale, which is home for me scale wise (well that and the associated 25, and 32mm scales), but while I enjoyed painting the models I was always troubled by the fact that to get some of the formations in the historical record (e.g. the famed Triplex Acies for the romans, with its triple row of supporting infantry blocks) I would need a lot of space on the game board (not to mention crazy amounts of miniatures!). That took the wind out of my sails for this project and the models have sat unprogressed for a long time. When I saw the Warlord announcement last year I knew this was the way forward, a smaller scale letting me have the number of units to play games with some semblance of the historical formations. This doesn’t solve my unused miniatures problem for my 28mm romans however, and the plan there is to repurpose them for smaller scale games in the Caesarean invasion of Gaul which is something else I’d like to wargame.

Another tricky aspect of the era was finding rules that captured the kind of gaming that I’d like to do for the period. That was resolved when I discovered Midgard last month, the game is fun and simple to play and has some great rules to reward the in depth formations the Roman’s adopted. In fact the author has published some army lists for the Punic wars specifically, making using Midgard for the period very easy.

Armed with some rules and a model range I plunged in and picked up the Roman/Carthaginian/Allied division boxes (and most importantly the elephant set) from Warlord, which gave me more than enough models to play a large game of Midgard.

The models come with bases for Hail Caesar, which aren’t quite right for Midgard where units are more standalone. So I decided to make my own bases, larger than the Hail Caesar bases, and put more models on each. The bases are of an 8cm frontage, 4cm deep for infantry and 5.5cm deep for cavalry. I modelled these and 3d printed them. If you’re interested in the files I put them up on Cults3D as a free download.

That’s enough context, onto the models! The models are Warlord’s epic scale which seems to be around 14mm so half size from what I’m used to. The detail is really quite good given the size and the models took washes really well which is very helpful. I painted this base of gallic slingers as a test unit to try out a few things: what washes work well at the scale, and what basing scheme I was going to go with. Wash wise, I was worried that my usual go-to Agrax Earthade might be a bit much (too dark/strong) for the scale so I looked for something lighter. I settled on Army Painter’s Soft Tone wash, which I think worked really nicely.

The process I used is as follows: I airbrushed some leather brown all over the models to get a nice brown base to work with, which would work for any leather items (belts, shoes, slings), and let me focus on painting cloth, shields and skin. I then basecoated these areas in nice bright colours (probably inspired by my reading and re-reading of Asterix comics as a kid!), basecoated the skin in AK Beige Red, and gave the models an all over wash of Soft Tone. Once that was dry I gave the skin areas a second wash of Citadel Reikland Fleshshade (somewhat diluted) to get some red into the skin. I then used the basecoat colours to highlight the models back up. The hair was then painted, basecoating it with an off-white, and using GW contrasts for colour (Aggaroth Dunes for the blonde hair, and Gore Grunta Fur for the reddish hair). Nice and quick!

For the basing I wanted to aim for a generic Mediterranean look, which could work for Summery Italy as well as the North African coast. To that end I used and AK texture paint called Sandy Desert, and while it was wet sprinkled on a couple of Woodland Scenics foams and some old GW sand mix I had lying around. The base rim is Vallejo Russian Uniform WW2. Overall I’m happy with the look, it’s probably a bit too deserty for Italy if I’m being honest, but hopefully close enough that suspending disbelief is easy enough!

Hastati

Hail Caesar, Uncategorized, Warhammer Ancients

Some of you may remember a post from a while back about my Republican Romans army. At the time I had built a fair few models and spent some time deciding how to field them using the Warhammer Ancient Battles ruleset. They’ve been sitting in a box since then waiting for motivation to strike. A couple of weeks ago I found a second hand copy of the rulebook and army list book for the Hail Caesar game by Rick Priestley at a local game store. I bought them, started reading them, and immediately began planning lists for my Romans using the ruleset.

In Hail Ceasar, armies are built around “divisions”, a generic, period agnostic word they use to describe a group of units lead by a commander of some sort. One of those commanders is chosen to be the general of the army. This system is quite flexible, and meant to be used as the player sees fit to represent historical formations. In my case, the unit was pretty clear as the divisions fit the republican maniples quite well.

One decision that needs to be made between players of the game is how big do they want a “standard” unit to be. Ranks in the game are mostly aesthetic, frontage is all that really matters as far as the rules are concerned. This is so that players of other rule systems can easily port their armies across to this system regardless of the conventions that might have been enforced by other rulesets. This flexibility is interesting and definitely took some adjusting to coming from more rigid systems. Seeing as the other player doesn’t exist (most likely to end up being friends playing whatever other army I end up painting for this system!) I got to argue with myself about what size to make units.

To respect the ratio of Hastati to Principes to Triarii found in each maniple (120, 120, and 60 men strong respectively), the republican army list sets a rule that a ratio of 2:2:1 units must be taken. I decided that these 5 units plus some skirmishers would make a good maniple/division. The game treats the components of a maniple as small units (so half the size of standard units), and sets as a guide the frontage of small units to 80-120mm (so 4-6x20mm based models in the first rank). If two of these small units are to match the 120 men found in the historical formation, then choosing the smaller end of that range gives me a 4×2 formation, 8 men per unit, 16 hastati per maniple, or a ratio of one miniature per 7.5 men, which seems reasonable to me (I’ve seen 10 used in the past). Now enough of that, let’s talk about painting!

As you can see above I have painted up four of these small units giving me enough for two divisions of troops. Still to come then are as many principes, and half as many triarii to complete the core of the units. On top of that I need to paint some velites (skirmishers), and a division of equites (cavalry). Finally I’ll need one commander per division.

I occasionally try things out when I paint, and this seemed like a good project to try the GW contrast paints in their intended use, i.e. single coat applications over a pale undercoat. I find rank and file games to be more forgiving than loose formation games when it comes to painting standards, as the nature of tight formations means they generally get looked at from further away. This meant that I wasn’t too worried about experimenting here, I was fairly sure I’d end up with something serviceable!

The paints I used are listed in the picture above. As you can see, many of the colours are a single coat of the contrast paints. The exceptions are flat colours and metallics. As undercoat I used Vallejo Grey primer, which is effectively an off-white, just very slightly grey. There is one highlight in the scheme and that is the cream cloth, which I wanted brighter than I could get with the contrast on top of the primer. You’ll notice off by itself an oil paint listed, and that was for the second experiment. I’ve used oils a fair bit on tanks and other vehicles in the past but haven’t really tried them on organic things before. I wanted to tone down the brightness of the models and unify them somewhat, so after some drying time, I thinned down some of the Dark Mud by Abteilung 502 and covered the models in it. I let that dry for a few minutes until the thinner looked to have evaporated (it has been over 40 degrees C for almost a week over here so that did not take long…), then wiped the excess off of the raised areas with a cheap makeup sponge.

I’m pretty satisfied with the result, I painted all 32 models in a few sittings so the speed is definitely there, and I think they look nice all ranked up! I can see why many army painters swear by these paints. I actually got excited by how fast I did these and started on the equites, but I missed highlighting things so I’m back to painting some WW2 models for a little bit.