Republican Rome – Lair of the Lagomorph

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.

This post will be different to other posts I’ve made on this blog, more of a formal explanation of what I am doing and why I am doing it. All of the posts so far I’ve made on the blog have been focused on painted models, but there are no painted models in this post, painted models will come later! Think this as an introductory chapter to a book about me painting this army.

This project I’ve been working on very slowly in the background, in between painting other models. It’s been going slow for a couple of reasons: 1) I have no real time pressure on this, as I don’t really have anyone ready anytime soon to play games of Warhammer Ancient Battles (WAB from now on!), 2) Part of the fun for me when building historical armies is to research them to try and get some historical accuracy to what I’m doing. I say some, because between the lack of complete certainty from the historians, the interpretations imposed by the model manufacturer, the interpretations imposed by the rules writers, and my own drives towards building something that I think will be fun to paint and play with, there is a lot of grey area! As a compromise I’ve settled on reading as much a I can about the era and the organisation of republican Rome’s armies, and from that, extract what I think are defining characteristics that I want to represent in this army.

Why Warhammer Ancient Battles?

Before getting stuck into why I chose this army specifically, I wanted to address the games system, as there are many other options to chose from when it comes to 28mm ancient battles, such as Hail Caesar from Warlord Games and Kings of War Historical from Mantic Games. While I enjoy painting miniatures for the sake of painting miniatures, when it comes to armies I like to have a framework to operate in, to help me structure what models to get and how to equip them. I chose WAB as that framework, mainly due to familiarity and nostalgia. I played Warhammer Fantasy Battles (which was the basis for WAB) for many years before it was discontinued, which means I have a baseline understanding of the WAB rules, and a bit of longing for a return to movement trays and ranked up miniatures (madness!).

Why Republican Rome?

This decision was driven by childhood memories. As a history-loving kid I was given a book about the Roman army (The Roman Army by Peter Connolly), which covered the commonly discussed eras (Republic, Late Republic, and Imperial). I was always struck by the illustrations of the different infantry types in the republican army, with the Velites and their wolf skins, Hastati/Principes throwing pilums, and the Triarii with their long spears. I still have that book as you can see in the photo below.

While all three eras covered in that book inspire me, when it came to choosing an ancient army to put together, the Republic won over the later eras. Specifically, this is the army of the Republic during the 2nd and 3rd Punic wars. While memories of the book inspired the choice of army, a more mundane consideration came into the decision: the variety of troops in the Republican army would be much more fun to paint!

Forming the Army

As part of researching the formation of these armies, I re-read through the book I discussed above, but also drew from another book: The Roman Army edited by Chris McNab, which goes into a lot more detail about how and why the army was the way it was.

With this reading in mind, I came up with the following drivers for the army:

All four infantry types must be included (Velites, Hastatii, Principes, Triarii)
The ratios of those infantry types should be roughly respected (Hastati:Principes:Triarii -> 2:2:1, with enough Velites to screen all these)
A legion would be reinforced with cavalry (Equites), and I want to include some too
The legions of the era fought with allies from other Italian states, and I would include these if I had the points to (I did not in the end)

With these points in mind, I looked through the WAB army lists and put together this 2800pt list:

There are a few too many Hastati relative to the ratio I discussed above, included because I had leftover points and the models available, and there are quite a few characters given the size of the army (assuming each unit is a century, this army would represent around a fifth of a legion, and a legion was led by 6 Tribunes), but Warhammer is a hero heavy system so I think of this as a concession to fun over accuracy.

Building the Army

I settled on Victrix models for the bulk of the army relatively quickly. They have a range of Republican Roman figures in plastic that looked nicely detailed and well cast, and one of the local stores over here carried their models which made them readily available. For characters I had to look at other brands, and I decided to get some of Warlord Games’, models. Warlord doesn’t have a range of early republic figures, by they do have late republic models which I thought would be close enough.

Victrix make two sets of legionaries, one with pectoral armour, and one with chain mail. Rome’s division between infantry troops being decided by wealth at the time, and troops buying their own equipment, I decided that the Hastati (poorest and youngest of the legionaries) I would model with the pectoral armour to make them easy to tell apart from the otherwise identically armed Principes who I would model with the chainmail bodies. The Triarii would also be modelled with chain mail, but as they are equipped with spears they would be easy to differentiate from the Principes.

Each Victrix set comes with 42 legionaries and 18 Velites, giving me a surplus of pectoral armour models if I were to only include the two units of Hastati as originally planned. Hence the inclusion of the smaller unit to fill out points, possibly the remnants of another maniple.

The Victrix models go together very easily, the main issue I had with them was the inclusion of stands directly on the models, which I cut off to glue them to Warhammer 20mm square bases. I can’t really fault them for this choice though, as they make these models to be system agnostic and need to cater to all types of basing as a result. I have some photos of the assembly process below.

I’ve finished building the first set of models I got, the pectoral armoured legionaries, which gives me my three units of Hastati, and two of the four units of Velites the army will have.

I hope you enjoyed a look at the process and decisions that I had to make as I went about planning this army. Expect to see some intermittent progress on this project, as I said at the start, I’m taking a very relaxed approach to getting these done, they will be worked on as inspiration strikes.