Irregular Wars Wargaming

I recently received a package of sample 10mm miniatures from a German company, Excellent Miniatures. For full disclosure, I paid for most of the postage, but I did not pay for the miniatures. The package contained an assortment of figures from different ranges that they currently sell. In this post, I am going to concentrate on the two ranges of elves that were in the sample - Elven Nobles and Elves of the Wood. I believe both ranges have been produced by Forest Dragon on patreon and Excellent Miniatures have a license to 3D print and sell them commercially.  Here you can see the Excellent Miniatures elves alongside examples of other assorted (nominally) 10mm miniatures. The first thing to note is that the quality of the sculpting is quite remarkable and the printing leaves them clean and crisp.The Noble Elves (on foot) are slightly smaller than all the others, but the comparison is a little unfair as these examples are not on the strip base that they would ordinarily be printed on...

This week saw two playtests of  Fantastic Battles  here in Ulster. The  first between my Ziggurat Dwarves and JB's Dark Elves , and the second between my Hearthshire Halflings against Jim's Byzernian Humans.  Rolling for Mishaps, the halfling line (bottom of the photo) was moderately impacted. One unit of treefolk was delayed and deployed to the rear of their designated position, the kitchen militia were too enthusiastic and deployed forward, and both the archers and hearthguard units were suffering from disease - or was it bad salmon mousse served the night before? The Byzernians had invested in a 'quartermaster' who positively modified all their Mishap rolls meaning they only had one enthusiastic unit - skirmishing kern on their right flank (upper left in the photo) - and a late unit of drunken bonnachts. The Byzenians had also purchased the 'ambush'  strategy allowing their rogue to lead a unit of light horse prickers ahead of their line on the left (top righ...

This week saw two playtests of Fantastic Battles here in Ulster. The first between my Ziggurat Dwarves and JB's Dark Elves, and the second between my Hearthshire Halflings against Jim's Byzernian Humans .  As noted elsewhere, all our testing to date has been with 10mm armies based on 40x40mm bases, but the game itself is scale agnostic so long as all companies on the table are based the same way. Rolling for Mishaps saw one unit of Ziggurati shield-bearers (the red shields) and the flying carpet-riding priests suffering the impact of disease, and the other unit of shield-bearers (the blue shields) arriving late and being forced to deploy behind the ballistae on the hill. The Dark Elves mustered all of their elite elvish units on their right (top left of the photo), and had three large rabble units of expendable thralls (all on stimulants) on their left. One of the units of thralls was wracked with disease - a devastating impact on rabble - while another was overly enthusiastic...

Continuing to plug away at my 1809ish Austrians, I am please to have finished the last unit of my Advanced Guard Division, the Archduke Charles Legion. The legion (six battalions strong) was raised by Archduke Charles (Erzherzog Karl) in 1808 from Bohemia and Moravia to provide bodies of light infantry for the Austrian army. Unlike the more numerous battalions of the same name raised in 1800, the 1809 legion seems to have been uniformed in brown coats with red facings and pike-grey trousers. The entire first battalion seems to have worn the Corsican hat (like regular jager battalions), but only the light companies in the other battalions wore the same, other companies wore a shako. This unit, with skirmishers wearing the Corsican hat but the rest wearing a shako, will nominally be the 2nd battalion which saw action (and took heavy casualties) at Aspern and Wagram in 1809.

With arguably too much time on my hands just now, I converted a couple of spare Magister Militum figures into additional commanders for my 10mm Classical Macedonians. The mounted chap with the Herakles-complex was a Thracian horseman (I have been converting them into hetairoi). The photos below show the green stuff lion-skin. The gentleman on foot is a peltast figure with a couple of simple green stuff feathers added either side of the plume. This brings the army up to 20 units and four commanders so far; about 180 points worth of an ADG army, or more than enough to play Hail Caesar, Dux Bellorum  or even Fantastic Battles .

It has been very slow going - I find it psychologically challenging to paint 96 figures, all in the same uniform, at one time but I refuse to break single units up into batches - but I have finally finished another large unit for my nominally 1809 Austrians for  Bataille Empire . I am hoping to be able to field my full 200 point army some time... this year, surely... we shall see. I'm not enjoying the painting journey for this army, but I do love the result.

This week my Ziggurat dwarves had their first outing, taking on Jim's Byzernians (supported by a small halfling allied contingent) in a 1,000 point game of Fantastic Battles . Unfortunately the war correspondents did a lousy job capturing a full report of the battle, so we can only provide on summary reflections from the sources close to the respective warlords. Thoughts from the dwarves: Lots of artillery is not a game breaker, but don't charge towards it with heavy horse.  Shieldwalls are hard as nails, don't charge them with light horse unless you are hitting the rear or a flank.  The drilled trait is super useful, even if it doesn't appear all that special at first sight.  Playing with randomised objectives was a nice bit of fun, but it didn't dominate the game.  We've been doing independent character charges all wrong. In the rules as written, independent characters were never supposed to get any melee modifiers on top of their basic profile, but ...

The next example army for Fantastic Battles comes in the form of 1000 points of Ziggurat Dwarves. These are all from Cibo's Little Dudes in Switzerland - most are from his range of Evil Dwarves, but some pieces are regular dwarves and the flying carpets are made from greenstuff.  The Ziggurat Dwarves are an ancient people from an arid land broken by fertile flood plains. Living in walled city-states, they build huge stepped monuments reaching into the sky. Some travellers believe these to be a memorial to an ancestral mountainous homeland far to the north, others feel the dwarves may simply be overcompensating for short-comings in other areas. To represent their steadfast nature, the 'doughty' trait (+1 to a company's basic Resolve factor) has been adopted as a racial trope. By far the smallest of the armies showcased to date, these dwarves favour quality over quantity mustering only five characters and 18 companies (intended to be fielded as eight or nine un...